Arena 3: Anarchism in Music

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ARENA 3: ANARCHISM IN MUSIC Publisher: ChristieBooks Guest Editor: Daniel O’Guérin Cover: Sean Fitzgerald Copyright © the individual authors First published in the UK in 2012 by ChristieBooks PO Box 35 Hastings, East Sussex, TN34 1ZS ISBN-13: 978-1-873976-51-7

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

Distributed in the UK by: Central Books 99 Wallis Road London E9 5LN Email: orders@centralbooks.com

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Guest Edited by Daniel O’Guérin ‘I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to. ‘ — Elvis Presley ‘State Control and Rock ‘n’ Roll are run by clever men... it’s all good for business, we’re in the charts again....

—Vi Subversa ‘Somebody once said we never know what is enough until we know what's more than enough.’

— Billie Holiday ‘I would like everyone to understand that they can be creators, that they are creators. The context isn't important, it's to help a world to exist, to be born.’

— George Brassens (For Sal, and everyone else raising a voice....)

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CONTENTS Introduction 1 Daniel O’Guérin 1 1 Daniel O’Guérin What’s in (A) Song? An Introduction to Libertarian Music? 3 2 David Rovics 45 Busking Memories 23 3 Phil Strongman 45 No Future, Nature Boy 38 4 Petesy Burns 45 The Social Space 44 5 Robb Johnson 125 What I Do 52 6 Norman Nawrocki 45 From Rhythm Activism to Bakunin’s Bum 60 7 Boff Whalley 107 In Defence of Anarchy 71 8 Boff Whalley 143 Anarchism and Music: Theory and Practice 77 9 Penny Rimbaud 95 Falling Off the Edge 83

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INTRODUCTION In this third volume of the Arena series we gather around the proverbial camp fire where we might listen to tunes to make our toes tap and to words which might reach into our hearts and pull us into a future of wild possibilities, daring us to dream. These songs of freedom push against convention, sing of finding ways and means to move beyond the confines of staid convention and the litany of war, poverty and misery that are the direct consequence of the edifice of capitalism and those frightened elites who hide cowering behind it.

In ancient Rome, after Constantine bent his knee to Christ (or at least saw the convenient propaganda in such a coat of many colours), the music of theatre and of festival dismayed the naysayers of the ascending Christian empire that grew in his wake; the frivolity and joyousness of celebrating life became anathema to the new social order bent on obedience to the will of God and, by divine right, those masters who perpetuated his will. And so they banned it.

But in all cultures, despite the engrained social mores, you can discover the life-affirming music that fuels the carnival and the street parade, strips away the dogma and drudgery of life and makes the heart leap. Life should be for celebrating after all, a Mardi-Gras of moments; not a never-ending struggle up a steep dark hill.

Music reflects the culture around it and ancient folk musics have melded and moulded themselves accordingly over time into a vast amalgam of expression. Latterly this has become a commodity and where once it was unhindered and organic, it is now shaped and packaged and available from all good participating stores. This is largely a Western phenomena and yet even within these boundaries there are still voices shouting over the walls and strains carried on the breeze and over the barricades of history.

Anarchist music is perhaps an ill-fitting term. Robert Fripp, of the rock group King Crimson, who are renowned for their inventive approach to composition, describes Crimson, who consciously avoid accepted (commercial) forms of rock music, as ‘a way of doing things, which is in a sense anarchic’.

Much in the same way that advances in other art forms were anarchic, when they broke the rules, such as The Goons or Monty Python who brought comedy kicking and screaming into modern times. It is this same approach which informs the 1

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oON ANARCHIST MUSICn anarchist cinema and video

avant garde, that is to say, unhindered expression. It is this approach which could become the bedrock of a new culture.

But form aside, whatever the medium or genre, there are still those voices singing or ranting against what they find wrong in this world of ours — some telling stories of those who tried to find a new world in their hearts, those who were not in the least afraid of ruins (for they knew they could rebuild from the ashes of the old); or those who sing words of encouragement and of defiance and of hope in desperate times; or who applaud the dispossessed and forgotten and celebrate their humanity while rallying against those spit on their misery. And who make us cry, and who make us feel angry, reminding us of what needs to be done - those who can make us laugh at the absurdity of it all, have us dancing in the streets, but who can also make us forget.

In these pages, then, a small selection of musicians and lovers tell of their thoughts and experiences in putting across anarchism, not so much as rhetoric or propaganda, but as expressions and reflections; reminiscences of life-journeys outside of the box and even existentialism. These ideas may influence us, they may be enjoyable to experience but it is when we run with them into the streets and fields, when life again becomes the carnival, that we might crack open the cold edifice of what passes for culture and allow a few bright flowers to break through.

Daniel O’Guérin, Spring 2012 Daniel O’Guérin is the editor of back2front magazine, a periodical journal which examines, promotes and critiques radical music, arts, politics and culture since 2003. He runs an independent music label and has also contributed to dozens of other publications since the 1980s when he had this daft idea that things could be much better.

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WHAT’S IN (A) SONG? An introduction to Libertarian Music

by Daniel O'Guérin (Back2Front zine) La Marseillaise was a tune adopted by many radicals due

to its association with the French Revolution of 1789 and would ironically became the national anthem of France.

Just as a national anthem can bound a patriotic crowd to lofty, if largely false, ideals and emotions so too can other forms of music from a more honest libertarian perspective. The development of anarchist philosophy in Liberty Leading the People the late 19th century and its consolidation in the anarchist-communism of Kropotkin, Malatesta et al counted many artistic figures among its adherents and sympathisers. All art forms are expressions of human experience after all; signposts of sorts offering perspectives both in and out of context for those who come to appreciate them. Music, of all the arts, is perhaps the most powerful at inspiring a feeling or memory or in putting a statement across. Melody lingers; counterpoint causes pause and awareness while lyrics, particularly those that follow some kind of meter, are easily etched into the memory. In folk tradition music was often a way of celebrating the memory of common people standing up to authority.

From the folk traditions of bygone ages to more modern examples such as the Rembetika which came out of the Greek underground at the turn of the 20th century or the hip hop tradition in working class America in the 1980’s we hear examples of class consciousness expressed through song. But Rembetika musicians a more radical tradition had begun to emerge in other times and places where the class war was in earnest. Joe Hill (18791915) was a Swedish-American migrant worker and member of the US syndicalist union the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

In times of high class struggle it was common for the bosses to send in the Salvation Army band to cover up the orations of Wobbly organisers (and to placate the crowd). Hill re-wrote the lyrics of the Salvation band’s Christian hymns so that workers could sing along to his expropriations. Joyce Kornbluh writing about Joe Hill comments: “He articulated the frustrations, hostilities, and humour of the homeless and dispossessed” (1) The IWW soon developed a tradition of folk songs and 3

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poems that aroused solidarity among workers in struggle or kept their stories alive around the camp fire. Perhaps the most well known tune from the IWW songbook is Solidarity Forever written by Ralph Chaplin in 1915:

Ralph Chaplin

‘Woody’ Guthrie

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold, Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.

We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old For the union makes us strong. (2)

Hill, along with Woody Guthrie (1912-1967) whose guitar famously had the slogan ‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ adorned along the front are credited as pioneers of the modern radical folk tradition in America. Influenced by traditional Irish folk music and Black Blues, Guthrie’s songbook included over 1000 songs related to tales of conscientious bandits and murdered anarchists (Sacco & Vanzetti); songs of youth and of old age; of woods, rivers and mountains and the distant plains creating a cultural focal point for the popular struggles of the moment. Guthrie and Hill would later influence the likes of Phil Ochs, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan and the so-called singersongwriter genre which emerged around the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-Vietnam war protests in mid-late 1960s America.

Other early developments in the US included protest songs against the First World War such as Alfred Bryan’s I Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be A Soldier from 1916 while even earlier tunes such as Bread and Roses written by Caroline Kohlsaat and James Openheim at a textiles strike in Massachusetts were taken up by later movements. During the Great Depression folk singers like ‘Aunt’ Molly Jackson who penned The Poor Miner’s Farewell which she sang to striking coal miners in Kentucky in 1932 were potent reflections on an economically-decimated working class: Leaving his children thrown out on the street, Barefoot and ragged and nothing to eat, Mother is jobless, my father is dead, I am a poor orphan, begging for bread. (3)

‘Aunt’ Molly Jackson

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A few years later in 1937 the Orson Welles-directed musical The Cradle Will Rock which depicted labour organisation against a backdrop of such corruption and greed was immediately shut down lest it encourage social unrest. (Welles and his team were locked out of the theatre and blockaded by armed

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servicemen under orders from the federal government). A lyric from the musical goes: Well, you can’t climb down and you can’t sit still.

That’s a storm that’s gonna last until the final wind blows, and when the wind blows...(4)

Of course throughout the early 20th century music began to change rapidly through cultural displacement and the merging of styles, while the influence of the romantic tradition led to more emotional forms of expression. The development of the phonograph and the gramophone and later the introduction of radio by 1906 did much to spread music, though the industry that grew up around it was (and remains) more concerned with commercial viability than artistic merit (and much to the chagrin of the latter). The performance of music had also become increasingly visual with the rise in popular cinema while music halls and show bands continued to be significant.

We know that while many genres began to develop from the turn of the century; the blues and jazz scenes had their own radical traditions which lamented the conditions of workers but often tinged with hope. In these lyrics blues singer Lead Belly spoke for many: Some white folk in Washington, they know just how, call a colored man a nigger just to see him bow The home of the Brave, The land of the Free I don’t wanna be mistreated by no bourgeoisie. (5) ‘Lead Belly’

It is the merging of these various genres - blues, jazz, country and the various folk traditions that landed with US immigrants and other huddled masses that gave birth to rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s. Several people have commented that rock ‘n’ roll has had more cultural influence than anarchist philosophy though the comparison is both unfair and erroneous.

