Linton Kwesi Johnson interview, 1982

This interview with Linton Kwesi Johnson was published in the newspaper Socialist Challenge (29 April 1982) under the headline 'We're di forces of vict'ry', alongside a couple of his poems.

'I am an artist who creates for people's entertainment and edification and enlightenment. If my poetry does that I'm happy. If it doesn't I'll have to try harder. If I do write about matters which are of political significance and importance that is only by accident. It's only because I happen to be a political animal who is involved in organisatonal politics.

I have been involved in the black movement since I was a youth. Maybe I would still be writing poetry if I hadn't been involved in the movement with about something completely different. But I don't ever get the two mixed up. You end up with a very cheap progagandist art and I'm totally against that.

I don't believe you can legislate for art. You can't say that the artist must be conscious and the artist must write to free people. An artist creates out of his own experience and at certain times in history there are certain individuals who happen to have these concerns and their art reflects it. For example, Martin Carter, the Guyanese poet; Nicolas Guillen from Cuba; and even in England William Blake who did the painting. These are coincidences. You can have an artist produce good art and be politically reactionary and vice versa.

I think as far as the black movement is concerned that what I do in Race Today is more important than writing ten poems or making ten albums.

Poetry has a role to play. I wouldn't go so far as to say it leads to political action. It has a role to play in the ideological struggle, the struggle for ideas. All it does is to reinforce existing sentiments. I think my poetry has a way of recording our experiences and of expressing the sentiments that we have. These are popular sentiments. I don't invent them. I'm not saying that art has no role to play in the revolutionary movement. Obviously it does. But it is very dangerous to overestimate that role. It is a stimulus.

What most artists hope for if they have a revolutionary perspective is that their art, whether their songs, their novels, their poetry will make people think about their situation or educate them.

It's about entertainment - not in the show business sense but you listen to a piece of music for instance and it'ssad. And because you're a human being and you have that human capacity for sadness you're moved. That's entertainment. And if that isn't what you do then it becomes cheap propaganda. And bad art as well'.

The paper also includes an advert for a '3 the hard way - an evening of poetry with Dub Poets' at Lambeth Town Hall in Brixton with LKJ, Oku Onouua and Michael Smith. The latter was to be killed in the following year in Jamaica after heckling a government minister of the then ruling right wing Jamaican Labour Party.

(Socialist Challenge was the newspaper of the International Marxist Group)

See also:

LKJ Interview in NME, 1984

 

Life Between Islands

Images of musicking and dancing feature heavily in the exhibition 'Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art' at Tate Britain.

Paul Dash - 'Dance at Reading Town Hall' (1965). Dash played piano in a band, the Carib Six - this is a view from the stage.

'As unofficial 'color bars' restricted access to public social spaces, homes became places of sanctuary. The front room, full of reminders of the Caribbean, became a site for intergenerational connection and somewhere to socialise with family and friends. Sound systems provided the soundtrack to the period. DJs, engineers and MCs set up in homes, on the streets and in community centres. They offered a way to connect with culture coming out of the Caribbean, especially Jamaica. For young Black Britons, music created opportunities for collectivity and celebration but also a means to address hostility and discrimination with a spirit of defiance. Dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson named them the 'Rebel Generation' (exhibition notice)

Tam Joseph - 'The Spirit of Carnival' (1982)

Denzil Forrester - 'Jah Shaka' (1983)

from Liz Johnson Artur, 'Lord of the Decks' featuring photos from the early UK grime scene.

'The various musical styles created in widely defined Black Atlantic history have proved so influential that we are obliged to consider the consistency with which they have summoned the possibility of better worlds, directing precious images of an alternative order against the existing miseries, raciological terrors and routine wrongs of capitalist exploitation, racial immiseration and colonial injustice. Those gestures of dissent and opposition were voiced in distinctive keys and modes. They carried the cruel imprint of slavery and were influenced by the burden of its negation.

However, that is not the most important observation we can make about them. The transcoding and transcendence of suffering made productive, becoming useful, but never, in spite of what Bob Marley had said, seeking redemption, directs our attention towards more elusive possibilities. Energised by political and social movements, those musical formations were anticipatory. They helped to construct and enact a 'not-yet' and enchanted it so that it could be both pleasing and seductive. It could be intoxicating and it could be enhanced the ingestion of intoxicants. 