While rock ‘n’ roll was challenging the sexual boundaries and social mores of the times it would eventually become subsumed within capitalism as its wider marketability and exploitation became apparent. The protest song was rarely heard within this new commercial medium as the commodification of teenage angst was initially slow to became a viable niche market, and only later the cornerstone of the 5

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business. But the folk/protest tradition, while also an entertainment per se, served as a genuine reminder of the economic reality of those workers who played, sang and listened, as well as a continual call to arms. As Ayerman and Jamison have commented: There is more to music and movements than can be captured within a functional perspective... which focuses on the use made of music within already-existing movements. Music, and song, we suggest, can maintain a movement even when it no longer has a visible presence in the form of organizations, leaders, and demonstrations, and can be a vital force in preparing the emergence of a new movement. Here the role and place of music needs to be interpreted through a broader framework in which tradition and ritual are understood as processes of identity and identification, as encoded and embodied forms of collective meaning and memory. (6)

Rock ‘n’ roll brought with it another perspective however - it offered a vague ‘freedom’ from 40 years in the field or on the factory floor and young people especially where drawn to the notion; increasingly terrified by the alternative prospect of wage slavery and toiling to make ends meet as their parents had done. Many young people fantasised about the life of the rock star and the ‘freedom’ it appeared to emulate while others were quick to capitalize on their dreams. The 1960s especially saw new and sometimes fresher perspectives on sex, drugs and libertarian ideas. But the threat of nuclear war, the debacle in Viet Nam and other social concerns provided materials for protest songs to draw upon within this commercial medium. A good example of the feeling of the times is from British rock band The Who: We’ll be fighting in the streets With our children at our feet And the morals that they worship will be gone And the men who spurred us on Sit in judgment of all wrong They decide and the shotgun sings the song I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution Take a bow for the new revolution Smile and grin at the change all around me Pick up my guitar and play Just like yesterday And I’ll get on my knees and pray We don’t get fooled again Don’t get fooled again Meet the new boss, same as the old boss... (7)

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As rock music developed, however, it became more egocentric and commercialised as screaming fans attended huge arenas for a glimpse of the star, while any revolutionary tendencies became increasingly exploited, marketed and ultimately moribund.

In other countries and traditions a similar development can be traced however we also begin to see a more explicitly anarchist outlook. In Italy radical poet Pietro Gori (1865-1911) penned several well known anarchist tunes such as Addio a Lugano Bella (“Farewell to Lugano”) and Stornelli d’esilio (“Exile Songs”). In 1887 Gori was arrested for his comments on the Haymarket Massacre when persons unknown threw a bomb at cops trying to break up striking workers (four were subsequently executed even though the prosecution conceded they had not thrown the bomb!)

In France Léo Ferré (1916-1993) and Georges Brassens (1921-1981) were Chancon singers who broke free from traditional song structures and fused ideas of love, melancholy and moral anarchy with street slang and monologue. Brassens performed such cabarets ‘to prostitutes, delinquents and other disinherited since 1952’. Ferré was later involved with Radio Libertaire, an anarchist free radio station in Paris while Brassens was editor of the anarchist weekly Le Monde Libertaire in the 1950s and also a member of the Anarchist Federation. Reflecting on the events in Spain in the 1930s Ferré wrote “Les Anarchistes“.

Pietro Gori

Georges Brassens

The anarchists. They have a black flag at half-mast on melancholy hope that they drag through life, some knives to cut the bread of friendship, and some rusted weapons so they do not forget. (8)

Spain itself had developed a healthy tradition of anarchist music. The more autonomous regions such as Andalucía or the Basque country have long folk traditions with political themes, which in turn have been exported to Latin America. Perhaps the most famous song from the 1936-39 revolutionary period is “A Las Barricadas” (To the Barricades):

Léo Ferré

Black storms shake the sky Black clouds blind us Although death and pain await us Against the enemy we must go The most precious good is freedom And we have to defend it With courage and faith

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ANARCHIST MUSIC Raise the revolutionary flag Moving us forward with unstoppable triumph Working people march onwards to the battle We have to smash the reaction To the Barricades To the Barricades For the triumph of the Confederation (9)

The anthem of the Spanish Mujeres Libres written by Lucía Sánchez Saornil in 1937 was a powerful statement for feminism at the time:

Lucia Sanchez Saornil

Fists upraised, women of Iberia towards horizons pregnant with light on paths afire feet on the ground face to the blue sky.

Affirming the promise of life we defy tradition we mold the warm clay of a new world born of pain. (10)

In Latin America itself Rafael Uzcategui has written of the tradition which evolved there:

Rafael Uzcategui

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Cappelletti — one of the historians of Latin-America’s libertarian ideals — asserts that anarchism has a wide tradition in our continent, rich in pacifist and violent struggles, manifestations of individual and collective heroism, in feats of organization, in oral, written and practical propaganda, literary works, stage, pedagogic, cooperative and community experiments. Its decadence — after the main role libertarians played between 1870 and 1930 — is attributed to three causes: The series of coup-d’états occurred around the ‘30s and the repression following each of them; the foundation of the Communist parties, that, thanks to the support of the Soviet Union, received material strength and a prestige lacking in the libertarian organizations and in third place, the apparition of national-populist currents, more or less linked to the armed forces. The anarcho-syndicalist groups developed a vast cultural work directed to the peasant and labour majorities during the first years of the 20th century. Soon after, the proclamations of newspapers and books were taken to the stage, to the plastic arts or turned into poems. In Argentina, libertarian “payadores” were the chroniclers and heralds of the agrarian struggles in the southern cone. Likewise, composers of tangos and milongas were activists of the ideal and immortalized the memory of successful labor struggles or of the consequences of bloody government repressions. In Mexico, Corridos, Zapatistas and Magonistas gave popular expression to demands for land, liberty and other demands of clear anarchist vein. (11)

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In Italy during the Second World War anarchists sang of leaving their homes to avoid conscription, a song that had been written many years before, and this is an example of how such songs maintain and reinvigorate the tradition as Uzcategui suggests above.

Farewell beautiful Lugano my sweet land, driven away guiltlessly the anarchists are leaving, and they set off singing with hope in their heart.

It is for you exploited for you workers that we are handcuffed just like criminals.

Yet our ideal is but an ideal of love.

Anonymous comrades friends who remain the social truths do spread like strong people.

This is the revenge that we ask of you.

And you who drive us away with an infamous lie, you bourgeois republic will be ashamed one day.

Today we accuse you in the face of the future.

Ceaselessly banished we will go from land to land promoting peace and declaring war, peace among the oppressed war to the oppressors. (12)

In Makhnovist Ukraine between 1919-21 the anarchist insurgents of the Black Army also spread their propaganda against the Bolshevik deceit by song: Makhnovshchina, Makhnovshchina Your flags are black in the wind They are black with our pain They are red with our blood By the mountains and plains in the snow and in the wind across the whole Ukraine our partisans arise In the Spring Lenin’s treaties delivered the Ukraine to the Germans

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ANARCHIST MUSIC In the Fall the Makhnovshchina threw them into the wind Denikin’s White army entered the Ukraine singing but soon the Makhnovshchina scattered them in the wind. (13)

Meanwhile the song Brüder, zur Sonne, zur Freiheit composed by Leonid Petrowitsch Radin had been a popular tune during the 1905 and 1917 Russian Revolutions. The German musician Herman Scherchen learnt the track while a Russian POW during the First World War, translated it into his native tongue and took it to Germany where it became an anthem for the German workers movement.

Brothers, to the sun, to the freedom, Brothers get up to the light.

Brightly out of the dark past, the future is shining through.(14)

This example shows the ability of music to break through international barriers and how songs written many years ago and still have an influence on future generations.

Of course it wasn’t only song that presented revolutionary ideals. Instrumental music has also played a part. We note in passing composers such as Aram Khachaturian (1903-1978) whose 1954 ballet Spartacus is concerned with slaves rising against their masters. Benjamin Britten’s (1913-1976) War Requiem from 1962 examined the futility of war using texts by Wilfred Owen while Luigi Nono (1924-1990) and Hans Werner Henze (b.

1926) both wrote a variety of works that combined music with texts, theatre, and electronics relating to political issues viewed from a revolutionary Marxist perspective. The first explicitly anarchist composer however is perhaps John Cage (1912-1992). Richard Kostelanetz comments:

John Cage

In surveying his work in music and theater, in poetry and visual art, I have noticed that the American John Cage favored a structure that is nonfocused, nonhierarchic and nonlinear, which is to say that his works in various media consist of collections of elements presented without climax and without definite beginnings and ends. This is less a negative structure, even though I am describing it negatively, than a visionary esthetic and political alternative. In creating artistic models of diffusion and freedom, Cage is a libertarian anarchist. (15)

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Cage himself confirmed his position: “I’m an anarchist. I don’t know whether the adjective is pure and simple, or philosophical, or what, but I don’t like government! And I don’t like institutions! And I don’t have any confidence even in ‘good’ institutions”.

The Anarchic Harmony Foundation was established after Cage’s death in 1992 on the notion that “anarchic harmony is one arrived at through social situations that de-emphasize leadership and encourage voluntary cooperation between individuals and groups.” (16) The avant garde tradition itself has long had radical concerns and is tasked with the pushing of boundaries, especially political, within a particular idiom.

However English composer Cornelius Cardew (1936-81), who himself argued for a “politically motivated peoples liberation music”, has argued that the often inaccessible atonal music of the avant-garde movement merely served to exacerbate the fragmentation of society rather than bringing the masses together.

Returning to popular music we can comment on the differences between the more radical folk traditions and the commercial music industry which would occasionally amalgamate some aspects of the folk genre but only if it was commercially viable to do so. This is not to berate the artistic merits or entertainment value of popular commercial artists but to illustrate the influence of capitalism upon the music itself.

The advent of rock ‘n’ roll brought several more adventurous bands to the fore. The Beatles, for example, brought songwriting back into vogue where it had previously been common practice for an artist to sing standards written by a professional song-writer. Corporations like Thorn-EMI were able to put their financial muscle behind bands like the Beatles while leaving others, as good if not better, out in the cold. Using tight legal contracts the Music Industry was able to dictate how a band should look, and ultimately how it should sound. Lyrics deemed to ‘rock the boat’ were often compromised and in this way artistic expression was effectively curtailed.

The influence of large sums of money consequently affected an artist’s output in other ways. The bigger they were, the less effort they seemed to make and very few artists within the commercial vein have been consistently interesting. In 11

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Hawkwind

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some instances the more famous an artist became, the bigger and more outlandish performances that ensued, while tales of wrecked hotel rooms and excess were common among the spoiled brats of the industry. We might note so-called radical bands like the Rolling Stones whose stars can be seen at the opera with politicians and bureaucrats. (Indeed in passing we might comment on the saccharine activity of self appointed martyrs like St Bono or Archbishop Geldof whose attempts to throw money at the poor merely cover up the reasons for why that poverty exists in the first place).

The industry itself had begun to target specific audiences especially since the 1960s and used a developing music press to invent a rock terminology that when stripped of bullshit merely created genres within genres to establish specific marketing demographics for considered exploitation.

Styles of dress and assorted brands became associated with particular genres as rock music became more and more excessive and hedonistic.