Here we encounter the possibility that, under optimal conditions, singers, dancers and audiences, DJs and selectors might be able to collaborate so that they could glimpse the edge of their world, grasp the fragility of the order they inhabited and apprehend the fleeting but fundamental possibility of Babylon's overthrow'

(from Paul Gilroy, 'Colour Bars and Bass Cultures, Dub Aesthetics and Cockney Translations: Music in the Creole History of Black Life in Britain' in 'Life Between Islands' (Tate 2021)

The exhibition closes on 3 April 2022

Always Remember: the AIDS Memorial Quilt in Hyde Park (1994)

TV Programme 'Grayson Arts Club' (March 2022) featured long term HIV survivor Jonathan Blake making a new panel for the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt.

The original quilt from the 1990s consists of '48 twelve foot by twelve foot panels, each comprising up to 8 smaller panels' each of which 'commemorates someone who died of AIDS and has been lovingly made by their friends, lovers or family' with nearly 400 people remembered (UK AIDS Memorial Quilt). It was inspired by the US AIDS quilt started in 1987 in San Francisco.

In June 1994 the UK quilt was displayed in London's Hyde Park, laid out on the grass alongside sections of the US quilt in the very moving 'Quilts of Love' exhibition. Here's a few photos I took a the time. As always wish I'd taken more and had a better camera!

This section of the quilt was made by women prisoners at FCI Dublin, a prison in California.

'Remembering those who died without dignity and respect. Silence = death'

'Although our bodies are confined in prison, our hearts are free to be with our loved ones who died from AIDS'. Not sure what prison this came from, but if highlights that the prison system in many countries was a frontline in the HIV struggle due to the criminalisation/incarceration of intravenous drug users who were at high risk of HIV.  Many people died from AIDS while locked up instead of being cared for in the community.

'Cumann Haemfile na hÉireann' - Irish haemophiliacs, a reminder of those who were infected by HIV through contaminated blood products.

Jasmine, 24 April 1992 to 26 December 1992: at this time babies were still being infected through 'vertical transmission' (i.e. acquiring HIV from HIV+ mothers) before new drug treatments largely prevented this 

Panel for Joe, Chain Reaction (1980s fetish club held at Market Tavern in Vauxhall); and from Act Up Ireland  - 'don't let our epitaph read we died because of complacency and denial'

There's a great recent article by Clifford McManus in History Workshop on the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt: '40 years on from the first HIV related deaths, and despite amazing advances in the prevention, treatment and support of people living with HIV, stigma still exists. The AIDS Memorial Quilt continues as a living piece of community art through which stigma and attitudes to HIV can be challenged. Every time it is displayed in a public place it tells the stories of real lives lost. It draws the memory of a person, and all those who have died of AIDS and AIDS related illnesses, out of the shadow of stigma into the light of celebration'.

Also a good article by Dominic McGovern at Vice

Hyde Park, 1994

London Club Listings 1982

London club listing from Time Out, 26 February 1982. Before my London clubbing days, and I must say it doesn't sound too great though of course there were many other things going on beneath the radar and not listed here.

I mean less than a year after the Brixton riots was there really a Battersea nightspot called Riots with 'perspex dancefloor, games room and cocktail lounge with resident pianist'?

Elsewhere 'The Best Disco in Town' at the Lyceum would no doubt have been fun, broadcast weekly live on Capital Radio every Friday night with DJs including Greg Edwards.

Le Beat Route in Greek Street was 'attracting second generation New Romantics who've just discovered Kraftwerk' and iD founder Perry Haines was putting on 'Dial 9 for Dolphins' at Dial 9 near Marble Arch. A Monday night in South Kensington might find you dressing 'imaginatively' with 'the nouveaux elites' at Images at the Cromwellian, while the Barracuda Club on Baker Street was also busy.

Elsewhere 'cult' clubs included the Fantasy Attic at Samantha's in New Burlington Street (apparently 'psychedelic'. There was 'rapping' at the Language Lab at the Gargoyle Club on Dean Street, and the Fridge and WAG were mentioned, both of them key London dance music venues for most of the 1980s.