By the 1970s however with stadium rock music the norm, bands played to huge crowds who could barely see their heroes creating a huge distance between the performer and the crowd, physically and culturally, creating false hierarchies and fake mythologies. Rock music had become elitist and snobbish. In the UK however the Free Festival movement, which had developed from the 1960s counterculture, advocated a non-commercial avenue for rock music. Bands such as Hawkwind and Here & Now often played free to audiences or offered their services to assorted benefits.

The 1970 Isle of Wight festival, England’s answer to Woodstock in America, saw bands like Hawkwind set up outside the commercial event to play for free. (While never explicitly anarchist Hawkwind has contained several anarchists such as Robert Calvert and Michael Moorcock). In the late 1970s groups such as Henry Cow began the Rock In Opposition movement, ostensibly a statement against the exploitation of the music business.

During the mid-1970s in Britain, however, there was a much bigger kick-back against the music industry with the appearance of punk rock. Malcolm McLaren, who’d been involved with the situationist group King Mob in London, introduced the Sex Pistols to the world and caused a bit of a stir.(17) Such was the beginning of the Punk explosion - torn clothes, spiked or coloured hair and bad attitude caused an

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initial furore as the new youth cult expressed its disgust at society; but punk rockers originally dressed for shock value and adopted imagery accordingly and thus the circled ‘A’ appeared alongside the swastika in a movement that was largely bereft of any real political meaning.

In an essay White Punks on Bordiga published in 1995 in Organise #35 the author comments: How can content be dissolved into form? Well, punk, to me and many people, expressed anger, boredom, restlessness and a sickness of society and conformity - the clever trick is that the music is also characterised by its angry, restless, and nonconformist ‘form’. Lyrical content was either blasted out of existence by screaming rants, crashing drums, and thrashing guitars or twisted to poetic extremes as a protest against the stale lyrics of 1970’s love ballads and disco trash tunes (e.g. Buzzcocks and their cynical anti-love songs, or Joy Division and their gloomy soul dredging excursions). But punk was mainly angry, and anger characterised its form - this tradition continues to date, and for the record companies it is often the case of the angrier the better.

The harsher the subject that forms the kernel of the lyrics (fascism, smack, prisons, state control, environmental rape) the more angry the lyrics, the more angry the accompanying form, the more the record becomes a ‘punk’ record, the more it sells to the punk market, the happier the record company. (18)

Punk was a virus that caught on quickly as both another exploitable fashion and latterly a political philosophy that identified with anarchism. The Clash, a much more incendiary band than the Pistols, had more of an inclination to social commentary. Although marketed by the CBS record company as the last gang in town and quickly becoming huge, front man Joe Strummer attempted to amalgamate radical politics with being a rock star, a contradiction that could never work.

Called sell-outs for signing with the huge CBS company Strummer was nonetheless an influential and enigmatic spokesman for the disaffected youth of Britain. If you didn’t like The Clash, Strummer suggested, then form your own band!

One person who took this idea to heart was Steve Thompson who changed his name, as was the trend of the day, to Steve Ignorant and together with avant garde poet Penny Rimbaud, who had been instrumental in the earlier free festival movement, founded the band CRASS. Although often overlooked by music historians who base their work on commercially successful artists the influence of CRASS was

The Clash

Steve Ignorant

CRASS — Feeding of the 5000

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Penny Rimbaud

massive in several ways. Initially they used the anarchy sign as a means of keeping both Left and Right political groups from adopting them as radical mascots, wanting nothing to do with either dogma yet from the outset they decided to take their politics very seriously. While many rock stars attempted to put over a radical message their ideas were often watered down by their celebrity or by the machinations of their record company. CRASS wanted none of it.

In terms of anarchism, and the anarchist tradition, the individuals that formed the band/collective Crass knew where they were coming from. They envisaged punk as a useful vehicle for propaganda (taking the already established music form and adding visual and sound bytes), the propaganda being the broadening of an understanding and appreciation of anarchism.

Crass carried on the punk tradition of anger and honed the lyrics down to sharp comments and questions on everyday life and the class struggle - at first assuming that listeners to punk music paid attention to the lyrics. Crass also made new ground in pulling together the elements that were being fostered - thus we saw the rise of cheap benefit gigs with no private organisers, the building of anarchist centres and prisoner support. They also began to consider the packaging of their records, using fold out sheets of montage, statements, essays and essential contact listings. (19)

They established their own label in 1978 and priced their albums at half the going rate which caused a stir, though the Clash were the first to attempt price restrictions. This was a clear and direct statement against the rock industry and an attempt to minimise the influence of capitalism on art. Young people were also attracted to the powerful artwork, by Gee Vaucher, and many of the CRASS records came with inserts and literature presenting various campaigns and dissemination of radical ideas. The CRASS philosophy was There Is No Authority But Yourself and DiY culture was subsequently encouraged and not just in the realm of music, but across communities. The first CRASS record was hugely successful and moreso for the fact that it’s shocking lyrics against church and state were meant from the heart: You’re paying for prisons.

You’re paying for war.

You’re paying for lobotomies.

You’re paying for law.

You’re paying for their order.

You’re paying for their murder.

Paying for your ticket To watch the farce.

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WHAT’S IN (A) SONG? Knowing you’ve made your contribution To the systems fucked solution, To their political pollution.

No chance of revolution.

No chance of change.

You’ve got no range.

CRASS

Don’t just take it.

Don’t take their shit.

Don’t’ play their game.

Don’t take their blame.

USE YOUR OWN HEAD. Your turn instead.

It’s not apologise. It’s not economise.

It’s not make do. It’s not pull through.

It’s not take it. It’s not make it.

It’s not just you. It’s not madmen.

It’s not difficult. It’s not behave.

It’s not, oh well, just this once.

It’s fucking impossible.

It’s fucking unbearable.

It’s fucking stupid.

FUCKING STUPID (20)

CRASS began to use their notoriety to raise funds for numerous causes and to help other bands get a start. They funded a small group called GREENPEACE who would later become much bigger and reinvigorated CND who later distanced themselves, but they also caused a surge of interest in anarchism - taking it ‘out of the dusty bookshops’. They began a cottage industry from their collective space, an old farmstead called Dial House in the Essex countryside, which Rimbaud had occupied in the late 60s and run as a ‘free house’. By limiting their contact with the music press, who had often ridiculed them, they gave most of their interviews to fanzines, which in turn caused a revival in self-publication and printing. Hundreds of bands and fanzine writers sprung up as consequence throughout the UK, creating counter-cultural hubs which in turn began to organise within their communities in different ways.

The music industry had latched onto punk very quickly and ‘designer rebellion and well-rehearsed anger’ were easily exploited. Punk had merely been a passing fashion yet the anarchist-punk milieu was its own beast. The bands that began to express themselves in such ways were often put down by the music press if they featured at all. CRASS themselves were 15

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debated in the House of Lords and accused of obscenity but it was their alignment with the ‘Persons Unknown’ trial in 1980 that brought them wider political attention.

The trial at the Old Bailey was at the time the longest criminal trial in history and was in fact a conspiracy against anarchists in which ‘persons unknown’ were accused of ‘conspiring to cause explosions’ and, by implication, overthrow the State in a re-run of the Angry Brigade. After acquittal Ronan Bennett, one of the defendants, planned to establish an anarchist centre and with financial backing from CRASS and anarcha-feminist band Poison Girls the Autonomy Centre opened in Wapping in 1981. The short-lived centre was to close due to breaking the terms of the lease though they later adopted the Centro Iberico in Harrow Road, an old school house that had been squatted by Spanish anarchist refugees.

These venues in combination with the rural free festival and traveller movement were signs of a new and far more militant counter culture.

CRASS were soon being courted by everyone from the IRA to the KGB ( a prank by the band had been to create a conversation between Thatcher and Reagan and slip the tape to the media which resulted in the US authorities accusing the KGB before the truth came out) while the groups pacifist philosophy was summed up in the track “Bloody Revolutions” which appeared in Freedom at the time (21): You talk about revolution, well, that’s fine But what are you going to be doing come the time?

Are you going to be the big man with the Tommy-gun?

Will you talk of freedom when the blood begins to run?

Well, freedom has no value if violence is the price Don’t want your revolution, I want anarchy and peace You talk of overthrowing power with violence as your tool You speak of liberation and when the people rule Well ain’t it people rule right now, what difference would there be?

Just another set of bigots with their rifle-sights on me But what about those people who don’t want your new restrictions?

Those that disagree with you and have their own convictions?

You say they’ve got it wrong because they don’t agree with you So when the revolution comes you’ll have to run them through You say that revolution will bring freedom for us all Well freedom just ain’t freedom when your back’s against the wall You talk of overthrowing power with violence as your tool

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WHAT’S IN (A) SONG? You speak of liberation and when the people rule Well ain’t it people rule right now, what difference would there be?

Just another set of bigots with their rifle-sights on me Will you indoctrinate the masses to serve your new regime?

And simply do away with those whose views are too extreme?

Transportation details could be left to British rail Where Zyklon B succeeded, North Sea Gas will fail It’s just the same old story of man destroying man We’ve got to look for other answers to the problems of this land You talk of overthrowing power with violence as your tool You speak of liberation and when the people rule Well ain’t it people rule right now, what difference would there be?

Just another set of bigots with their rifle-sights on me Vive la revolution, people of the world unite Stand up men of courage, it’s your job to fight It all seems very easy, this revolution game But when you start to really play things won’t be quite the same Your intellectual theories on how it’s going to be Don’t seem to take into account the true reality Cos the truth of what you’re saying, as you sit there sipping beer Is pain and death and suffering, but of course you wouldn’t care You’re far too much of a man for that, if Mao did it so can you What’s the freedom of us all against the suffering of the few?

That’s the kind of self-deception that killed ten million Jews Just the same false logic that all power-mongers use So don’t think you can fool me with your political tricks Political right, political left, you can keep your politics Government is government and all government is force Left or right, right or left, it takes the same old course Oppression and restriction, regulation, rule and law The seizure of that power is all your revolution’s for You romanticise your heroes, quote from Marx and Mao Well their ideas of freedom are just oppression now Nothing changed for all the death, that their ideas created It’s just the same fascistic games, but the rules aren’t clearly stated Nothing’s really different cos all government’s the same They can call it freedom, but slavery is the game Nothing changed for all the death, that their ideas created It’s just the same fascistic games, but the rules aren’t clearly stated Nothing’s really different cos all government’s the same They can call it freedom, but slavery is the game There’s nothing that you offer but a dream of last year’s hero The truth of revolution, brother................... is year zero. (21)

The anarchist-pacifist stance of Crass was not everyone’s cup of tea however and so more militant groups began to appear 17

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such as Conflict and Chumbawamba while many of the bands who came from the Crass camp were often poor imitations.

This was all too apparent in vague lifestylist notions of what anarchism meant and in the contradictory politics of negation which made up most of the lyrics. There was debate at this stage between the emerging anarchist punk philosophy and traditional class struggle anarchists.

Ian Bone of anarchist punk band the Living Legends, who founded the newspaper Class War discusses the influence of Crass: Crass had found a way o f getting anarchist political ideas through to tens of thousands of youngsters. From the plastic A’s of Rotten’s ‘Anarchy in the UK’, Crass gave the circled A real political meaning. They had created an embryonic political movement. They’d reached punters in towns, villages and estates that no other anarchist messages could ever hope to reach. But what were they going to do with it? People were fighting back but Crass were s till telling them to turn the other cheek. They’d achieved something much bigger than I previously recognised but their influence had become reactionary. The time w as right to produce a paper aimed at the Crass anarcho-punks and soon after the first (Class War) paper hit the streets. (22)

Perhaps the most significant development which comes from the period was the Stop the City demonstrations in London in 1983 and 1984 organised by the anarchist group London Greenpeace and heavily promoted by CRASS which caused millions in damages, according to The Times, and became a precursor for the Reclaim the Streets and J18 movements and the later and international anti-G8 demonstrations. Throughout these times the anarchist-punk groups despite their unresolved political arguments and counter-arguments helped to fund many ongoing radical activities. CRASS played their last gig for striking miners in Aberdare, Wales in 1984. To some extent they felt they’d done all they could within the particular medium of punk.

The influence of Crass should not be underestimated. Many others began to adopt some of their philosophies and set up in their wake across the UK and spreading to Europe, the US and beyond. The US punk scene had developed its own punk hybrid known as hardcore. In American cities and small towns hardcore scenes grew up around certain bands and 18

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publications who had begun to tour, or print information about what was going on, but again it was another youth subculture concerned with vague tribal identity and it was bands like Dead Kennedys, Millions of Dead Cops and Canada’s D.O.A. who created a more anarchist leaning.

Dead Kennedys’ front man Jello Biafra interviewed in the Anarchism in America documentary states: “Anarchy begins with the mind and American minds for generations have been programmed in the opposite direction.” (23) An example is given in these lyrics to the Dead Kennedys track Moral Majority:

Dead Kennedys

You call yourself the moral majority We call ourselves the people in the real world Trying to rub us out, but we’re going to survive God must be dead if you’re alive You say, ‘god loves you. come and buy the good news’ Then you buy the president and swimming pools If Jesus don’t save ‘til we’re lining your pockets God must be dead if you’re alive Circus-tent con-men and southern belle bunnies Milk your emotions then they steal your money It’s the new dark ages with the fascists toting bibles Cheap nostalgia for the Salem witch trials Stodgy ayatollahs in their double-knit ties Burn lots of books so they can feed you their lies Masturbating with a flag and a bible God must be dead if you’re alive (24)

Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, DOA and others toured small American towns and brought their ideas into rural backwaters creating a radical backdrop for many young people in the process. So it was the anarchist punk movement developed all over the world. It continues to play a role introducing many young people to libertarian ideas but in consequence it is a doubleedged sword. More often than not the anarchism espoused by punk bands was one of individualism.

Bob Dylan has written that he stopped creating overtly political songs because he felt they had become a safety net.

People merely identified with the message and bought the record or went to the gig as if this was somehow going to 19

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David Rovics

arrest the problems discussed in the lyrics. In punk rock small communities with conflicting ideas espoused lifestylist politics such as vegetarianism and consumer boycotts without seeming to grasp the implications of the wider class struggle. In consequence some see punk as a distraction from the work that really needs to be done.

Although many of the original anarcho-punk bands no longer exist many of their individual members continue to put forward the Idea while others such as Oi Polloi, MDC and the Subhumans are still going to this day, and the movement is international. But while punk has latterly been the genre most associated with anarchism it is not the only one. The folk tradition has continued and will continue to carry the thoughts and deeds of those gone before across the centuries. Artists such as David Rovics and Utah Phillips (1935-2008) and bands like Chumbawamba have carried on a largely acoustic rendition of anarchist folk tales. In the UK in the late 80s and early 90s the rave/techno scene, itself inspired by the anarcho-punk movement, brought a green anarchist/ecological vision to the fore through illegal raves and parties in warehouses and secluded rural hideouts. In turn the State brought in the Criminal Justice Bill in 1994 shocked at the idea that people may actually be celebrating without paying for it, in an attempt to crush the movement.

The punk ethic, rather than the style of music, has had a considerable influence on wider musical culture with politicised bands like Rage Against the Machine or System of a Down, and even in hip hop culture with bands like Consolidated, techno bands like Germany’s explicitly anarchist Atari Teenage Riot or the unclassifiable Negativland who’s ABC of Anarchism includes readings from Alexander Berkman. Of course outside of this there is an ongoing folk tradition which has always formed the bedrock of the protest song. The Zapatista movement, which created an autonomous peasant zone in Chiapas, Mexico have developed their own anthem: Our people demand an end To exploitation, now!

Our hander istory says... now!

To the struggle for freedom.

This brief essay is merely an introduction into the relationship of anarchist and libertarian ideas with music; there is so much territory to cover and so many stories to tell that we might 20

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only glance at a few examples along the way. I have indicated the influence of the corporate music industry and its exploitation of the protest song, and touched upon a few critiques. Central to these critiques is that political rock music can provide a form of escapism which provides a safety net that can detract from actual mobilisation. Folk music is the more genuine idiom, it is older and far less contrived, yet within this narrative we are here to celebrate the diversity and passion of radical expression, the influence it has brought to bear and the constant reminder of the need to work together to overcome our oppressors. Let the chorus soar.

Notes 1. 0Kornbluh, Joyce L., Rebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology, University of Michigan Press, 1964 2. 0Lyrics from Solidarity Forever, composed by Ralph Chaplin, 1915 3. 0Lyrics from The Poor Miner’s Farewell, composed by Molly Jackson, 1932. See also Archie Green, Only a Miner: Studies In Recorded Coal-Mining Songs, Urbana, IL, 1972 4. 0Lyrics from the libretto for The Cradle Will Rock composed by Mark Blitzstein, 1937 5. 0Lyrics from The Bourgeois Blues, composed by Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter), 1937 6. 0Ron Ayerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements, Mobilizing Traditions in the 20th Century, Cambridge Cultural Social Studies, 1998 7. 0Lyrics from Won’t Get Fooled Again, composed by Pete Townshend, 1971 8. 0Lyrics from Les Anarchistes, composed by Léo Ferré, 1966 (translation by Caleb Smith) 9. 0Lyrics from A Las Barricades translated by Ilsa Barrea and Rachel Voland ,1998 10. Lyrics from the Anthem of Mujures Libres, composed by Lucia Sanchez Saornil Valencia, 1937 11. Rafael Uzcategui, The Tradition of Libertarian Singers, See online http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/anarchism/songs.html (also a major source for this essay) 12. Lyrics from Addio A Lugano, composed by Pietro Gori, 1898 (translated by Davide Turcato) 13. Lyrics from La Makhnovtchina, author unknown. See online http://perso.club-internet.fr/ytak/ (translated by Dan Clore) 14. Lyrics from Brüder, zur Sonne, zur Freiheit, composed by 21

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Leonid Petrowitsch Radin (Translation from the German by Jan Hoesemans) 15. Richard Kostelanetz The Anarchist Art of John Cage, 1993. See online: http://www.sterneck.net/john-cage/kostelanetz/index.php http://www.anarchicharmony.org/

16. The Anarchic Harmony Foundation. See online: 17. McLaren died in 2010 and his last words were “Free Leonard Peltier”.

Peltier was the Native American activist framed for his political outlook by the authorities in 1977 still in custody.

18. See the essay White Punks on Bordiga along with several other articles on the anarcho-punk movement from a critical perspective at: http://www.uncarved.org/music/apunk/ 19. ibid 20. Lyrics from You Pay by CRASS, 1978 21. Lyrics from Bloody Revolutions by CRASS, 1980 22. Ian Bone Bash the Rich, True Life Confessions of an Anarchist in the UK, 2006 23. Joel Sucher & Steven Fischler Anarchism in America, documentary, 1983. Also contains interviews with Murray Bookchin and Paul Avrich. A sequel is apparently in production.

24. Lyrics from Moral Majority by Dead Kennedys from the album In God We Trust, Inc

CLASS WAR CD OUT NOW Ian Bone has recorded some new material with Andy Martin and ‘UNIT’, including the new track ‘FUCK OFF GORDON BROWN’, a 7.5 minute reading of ‘TO TRAMPS’ by Lucy Parsons and Durrutti’s famous ‘ We are not in the least afraid of ruins’ speech, plus a reading of the Mansfield miners rally from Bash The Rich. UNIT added another 13 new tracks of their own and the entire LIVING LEGENDS back catalogue (21 tracks from Swansea, Cardiff and Bristol) PLUS the CLASS WAR single Better Dead than Wed featuring the dulcet tones of Martin Wright. This makes for a wopping double CD of 42 tracks in all including such faves as TORY FUNERALS and THE POPE IS A DOPE. The CD, entitled CLASS WAR featuring UNIT and THE LIVING LEGENDS. can be had for a cheapo tenner from Andy Martin at: UNIT HQ PO BOX 45885 LONDON E11 LUW unitunited@yahoo.com

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BUSKING MEMORIES David Rovics, anarchist and Wobbly, is a political singersongwriter who travels the world raising political and social consciousness, and making incisive social commentary wherever he performs. As David explains, he began his career busking in Seattle.

by David Rovics ‘In that Wobbly tradition of sharp social commentary, David is a master.’

—The Industrial Worker ‘Listen to David Rovics.’

— Pete Seeger ‘New York-born Rovics is a folk protest musician for the modern day. With songs titles like Who Would Jesus Bomb? and Lebanon 2006, he’s not out to replicate the poetic undercurrent of Blowin’ in the Wind like Dylan...’

—Time Out

David Rovics

by André Lyagen

Some recent experiences over the past few months have brought me back to my youth, or at least my young-adulthood, much of which I spent as a professional street musician. For many, busking is a marginal profession at best. For others, it’s a good living. These days there are large parts of the world, particularly in the US and Canada, where you can travel for hundreds of miles without seeing a busker. In much of the world, though, and in some parts of North America as well, the buskers are an active subculture that anyone who uses mass transit or frequents pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods has daily contact with in one form or another.