See also:

London Gay Disco 1972

NME Guide to Rock & Roll London (1978): Disco

NME Guide to Rock & Roll London (1978): Gay clubs

NME Guide to Rock & Roll London (1978): Reggae

Clubbing in London i-D listings, 1984

Clubbing in Sheffield i-D listings, 1984

Clubbing in Manchester listings, 1984

Clubbing in Luton, 1984

1987: Dancing in Brixton and beyond

The Face London Club listings, March 1989

Gays Against Nazis, Leeds 1978

Gays Against Nazis/Rock Against Racism gig at Leeds Poly, 30 June 1978 with The Mekons, reggae band Tribesman and Sheffield post-punk band 2.3

source: Record Mirror, 1 July 1978

 

Skibadee remembered on home turf

The great junglist/drum & bass MC Skibadee died last month and fittingly is the subject of lots of memorial graffiti around Waterloo in South London where he was born, particularly in the graffiti tunnels under the station (Leake Street)

Alphonso Bondzie (his real name)

'Skibadee, 1.2.1975 - 27.2.2022'

'inspired, loved, taught and pioneered, world's no.1 jungle and D&B Emcee Skibadee'

See also - Ukraine war graffiti around Waterloo today

MF Doom murals

There was a similar outpouring on the death of MF Doom in late 2020 - these examples from Deptford Creekside:

Song of the Living Corpses - Japanese Textile Workers' Ballads

As Japan industrialised in the late 19th and early 20th century large numbers of young women were employed in textile mills, often living in tightly regulated dormitories under the control of their employers. Like people in many places they sang songs of despair and defiance.

Here's some extracts from a few textile workers' ballads, from an article by  E Patricia Tsurumi (Female Textile Workers and the Failure of Early Trade Unionism in Japan, History Workshop Journal, 18, Autumn 1984).

Song of the Living Corpses

My family was poor,

At the tender age of twelve,

I was sold to a factory.

Yet though I work for cheap wages,

My soul is not soiled.

Like the lotus flower in the midst of mud,

My heart too,

Will one day blossom forth.

Carried away by sweet-sounding words,

My money was stolen and thrown away.

Unaware of the hardships of the future,

I was duckweed in the wind.

Excited, I arrived at the age,

Where I bowed to the doorman,

I was taken immediately to the dormitory,

Where I bowed to the room supervisor.

I was taken immediately to the infirmary,

Where I risked my life having a medical examination.

I was taken immediately to the cafeteria,

Where I asked what was for dinner.

I was told it was low grade rice mixed with sand.

When I asked what the side dish was,

I was told there weren't even two slices of pickle to eat.

Then I was taken immediately to the factory,

Where I donned a blue skirt and blue shirt,

And put on hemp-straw sandals and blue socks.

When I asked where I was to work

I was told to fasten threads on the winder.

Because my parents were good-for-nothings,

Or, because my parents weren't good-for-nothings

But I was a good-for-nothing myself,

I was deceived by a fox without a tail.

Now I'm awakened at 4:30 in the morning;

First I fix my face, then go to the cafeteria;

Then it's off to the factory

Where the chief engineer scowls at me.

When I return to my room,

The supervisor finds all manner of fault with me,

And I-feel like I'll never get on in this world.

When next I'm paid

I'll trick the doorkeeper and slip off to the station,

Board the first train

For my dear parents' home.

Both will cry when I tell them

How fate made me learn warping,

Leaving nothing but skin and bone on my soul.

We friends are wretched,

Separated from our homes in a strange place,

Put in a miserable dormitory

Woken up at 4:30 in the morning,

Eating when 5 o'clock sounds,

Dressing at the third bell,

Glared at by the manager and section head,

Used by the inspector.

How wretched we are!

Though I am a factory maid,

My heart is a peony, a cherry in double blossom,

Though male workers make eyes at me,

I'm not the kind to respond.

Rather than remain in this factory,

I'll pluck up my courage,

And board the first train for Ogawa,

Maybe I'll even go to the far corners of Manchuria.

Prison Lament

Factory work is prison work,

All it lacks are metal chains.

More than a caged bird, more than a prison,

Dormitory life is hateful.

The factory is hell, the manager a demon,

The restless floorwalker a wheel of fire.

Like the money in my employment contract,

I remain sealed away.

If a male worker makes eyes at you,

You end up losing your shirt.

How I wish the dormitory would be washed away, 

the factory burn down,

And the gatekeeper die of cholera!

I want wings to escape from here,

To fly as far as those distant shores.