Ever since anybody has been paid to play music, there have been buskers. In other words, it is a tradition that goes back at least as far as the first market town. And as sure as busking is as old as civilization, it has also always been the number one profession of travelers of many kinds, and of the newest migrants to any place, along with other forms of day labour. Although the tradition is old and has a timeless quality to it, it’s also profoundly influenced by things like laws, urban planning (or lack thereof), and the state of popular culture (that is, Clearchannel, Sony, Time-Warner, etc.).

From the time I was in my late teens I guess I was pretty sure I wanted to be a professional musician. I tried my hand at busking in various cities as a youthful vagabond, but for years it was only an occasional preoccupation that only supplied me with a very supplemental income in terms of what I needed to come up with every month in the perennial effort to keep a roof over my head and food in my belly. In my early busking 23

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efforts I don’t think I ever made much more than $4 an hour on average, and I could make three times that much money doing temp jobs for Kelly Services and the like. Back then, in the 1980s, someone who could touch-type and knew how to use a primitive word processing program was in high demand.

I could (and did) live somewhere for a few months just to check it out, knowing I had a skill that could keep me more or less gainfully employed in any major city or college town.

By the early Nineties, though, I developed an unmistakably nasty case of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and typing for a living was no longer a viable option unless I were just resigned to the problem getting worse, which I wasn’t. I stopped typing for a living and never looked back. Faced with the need to make a living doing something else, I started busking again. I also took a couple jobs in cafes, but it became clear that I could make just as much money per hour busking, so I never worked the cafe jobs more than on a very part-time basis.

I quickly discovered that there were ways I could make quite a bit more money busking. But I never intended to be a professional busker — I wanted to be a professional musician, making a living performing mostly original material, or at least covers of really obscure leftwing artists. I knew this kind of material wasn’t ideal busking material, unless you're busking near a protest or something, but I didn’t care. I had a plan, and busking was to be part of it. The plan was to become a really good musician, and then to become a really good songwriter. I viscerally recognized the truth in the advice I had received somehow or other from Utah Phillips, I believe it was — that in order to be a good writer of any kind, you first had to steep yourself in the tradition. Whatever tradition you're into, you have to have it in your blood.

At the Pike Place Market in Seattle there was a young woman one day handing out fliers about what it meant to be a bard. It said a bard needed to be able to make up a song on any subject on the spot, and a bard should have at least three hundred songs memorized at any given time. I never worked too hard at on-the-spot songwriting — although one of Pike Place Market’s regular buskers, Jim Page, was and is a master at that art — but I thought memorising three hundred songs seemed like a good plan.

Although I had lost the worker’s comp claim against my former employer due to a new law passed by the state of 24

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Massachusetts under the Republican governor at the time that said any worker’s comp claims had to be approved by the employer of the injured worker, thereby making most claims by folks like me completely pointless, Aetna kept on sending me worker’s comp checks by accident. They were supposed to only send them for 6 weeks, but they kept coming for eighteen months. I was receiving a whopping $160 a week for eighteen months, and I savoured every bit of my newly-found liberation from wage-slavery.

I used the time methodically, living in the tiny little efficiency apartment in Seattle I had moved to. Every day I spent several hours learning songs and practising them, committing them to memory. I had a songbook I made from photocopied pages of other songbooks, and lots of lyric transcriptions I had made myself for songs of artists without songbooks such as Jim Page, John O’Connor, Utah Phillips and others. Once I had a batch of songs memorised I’d spend an afternoon busking at Pike Place Market, then I’d go back to the woodshed and work on learning more songs.

Life continued like this until Aetna rudely stopped sending me checks. I then briefly and abortively pursued higher education a bit more in late 1993 and early 1994, before picking up with a band called Aunt Betsy, for whom I played bass guitar, recorded an album, and did a Midwest tour.

Soon after that was over I found myself once again living in Boston, where I had originally gotten Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. This time I wasn’t typing for a living, I was busking, pretty much five or six days a week, four hours a day (until my voice was hoarse, which took four hours generally), mostly in the Boston subways — The T, as it’s known.

Although I spent most of three years as a full-time busker in Boston, I was still looking at it as an opportunity to pay the bills while honing my craft. By this time I had learned well what sorts of acts make significant money on the streets, and I was not doing most of the things I should have been doing if I were trying to really master the specific craft of busking. My goal by then was to become a good topical songwriter and a good musician, and I was still working at it.

Particularly on the streets — the tourist spots like Faneuil Hall or the neighborhoods where people go when they’re ‘out on the town’ such as Harvard Square — the buskers who make serious money are generally very talented people who tend to fall into one of three categories: the exotic, the 25

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extravagant, and the familiar. People who combine these qualities often do the best. For those of us who possessed none of these qualities, those of us doing a more subtle kind of thing, such as telling an unfamiliar story or singing an unfamiliar song in a way that wasn’t particularly flashy, our best bet was always the subways, rather than the streets, and the Park Street T stop, middle platform of the Red Line, became my home. Usually Monday through Friday, 11 am till 3 pm or so.

On the streets people are walking around from place to place, going somewhere, and if they’re going to stop and listen to a street musician or watch a street performer of some other kind, the performer has no more than a few seconds to catch their attention. In the subways it’s different — people are standing on the platform waiting for the next train. If it’s not rush hour, the trains might be coming once every ten minutes.

This means that most of your audience is going to be on the platform, within earshot of you, for one full song. If the trains are running late, maybe they’ll catch two or three. (Those were the best days.) In this situation you have a bit more to work with, you have a chance to suck them into your story — nothing too impressive required other than a good, solid narrative.

Until last fall I hadn’t really done any busking since 1997. I often think of the years when I spent much of my time on most days somewhere underground, though, and sitting in a bus a couple weeks ago really brought it all back to me in a more physical way. Sitting in a bus is also something I haven’t done much since those days, for better or worse, and sitting in my seat, looking at the advertisements and the poetry and the diverse bunch of people crowded onto that bus, I remembered all those mornings, many hundreds of them I guess, taking the Orange Line from the second-to-last stop, where I lived in Jamaica Plain, to Downtown Crossing, where I’d take the Red Line one stop to my spot at the Park Street T stop.

I guess it was the closest thing to a regular full-time job I ever had. Each weekday morning I’d put my guitar on my back and pack my battery-powered amp, mike stand, mike and assorted cables onto a little wheelie thing and I’d walk to the Green Street T. The commute from there in JP to downtown was 45 minutes each way on the Orange Line. I became quite disciplined about reading a book during the commute, so I was spending 1½ hours each day reading a book in those 26

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days, and I got more book-reading done during my Boston busking years than ever before or since.

The subway line I was riding on every day only exists due to a struggle waged by the local residents against a planned highway that would have essentially wiped the neighbourhood off the map, like so many others around the country before it. People mobilised and the government ultimately cancelled their highway plans and replaced them with an extension of the subway instead. Above the subway in JP is a long, thin park, and on this park every year people involved with a local institution called Spontaneous Celebrations hold a small festival — in part to commemorate the victory of the neighborhood in defeating plans for a new highway.

In a place like Boston it doesn’t take very long to get to know all the regular street performers. Some of them come and go, but by and large it’s pretty much a few dozen people who are full-time buskers, at least among those whose main stomping grounds were the T, like me. I quickly discovered that for the sort of music I was doing, the mid-day train schedule worked best. Fewer people coming through, but they have more time on the platform. I made a living, just barely, but in a decidedly unambitious way. The more ambitious performers did popular covers, or had a really eye-catching shtick of some kind, and in the subway they played during rush hour, when the maximum number of people are going past them or waiting on the platform near them, and when the trains are coming every few minutes — too fast for most commuters to even hear an entire song.

The plus side of being unambitious was there was rarely any competition for my favorite spot — at least by the time I got to it. Before I got there there would often have been someone busking for hours, taking advantage of the rush hour. Two of the regulars at that spot other than me were a cantankerous blues musician from New York with the stage name of Roland Tumble, and a cantankerous blues and folk musician from West Virginia named Nathan Phillips, who later took up the moniker of Bullfrog. Many of the other musicians would drop by on their way to another spot, sometimes checking in to see if my spot was already taken. It was a major stop for switching from one major line to another (Green to Red or vice versa) so they would often have been coming through anyway, and when you ride the subway 27

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enough you know where to get on so when it stops at Park Street you’ll be near the area where the buskers usually busk when you step out of the train.

Some of the best musicians I know, who I have recorded and performed with on and off since then, I first met in the subways. Eric Royer was one of them. I don’t remember if we met when I was listening to him busk or when he was listening to me, but whenever I was lucky enough to come across him on the street or in the subway somewhere I’d listen for a good spell. He was and is a crazy musical phenomenon, with a vast repertoire of traditional old-time and bluegrass songs in his head, all delivered on a five-string banjo that he plays with consummate skill, and when it comes to most of the bluegrass numbers, with the blinding speed and technical accuracy that the genre usually calls for. But in addition to the fine singing and banjo-playing, Eric also accompanies himself with the most sophisticated one-man band setup I have ever seen or heard of, which basically involves playing a two-string bass, a four-string guitar and a cow bell using an intricate, medieval-looking invention of his that allows him to play different chords, complete with an alternating bass line, using pedals controlled by his feet.

The highlight of many different afternoons of busking was when Eric would stop by on his way somewhere, get out his banjo, and play along with me for a few songs. Eric is a fairly shy sort who probably didn’t enjoy a lot of the attention he’d get while busking, but his craft was clearly destined for the profession. The blistering banjo solos are a real attentiongetter, and combined with the wild one-man band setup it’s irresistible. Eric made more in an hour than I’d generally make in a day — this despite the fact that he hardly ever did a song that anybody other than a serious traditional music fan would recognise. If he did bluegrass, one-man band versions of Aerosmith songs he probably would have made many times as much money, I’d guess.

One of the legendary buskers of Harvard Square in the 1980s — a few years before my time as a professional busker, but he would very occasionally make an appearance during my time on the scene — was a guy named Luke. I don’t know his last name — I heard many people refer to him by his first name and never once heard anyone mention any other name.

He was a very precise, energetic performer with an impressive vocal range and very solid guitar skills, and he did nothing but 28

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Beatles songs. He only ever busked in the same storefront in Harvard Square, and whenever he’d set up to do his thing he’d attract an adoring crowd of tourists, students and street kids who’d stick with him until he packed up for the night. If he wasn’t around on a warm weekend night when people figured he’d probably show up, many of the street kids could be heard asking, where’s Luke?

With Luke there was something intoxicating about the way he used the Beatles as a unifying factor for all of society.

It turns out pretty much everybody loves the Beatles — they transcend age, class, ethnicity, etc. Their music was just so popular and so infectious that it just managed to get into the broad fibre of society, and people would sing along actively, often in harmony. It was a very participatory thing.

But if Luke represented the positive side of using popular culture for good purposes, you might say Manny represented the dark side. He was always an impeccably nice guy, and extremely industrious. He had learned many things about doing street music over the years, growing up somewhere in the Boston area, with his unmistakable, working class Boston accent. He knew the basic elements, or some of them, of how to make decent money at the craft: a good spot with room for lots of people to gather, a good sound system, a knowledge of songs that people are familiar with. He may have known that he could make even more money if he were a better musician, but this was unclear.

I heard the stories from many people who attempted to have a chance to busk in Manny’s very prime spot there in the middle of Harvard Square on Brattle Street. Whatever time of the morning they’d get there — and for the best spots you had to get there hours early and hold the spot until the good busking time came around — Manny would be there. It seemed he often got there before dawn, riding to the Square on his bicycle, home-made wooden trailer attached to the back of it, with his mixing board, speakers and guitar.

What he lacked was the ability to deliver anything but the most lifeless renderings of only the most over-played, overbusked songs ever written. Like a broken record, visitors and locals alike would be accosted every day to many hours of Cat Stevens, Neil Young and the Rolling Stones — but only their very most popular songs, none of the other ones, ever.

Workers at the local businesses had to suffer interminably repeated unvaryingly stillborn renditions of Heart of Gold and 29

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The Sound of Silence, quietly wishing Manny would one day be silent, their wishes dashed with every new dawn, as they found Manny holding down his spot when they came to open their businesses.

And then there were artists who had an even better, more souped-up battery-powered sound system than Manny’s, complete with a variety of effects pedals, but who were masters of their craft. One such busker in Harvard Square for many years was Ned Landin, aka Flathead. He was, in fact, slightly Neanderthal-looking, with long hair coming out of a balding head and big, hairy eyebrows. I assume that’s where he got the stage name, I don’t know. More notable than his appearance was his mastery of the guitar and his poignant songs. He’d do a lot of his own songs, not so much familiar stuff, but despite this and the fact that he was just another white guy with a guitar, he had a loyal following in the Square because he was just so damn good. Flathead originated in Minnesota, and he could often be seen busking in Harvard Square in the middle of winter, when most buskers were either in the subway, busking in some warmer part of the world for a few months, or doing something else for the winter. Just to emphasise the point, he would plant his big amp on top of a nearby snow bank. He told me once that if the temperature went down below 25 degrees Fahrenheit he’d stop for the day, not because he had a problem playing the guitar in such weather, but because people wouldn’t stop and listen when it was that cold.

Weekends were the best time to busk in a place like Harvard Square, and many people only came out to busk on weekends, such as Mike, the juggler and tightrope-walker extraordinaire, who set up his tightrope in one of the few parts of the Square where there’s a wide enough public space to set up a tightrope without getting hit by a car. This happened also to be within earshot of Manny’s perennial spot, so the juggling and tightrope-walking inevitably had to happen to the tune of yet another sad performance of ‘Wild World’ or ‘Down By The River’.

A bunch of us regular street performers once had a meeting to try to figure out a system so people wouldn’t have to get up at dawn to hold down a prime spot, which is generally the default procedure when a better system isn’t agreed upon, but if I recall, Manny didn’t show up to the meeting, and we gave up soon thereafter. Sometime after that 30

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Flathead abdicated his position as a fixture of Harvard Square and moved to Los Angeles. I couldn’t believe a Minnesotan who had lived for years in Boston could find a happy home in LA, but he’s still there last I heard, so I guess he likes it.

At the Harvard Square T Stop — easily the most popular place on the T to busk, the Inbound platform, specifically — a system had been agreed upon by all the regular buskers, called ‘the flip’. This happened every morning at 7 am, and I believe it still does today. Every morning at 7 anyone who wanted to busk on the spot at some point during the day would show up, and the spot would be randomly allotted via the flip of a coin to three performers, who had dibs on morning, afternoon or evening. I never wanted the morning slot and I was damned if I was going to get up at 5:30 so I could be on the other side of the Boston area by 7, just so I could hang around somewhere or other in order to have the afternoon spot I wanted. But I did show up for the flip on more than a few occasions, somehow or other.

During one of the time periods when I was showing up for the flip we had an entertaining little problem in the form of a Polish accordion player, an older man who had probably very recently immigrated to the US, and spoke no English.

The flip is, of course, just a convention established by the community of street performers — nothing legally binding or anything. So if someone gets there before 7 am and doesn’t want to play by the rules, there’s no predetermined method for dealing with this. So for several mornings in a row, an assortment of musicians showed up for the flip and encountered this stern-looking, very large Pole with a massive accordion protruding from his very large belly. Each morning we’d all attempt to explain to him through some combination of English and sign language what the deal was, and each morning he’d look at us with an expression that at first appeared to be confusion, and later looked more like annoyance.

By the second morning, Roland, who was cantankerous to begin with, suggested we break the accordion player’s fingers. The rest of us, exasperated though we were by the situation, all thought that this was a shockingly violent idea, especially coming from a fellow musician who used his fingers for a living in very much the same way as the accordion player. Along with me and Roland, Grant was there every morning. Grant was a very good classical guitarist from 31

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somewhere in England who was one of the most regular occupants of the spot there on the Inbound platform of the Harvard Square T. Finally, after four or five days of this, a young classical violinist from Russia came to the flip, and the conflict was resolved immediately and amicably. Amazing what a little verbal communication can do when it’s in the right language. The Pole spoke Russian. The violinist explained, in Russian, how the flip works. The accordion player understood.

Starting that very morning he started participating in the flip and playing by the established norms henceforth.

In all the years I was busking in the Boston area I hardly ever played an original song. I was actively writing them by then, but I felt like they were still collectively works in progress. I also couldn’t bear exposing my own songs to the harsh subway environment, really, it was more an emotional thing than anything strategic in terms of my musical evolution, though that was also part of it. In any case, what I sang down there was almost entirely obscure songs from the past and present that only hardcore fans of topical folk music might recognise — and even most of them wouldn’t, either.

In my years living in Seattle I became a huge fan, as well as friend, of Jim Page. Left-wingers in Seattle and people who frequent certain places like the Pike Place Market know his music, but in Boston, and most other places, this is not the case. While in Seattle I went to many of Jim’s shows. Many of his songs I couldn’t find in recorded form I found by befriending other Jim Page fans who had recorded some of his live shows. I copied their recordings and transcribed every word of every song on them. Then I set out to figure out how he played the guitar parts. That part was harder — I never learned to fingerpick anything like Jim, nowhere near that good, but I did learn to mimic his flat-picking style, as well as his idiosyncratic singing style, which he has since pretty much abandoned, but he used to fancy a certain vocal trick that made him sound perpetually like a teenage boy whose voice was changing.

So I’d stand there deep under the streets above, singing the songs of Jim Page, Phil Ochs, Utah Phillips, Woody Guthrie, and loads of old anonymously-written songs I had found in books like Songs of Work and Protest or The Little Red Songbook. There were many conclusions I could effectively draw from years singing those songs in the Boston subways. For one, the overwhelming majority of people riding 32

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the Boston subways seem to have a ‘live and let live’ policy in life. Only twice did anybody ever get visibly angry as a result of my leftwing songs. One was an elderly World War II vet who took offense to The Draft Dodger Rag. Another was an agitated young man who seemed to think a line in a Judy Small song was offensive to poor people, because he evidently didn’t understand the line was supposed to be ironic.

Most people didn’t react one way or another, but from those who did, whether because they said something, or through their facial expressions or their donations, it was clear that many people were very sympathetic to the ideas I was singing about. One conclusion that can be drawn unequivocally is that white men in suits are almost universally stingy bastards. They probably also didn’t like the music or the words, but other street performers can also attest to the stinginess of this crowd. The working class is generally far more generous than the yuppies, and, breaking things down demographically, no one was more generous than middle-aged Asian women.

The Boston area has the best mass transit out of any city in the US with the possible exception of New York City.

Boston is also a huge college town and is comparatively pedestrian-friendly, though compared to many cities in Europe it doesn’t come close. But neither of these factors is the main thing responsible for the flourishing street and subway music scene there. It mainly comes down to the actions of Stephen Baird and the Street Artists Guild in the 1970s.

As I heard the story from Stephen and others soon after I started busking there in Massachusetts’ capital, busking in Boston or Cambridge was much like busking in most of the US. That is, any cop who didn’t like your looks or your music or was just in a bad mood that day could tell you to pack it up because you were blocking the sidewalk, disturbing the peace, or because a business owner or resident complained, or whatever other reason they wanted to invent. The street artist had no recourse but to pack it up or risk arrest. Stephen’s organisation sued the city of Boston and the city of Cambridge, and maybe other entities, I don’t remember. They won these suits, and street music was established as a legally protected activity. This really upset some of the meaner elements of the local police force, but they had to accept it.

In Cambridge, it wasn’t even really under the authority of the police to say anything about the street performers now.

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They were officially being monitored by a paid staff member from the Cambridge Arts Council. Official rules of conduct were established that the monitors were monitoring. The performer couldn’t take up more than 50% of the sidewalk in front of him or her. Volume of the amplification equipment (which they were allowed to use) couldn’t exceed 80 decibels measured at a distance of 25 feet, etc. Unfortunately, in one particular case, the power-tripping police force was replaced by a power-tripping monitor. Granted, the guy wasn’t armed, but he had the authority to issue tickets that the street performers were obliged to pay, and he issued them regularly.

He seemed to think his performance as a monitor was dependent on how many tickets he issued. I’m pretty sure this was his very own idea. He was either on a big power trip, or he hated music, or he hated people generally, nobody knew.

He was a quiet, stern, single-minded man, and his job was to make the life of street musicians difficult. It's conceivable that he didn’t actually know how to use a decibel meter, but only just. He definitely wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but this decibel meter was a very simple device. The thing was, he often took his measurements at a distance closer than 25 feet, which would of course dramatically increase the reading.

Also, a passing truck could be far louder than the music on occasion, so if you were just a vindictive misanthrope of some kind, you could always get high readings and blame it on someone.

I never got a ticket. The amp I used was industry standard for the subways, but kind of wimpy for street use.