My Factory

At other companies there are Buddhas and Gods.

At mine only demons and serpents.

When I hear the manager talking,

His words say only 'money, money, and time

'They sang lovingly and longingly of their parents and siblings at home; they sang angrily and resentfully of the factories and sheds in which they toiled and of the owners and managers who supervised that toil' (Tsurumi)

Parallel Mothers: History refuses to shut its mouth

Lots to love in 'Parallel Mothers'/'Madres Paralelas' (2021), the latest Pedro Almodóvar film.

One plot thread concerns the uncovering of a mass grave for victims of Franco's fascist forces, very much a live issue in Spain where The Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (which features in the film) has been leading the movement to uncover the stories, and physical remains, 'of thousands of civilians executed during the 1936-39 Civil War and the 1939-75 Franco regime. It is estimated that 200,000 men and women were killed in extrajudicial executions during the War, and another 20,000 Republicans murdered by the regime in the post-war years. Thousands more died as a result of bombings, and in prisons and concentration camps'.

The film finishes with a quote on screen from the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano

'No history is mute. No matter how much they burn it, break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth'.

The quote in its wider context is as follows:

'Does history repeat itself? Or are the repetitions only penance for those who are incapable of listening to it? No history is mute. No matter how much they burn it, break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth. Despite deafness and ignorance, the time that was continues to tick inside the time that is. The right to remember does not figure among the human rights consecrated by the United Nations, but now more than ever we must insist on it and act on it. Not to repeat the past but to keep it from being repeated. Not to make us ventriloquists for the dead but to allow us to speak with voices that are not condemned to echo perpetually with stupidity and misfortune. When it is truly alive, memory doesn’t contemplate history, it invites us to make it' (Eduardo Galeano, Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-glass World, New York: Picador, 1998, p. 210).

Stop Clause 28 - a queer (near) riot in London, 1988

'Section 28' of the Local Government Act 1988 was a piece of culture war-style legislation framed by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government to ban 'the promotion of homosexuality' by local councils. It prompted a massive movement of opposition with probably the most militant LGBTQ+ demonstrations ever seen in the UK, including in early 1988 in Manchester (see previous post) and in London. The following is a report from the Pink Paper ('Britain's only national newspaper for lesbians and gay men') of the demo in London on 9th January 1988. The march went from the Embankment to Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park by the Imperial War Museum in north Lambeth, with a breakaway en route to Downing Street. Although the movement failed at one level - the law was passed - it paved the way for the largely successful movement for equality that followed in the 1990s.  

Pink Paper front cover, 14 January 1988

'More than 12,000 lesbians and gay men and our supporters marched through London on Saturday to protest about Clause 27 (now 28) of the Local Government Bill, which bans "promotion" of homosexuality by local authorities - and 33 of them were arrested and charged with criminal offences.

The Rally attracted four times as many marchers as its sponsors, the Organisation for Lesbian and Gay Action, had expected. Police rapidly revised their own estimate of attenders from five to eight thousand as trouble flared at Whitehall, where part of the march broke away to besiege Downing Street and make their feelings known to the Prime Minister, who was hiding in Number Ten. The march ground to a halt as activists, scene queens and bar dykes all gathered round to shout their anger at the Goverment-backed attempt to turn homosexuals into second class citizens. There were several minor injuries as police forced the crowd away from the entrance to the Thatcher residence and about 20 people were arrested for obstruction or assault. Organisers appealed for calm as police threatened to bring in officers on horseback to disperse the crowd.

After almost three quarters of an hour the tension abated and people drifted back to the route. There were further arrests at Waterloo. People from as far apart as Pontypridd and Norwich, Brighton and Edinburgh, crowded into Harmsworth Park to hear Chris Smith, Linda Bellos and other speakers. The father of a lesbian spoke movingly about the pain of having rejected his daughter before learning to understand and love her. Robin Tyler, US entertainer and activist gave a hilarious account of her affair with Dame Jill Knight - "That bitch - she swore she'd get even" - and talked about Ronald Reagan being "Margaret Thatcher in drag". But her speech turned to anger as news came through that police were arresting and harassing people at the perimeter of the park, picking out young women and black people. "If they want to arrest all of us, they'll have to arrest millions" she shouted, "including MPs and members of the Royal Family".