The streets — and we're not talking about pedestrian streets here, for all you European readers who might assume such a thing — are much noisier than the subway platforms, and people tended to use bigger amplification devices. Usually things they’d have to rig up themselves, requiring a certain level of interest in slightly technical things, like you might need to use a soldering iron or something, from the looks of it. They’d use things that were made for cars and rig them up to work as amplifiers to connect to speakers and play live through, all powered by a car battery. So there was always some mixing of things that were designed to be powered by AC and things meant to be powered by DC. I never got into that fancy street amplification stuff. In most places I had busked before Boston, people didn’t tend to use amplification.

In Boston they did (mainly because they were allowed to).

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But in the subways the standard device was a Mouse amp.

I believe the company stopped making them. But at the time it was the best thing you could find for the price, by far.

Basically nobody else made anything quite like them, I suppose because the market for such a thing was so small.

How many street musicians are there in the world who are allowed to use amplification? Who else would have need of a battery-powered amp you can plug a mike and a guitar into and sound pretty good for several hours of battery life as long as you had no ambitions of entertaining an audience of more than 25 people or so? I remember being surprised when I heard, rightly or wrongly I don’t know, that the folks who made the Mouse amps went out of business. For many years the little thing was, along with my guitar, my most important possession. If you didn’t want to mess around with soldering irons and car batteries, there simply wasn’t anybody else who made a small but decent-sounding amp with a battery that lasted several hours on a charge. A Pignose amp was the closest thing there was before Mouse, and those things are awful. Many years later, perusing a music store somewhere, I came across this thing made by Crate, the Limo. It was similar to a Mouse, but slightly bigger, louder, better-sounding and with a longer-lasting battery. I hadn’t busked in years at that point, but I had to get one. I never used it, but it stuck with me somehow for many different moves. (Then when Occupy started last fall I knew I had to take it with me in my travels so I’d be prepared to do impromptu concerts at the local neighborhood Occupation, and I did. But it’s really more of a subway amp, still, I discovered when I finally put it to use.)

The quality of the buskers throughout the Boston area is so high, generally, that tourists often asked me if we were being paid by the city to busk. Other times they just assumed we were. People in charge of attracting business to downtown Portsmouth, New Hampshire instituted a program to help defray the costs of Boston-area musicians who want to go up there and busk, so this idea of people being paid something to busk wasn’t actually a complete pipe dream. We got the option to enroll in the Portsmouth program when we got our $40 annual busking licenses at the Cambridge Arts Council.

Licenses to busk in the T were free. But we weren’t being paid.

During my busking years I left Boston a number of times and plied the trade in other places. In San Francisco the 35

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general knowledge among buskers was that among the places you could play was the lobby area in the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) where people buy their tickets to ride. I busked a bunch there, but there you just get the passersby, nobody spending substantial time there for the most part. On the platform is where you get the quality time, but the platform is where you were strictly not allowed to busk.

One day I tested the law. I bought a ticket and got onto the BART at Civic Center. Took the guitar out on the platform and started singing This Land Is Your Land’. Not in any kind of offensive way, just a nice, moderate rendition of the song, with my guitar case sitting on the platform in front of me as usual for busking. I wasn’t even halfway through the song when I was interrupted by a cop and told to stop, that I couldn’t do that. I got in the next train and took it one stop, and there and at every other stop in the city of San Francisco (I tried all of them) the same thing happened, I never got to finish the song, and it’s not a long one. People responded very generously to the song each time, and I think I made $20 in 20 minutes or so there.

I visited London, England twice during my busking years. Once just before the 1995 Criminal Justice Act went into effect and once just after. There was a provision in this law that dealt with street music, which basically criminalized it, as I recall. The impact of the law was stark and easy to see.

Before the law went into effect the Underground was full of talented buskers. After the law came into effect the Underground was still full of buskers, but the level of talent had plummeted. These new buskers were people living on the margins of society who didn’t care whether they got a £200 fine. The buskers who didn’t want to get the fine, or were just offended at being considered criminals in the first place, left the Underground and presumably took up different occupations or went to busk somewhere else where they were not unwanted.

I remember around that time listening to someone on the BBC World Service saying that he liked the buskers in the Underground. He was saying this in the context of a story about Singapore, where busking was a criminal offense.

Ironically, he didn’t seem to know that the same was now true in London as well.

The worst part about busking was the air quality. It's not necessarily smog of the sort cars produce, but it always smells 36

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really bad when they hit the brakes. In both Boston and London the subways were built around the turn of the 20th century, and it'‘s not like the florid-smelling, ultra-modern Metro in Copenhagen or the Shinkansen in Japan. It stinks, a lot. London, not surprisingly, given that it’s a much bigger city, is much worse than Boston. Every night after busking in the Underground I’d have nasty black gunk coming out of my nose for hours.

But far more challenging than the air quality, really, is the illegality of the activity. When you give it a try, you’ll find that in most places that would be obviously good places to busk, public spaces with lots of pedestrians who would tend to enjoy having good musicians around, it’s not legal to do so.

In New York City spaces are limited and auditions are required, going against the very nature of the thing. Try busking on subway platforms in Atlanta or the nation’s capital and you will suffer the same fate. Or London, Singapore, or lots of other places. But in Boston it’s alive and well, for now.

In the spring of 1997 I went on a tour around the US playing bass for Robert Hoyt, and then travelled for several months backing up veteran street performer Chris Chandler.

Like Chris had, I went on after those tours to touring myself, playing indoors, as Chris put it, doing gigs that usually paid a little bit better than street performance did for me, where the air quality is somewhat better as well. But despite the downsides of the craft, I often nostalgically recall my years of working there beneath the streets of Boston.

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NO FUTURE, NATURE BOY Journalist, author and documentary maker Phil Strongman was at the 100 Club in 1976 when the Sex Pistols performed there.

He was also an extra in The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle and has known many of punk’s greatest figures. His books include Pretty Vacant. A History of Punk, Cocaine: A Novel, and John Lennon and the FBI Files. Phil is currently finishing his documentary feature film Anarchist! The Malcolm McLaren Story.

by Phil Strongman

Phil Strongman

38

One Friday in the late Spring of 1948, visitors to New York were puzzled to see large crowds of people standing on every other street corner. The people stood almost motionless, as if entranced. More puzzling still, these unprecedented crowds were not queuing outside cinemas, theatres, factories or sports arenas. They were all gathered around record shops – and the reason was an unusual new single by the ‘up-and-coming negro singer’ King Cole.

The song’s hand-written lyrics and music sheet had been handed to Cole in LA the previous Summer, given to him by an unshaven man wearing, incredibly, flowing white robes and sandals. Even more shockingly, for the time, the man — Eden Ahbez — had shoulder length hair.

Cole was a little taken-aback but he took the music and later played it at home, seeing it’s potential immediately. A version was quickly cut in August 1947 with Cole giving a spell-binding performance as arranger Frank DeVol did some amazing orchestration, a musical sleight-of-hand of tumbling yet minimal magic with a strummed harp plus a last half pushed forward by jazz brushes and a gypsy violin solo. But, despite DeVol and Cole’s enthusiasm, it still took Capitol Records almost eight months to release Nature Boy, the label being unsure that such a strange song had any chance of becoming a hit. They were wrong, of course, and in New York and several other cities it sold out within hours while those who’d just missed buying a copy insisted that store staff play the last 78 in the shop as loudly as possible, over and over again. They did, mostly, and more and more passers-by heard the recording and were captivated by it until besieging crowds began to fill pavements — a few of these ‘mobs’ eventually being dispersed by cops as other policemen ordered stores to close early. The

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record sold over two million copies that year, topping the charts for over a month before becoming the theme tune for Joseph Losey’s anti-racist movie parable The Boy With Green Hair (the lyrics were to be the subject of another, eponymous film, in the year 2000 which, in turn, led to Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge which contains a version of the song by Massive Attack and David Bowie).

As Nature Boy became a hit across Europe, King Cole became Nat King Cole, an international star, and many cover versions of the song swiftly followed, including takes by Sinatra, Dick Haynes and, years later, Bobby Darin, Grace Slick and George Benson.

The power of ‘cheap music’ had been demonstrated many times before Nature Boy but the latter was more than just a dance sensation or a standard love song — and it’s author, eden ahbez (he preferred to use no capital letters in his name) was no ordinary song writer. He was one of LA’s ‘nature boys’, an informal gang of proto-beatniks who lived on vegetables, nuts and fruit and who hung around at the beach or at the Eutropheon café on Laurel Canyon Boulevard.

Despite his pioneering ultra-natural Californian lifestyle, ahbez had actually been born George McGrew in urban New York in 1908, to a Jewish father and Scottish mother. He spent his first 30 or so years wandering from town to town, usually making a poor living as a piano player, before he gained a residency at the Eutropheon, a venue which also doubled as a health food store cum café (it was run by German émigrés John and Vera Richter who were both fans of the Wandervogel backto-nature movement that the Nazis had banned in 1933, Hitler’s boys deciding that Wandervogel was too much of a rival to the new Hitler Youth).

The Eutropheon was also where George McGrew became ‘eden ahbez’, a new surname that literally went all the way from A to Z, which was perhaps appropriate for a man who insisted only the words ‘Infinity’ and ‘God’ were worthy of capital letters. His attitude showed in the chorus of Nature Boy – ‘the greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love… and be loved in return’ — the song itself being about a wise, wandering child of the wilderness, the hero of a wistful world of possibilities. Implicit in these and other verses are the nature boy’s love of freedom — and humanity. And his quiet rejection, therefore, of Post-War America and its dominant (commercialmilitary) values. It was not, in other words, a typical moon-and-

Liberty leading the people: still from the forthcoming Anarchist! The Malcolm McLaren Story. PS Films (2011)

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June love song. It even had, on some level, faint echoes of the Sermon on the Mount, the philosophical tour de force of Christ that had become an obsession with Leo Tolstoy, eventually leading Russia’s man of words into becoming one of the very first Christian anarchists, a firm believer in direct but nonviolent action (and, as such, his The Kingdom of God Is Within book became a major influence on both Gandhi and Martin Luther King)…

After hearing nothing for months after meeting the rising singer, ahbez assumed that Cole had had no luck with his song. As ahbez had left no forwarding address there was no way for Cole or Capitol Records to contact him. Legend has it that ahbez was eventually found by Capitol in late 1948 — he and his newly pregnant wife were sleeping rough under the ‘L’ letter of the huge ‘Hollywood’ sign. The success of Nature Boy re-launched ahbez’s musical career and — while still often wandering or sleeping in the open air — he also spent some time in the Fifties writing songs for everyone from Eartha Kitt to Frankie Laine to Sam Cooke (who gave him his second, and last, hit with Lonely Island).