Legal observers and organisers rushed to the trouble spot, where Kennington police had brought up 10 mounted police ready to charge and were arresting people carrying banner poles or kissing. Both marchers and locals were arrested for drinking after hours - about three minutes after hours in fact at a nearby pub. Arrests continued at Cannon Row Police Station, where a lesbian who had gone to enquire about her girlfriend was charged retrospectively with assault on a policeman earlier in the day at Downing Street. Later, the legal officer of City Anti-Apartheid Group, Anhil Bhatt, was arrested outside the station for obstruction while waiting for the last person to be released. "He was nicked just for being there and being black" said Jennie Wilson of OLGA who witnessed the arrest'

 

(note advert for Fallen Angel bar in Islington - I believe the Pink Paper had an office upstairs there at one point. Used to go there for lunch when working in Islington in early 1990s)

'There are 12,000 men and women after Saturday's march proud to say - "I was there". There on the day when the lesbian and gay movement of Britain came of age; there on the day when we put our differences aside striding step by step as one; there on the day when the gentle loving people became angry and we started fighting for our lives.

Even before the march left Temple in central London an uneasy sense of expectancy hung in the air. This was no Pride Carnival. There were no floats, bands or balloons. The drag queens were in their civvies and all the pink was tinged with grey. In only three weeks the organisers had attracted four times the numbers they expected as the ranks of the regular activists were swelled by representation from all sections of our communities. There was no gay or lesbian, no black or white. We were one. Strong and defiant.

All around people united. Fearful that our businesses will be closed, frightened that our jobs will be taken away, afraid that our books will burn. Our very existence is at stake and we are beginning to battle'.

List of banners on the demo

Appeal for witnesses from the January 9th Defence Campaign 'Were you on the OLGA/Stop Clause 27 Campaign March in London on Saturday January 9th? There were 33 arrests at Whitehall, Waterloo and Kennington. Charges brought against people include obstruction and assault'.

I was in Whitehall, lots of pushing and shoving at the entrance to Downing Street, not quite Stonewall 1969 or San Francisco 1979 but it was quite heavy. Here's a couple of photos of mine from Stop the Clause demos in London. I think the first one was from that day, the other one possibly from a later demo.

'the first breath of a chilling wind of intolerance'

My 'Council workers against Clause 28' badge. I recently donated this to the LGBTQ+ archive at the Bishopsgate Institute, as I realised that they had a set of a similar badges but not this one (including 'Librarians against Clause 28' and 'Defy the Clause' 

Report from Counter Information, February 1988 - referring to 'Jill's Bill' as it was proposed by Dame Jill Knight, a Conservative politician who had been a member of the far right Monday Club.

A Jewish Ball in London (1859)

'Yesterday evening a grand ball, attended by the leading members of the Hebrew persuasion in the city, took place at the London Tavern, in celebration of the removal of the Jewish disabilities and in aid of the funds of the Jews' General Literary and Scientific Institution.

The ball took place in the large room of the tavern, which has recently been entirely re-decorated in simple, but most graceful, style making it one of the handsomest as it has long been one of the finest in the city of London.  Dancing commenced about 10 o'clock - the band being led by Mr La Motte - and was continued with the utmost spirit till the lights began to 'pale their ineffectual fires'. Upwards of 200 of the leading members of Jewish firms were present' (Times 4th  February 1859).

The reference to 'the removal of the Jewish Disabilities' is to the passing of the Jews Relief Act 1858,  which removed previous barriers to Jewish people entering Parliament

The City of London Tavern was located in Bishopsgate during the 18th and 19th Century. While the word Tavern today implies a simple pub, this was a large building with a grand  hall for balls, public meetings and other events.

interior of the London Tavern, 1814

The balls that were held here sometimes went on very late, as mentioned above and also referred to in an account of another ball in aid of the Licensed Victuallers Asylum: 'About two hundred happy couples, mostly juveniles, joined in the mazy dance, evidently very much to their own mutual delight,.. After supper dancing was renewed, and kept up with untiring spirit to an early hour in the morning'. (Morning Advertiser, 10 January 1838). Yes it was possible to dance through the night in London even before electricity.

Simulmatics, sorcery and counter-insurgency

 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.

The Au Pairs - 1981 Interview with Lesley Woods

'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):

2021 Guardian interview with Lesley Woods 

[post updated October 2024 with addition of Leveller advert and review from 1982]