In the late Sixties, as the ‘beatnik-hippy’ look he’d inadvertently pioneered went worldwide, ahbez met and became friends with both Brian Wilson and Donovan. But his wife’s death in 1963 — and his son’s demise less than a decade later — had hit ahbez hard and his musical contribution slowed to a trickle of, mostly unreleased, demos. He eventually died in 1995, killed by injuries caused when he was hit by the unnatural force of an automobile. His death produced no headlines and precious few obituaries. Yet this little known man had helped launch a musical legend — and, more importantly, created one of the musical sensations of the 20th Century.

A quarter of a century after Nat King Cole had first taken ahbez’s song into the charts and the concept of freedom — as a cultural-political philosophy linked to music, lifestyle and selfexpression — no longer seemed on the agenda. After the threatening excitement of the Sixties had died away, the new force of rock ’n’ roll had quickly become a flabby, corporate shadow of its former self. The mullet haircut and flared jeans that were once so daring had become the unofficial uniform of the entire world — the teenage revolution of the Fifties and Sixties had seemingly been bought up, and neutered, wholesale. By the mid-Seventies even NME writers were saying 40

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the game was up as rock promoters vied for the prestige, and profit, of preparing a large scale gig in honour of Her Majesty’s forthcoming Silver Jubilee of 1977. The one-time soundtrack of hope and rebellion was destined, it seemed, to become the sound of cash registers — and subjugation.

At the end of 1975, as most true followers of the fly despaired, an unknown group played at a London art college.

The plug was pulled on them after barely ten minutes and only one member of the audience actually applauded their brief set.

To a wave of indifference, one minor fist fight and not a single write-up, the Sex Pistols had arrived. Their subsequent success, and impact, now seems inevitable but, at the time, the odds were a thousand to one against. Somehow the four semi-legal ‘teenagers who hated each other’ became the part-creators, and undoubted figureheads, of an entire new genre; the ultimate heroes, and villains, of a whole generation. Their manager, midwife and mentor was Malcolm McLaren, a former King Mob prankster then most famous for illegally giving away Selfridges’ gifts — while dressed as Santa Claus — burning the stars ’n’ stripes at Grosvenor Square and running SEX, a bizarre shop that mixed teddy boy clothes, rubber and cire t-shirts and, by the summer of early 1976, garments that bore increasingly political slogans. These politics were anarchistic, implicitly and explicitly. The Anarchy shirt he created with partner Vivienne Westwood mixed black and red patches — and silk portraits of Marx — with bleached quotes from CNT legend Buenaventura Durruti. ‘We Are Not In The Least Afraid of Ruins’.

By the end of that year the Pistols were signed to EMI, the world’s largest recording company. They also had a set that was, on several levels, truly anarchic. Virtually no two numbers were the same. Their opening effort, Flowers of Romance, was a never-to-be-recorded mess that was deliberately designed to be a second sound check — as well as a defiant blast at those expecting technical perfection. Submission was a haunting near-reggae shuffle while Pretty Vacant bounced and pounded like a rubber ball shot out of a cannon. Anarchy In The UK, their first and last single for EMI, was an awe-inspiring thrash from its crashing, descending opening — not unlike the start of The Who’s Anyway Anyhow Anywhere or Roxy Music’s Pyjamarama – through to its howling chorus and cataclysmic ending. It established the group as, culturally at least, anarchists, something their notorious TV swear-in with Bill Grundy only confirmed.

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The Pistols were fired from EMI after the tabloid fall-out from the Grundy episode became too much for the label highups. The group’s next label were thought to be shock-proof but A&M showed them the door the morning after their offices were ‘trashed a little’, a sacking that came just seven days after the signing. As with EMI there was a pay-off — by now the latter totaled £100,000 (a million in today’s money). The original line-up had been shattered between the EMI and A&M sackings, tunesmith and bassist Glen Matlock being replaced by Sid Vicious, a pal of menacing singer John ‘Rotten’ Lydon. This only added to the growing clamour around the group’s next choice of single, the rocking roller-coast that was God Save The Queen. As the Queen’s Silver Jubilee drew closer McLaren found door after door closing. Although the Pistols were, in 1977, the world’s most infamous act, no major British label was prepared to get involved. The group, and the GSTQ single, were too hot to handle in a country that still ended its television broadcasts — and most cinema programmes — with the official national anthem.

Eventually, with time running out, McLaren was forced to do a deal with Virgin’s boss Richard Branson. GSTQ would be rush-released in time for maximum exposure — and maximum offense — the week before the Silver Jubilee.

Anarchy In The UK had sold less than 50,000 copies before EMI had withdrawn it and no one was quite certain of how well an ‘anti-monarchist’ single might do (especially one that was banned from all radio and TV play). McLaren used this uncertainty as a selling point —‘in the shops now but maybe not for much longer’ — that encouraged fans, and record collectors, to buy more than one copy (as quickly as possible).

And thus the single that was not supposed to ever be issued became the fasting-selling record in British history — topping every chart in Jubilee week, every chart except the one that counted, the official BMRB/BBC chart that placed the group at No.2. Lyrically it was a scream that had been overdue since the ruling class had thrown away a million lives in the trenches — yet it’s ‘no future’ ending was completely topical too, capturing the Cold War paranoia of a world that had had no real future since the steel gantry had evaporated at Los Alamos.

Although the opening words – ‘God Save The Queen, The Fascist Regime’ — were simplistic on the written page, when combined with a throbbing bass and stuttering jagged guitar the whole thing swelled into what John Peel called ‘one of the 42

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greatest rock records ever made. It shows how society dehumanises people from the top on down’ But the Pistols and McLaren had pushed their luck and they would pay the price. It’s since been revealed that group and their management had pages on them within MI5’s ‘Subversion In The Music Industry’ file. Phones were tapped, people were followed. The band’s Jubilee Boat Party was ambushed by the police and McLaren was beaten and arrested as was Westwood and several others. Although dozens of journalists were present not a single British broadsheet or radio station reported a police raid on the most famous band in the country. Of the tabloids only the Daily Mirror saw fit to give the episode any coverage at all, and that was a single paragraph, buried on page five. In the following week a series of coordinated attacks saw the group’s frontman Lydon and drummer Paul Cook hospitalised while Pistols’ art director Jamie Reid had his legs broken. The windows at McLaren and Westwood’s World’s End shop – now renamed Seditionaries – were shattered and the phone was, temporarily, cut off. All these acts were carried out by ‘persons unknown’, none of whom were ever traced or arrested.

None of the backlash mattered. The Pistols had captured the imagination of their generation and their legend was already beyond control. Through the doors the Pistols and McLaren had kicked down flowed punk, post-punk, new wave and a thousand other groups, labels and sub-genres. Over the next few years the whole messy explosion was to promote CND, Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League — and help relaunch anarchism as a living cultural and political force.

Nature Boy and God Save The Queen both concerned freedom, one obliquely, implicitly, the other dynamically, explicitly.

Encouragingly, despite all the odds, they were Liberty leading the people: still from the forthcoming Anarchist! The both massively popular. Malcolm McLaren Story. PS Films (2011) 43

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THE SOCIAL SPACE Petesy Burns has been involved in the Belfast punk/anarchist community since the late 70s. Over that time he has played in many bands as well as being involved in the promotion of independent libertarian culture, mainly through his work with Giros, the social space of the Warzone collective. He is presently still involved with the Warzone collective as well as continuing to work creatively within the mediums of music and theatre. .

by Petesy Burns

Petesy Burns

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I can’t have been older than seven when I first encountered the meaning of the social space in people's lives. The family was my first experience of the social space but that's a given for most of us. This was the social space of the community and it was under attack from the forces of the British state.

The B-Specials(1), the Royal Ulster Constabulary(2) and subsequently the British Army threatened, intimidated and shot their way into ‘our’ social space because people dared to mutter the word equality.

My first memory of the social space in action was the women and older children creating a petrol bomb ‘factory’ in our square. Crates of milk bottles would be brought in, some would put a little sugar(3) into the bottles, others would half fill them with petrol, the next (who had previously been tearing rags) would be stopping the bottles with the cloth fuses ready for the final crating of the finished product to be brought up to the front line. It was well past bedtime and it was a sight to behold for one so young, frightening and exhilarating at the same time.

The battle for the social space lasted and lasted.

Internment came and the social space became a no-go area for any of the Crown’s forces. Rent and rates strikes, power cuts, operation Motorman where the forces of the Crown dug back into ‘our’ social space and erected their observation posts on top of the high rise flats. A different kind of resistance surfaced to protect ‘our’ social space, this time with guns, bombs and military discipline. The social space was still there but the simplicity of ‘ours’ got more complicated as time went on and the community was increasingly made to feel that they had to justify the actions of ‘our’ side. We also had to ignore the divisions happening in the community through diverging

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ideologies that routinely manifested themselves in ‘our’ own kind shooting each other. The social space became two social spaces with further sub divisions waiting down the road. The wider issue of the chasm between the two religious communities was a largely unspoken given and was thus accepted as the way things were and would always be.

‘God save the Queen, the fascist regime’. Music to the ears of someone who had grown up at the brutal end of British policy in the North of Ireland. The music social space had hitherto been occupied by Sweet and Status Quo. All that was about to change. Something else that was about to change was my idea of the social space.

Within the seemingly radical environs of resistance to the state existed a conservatism that ultimately quashed expression outside the norms of ‘our’ social space. You fitted in politically and socially or you just kept your mouth shut and your head down. You knew there were certain people you never crossed and that was that. I was the first one in ‘our’ social space to take in my parallels(4), paint stuff on my blazer, emblazon it with safety pins and walk self-consciously (but with attitude) down my street. The Pistols and the punk rock media hype had softened the blow but I may as well have landed from planet Fuck-knows-where. A large degree of bemusement, some off the cuff insults along the lines of ‘Ya fuckin’ queer’ and not a small degree of derisory stares from people who I knew wanted to come up to my face and shout ‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’ A few more brave souls emerged and we’d make a big thing of going to the local discos, bringing our own records so we could create our dance space. The whole place would gather round while we pogoed and thrashed around the floor in fits. They thought we were mad bastards.

And we were. The hard men would spit on us or piss on us in the bogs(5) because they wanted to think punks liked that kind of degradation. We took it. What we didn’t take was the boys from the junior ‘movement’ trying to intimidate us. We seen them off in no uncertain physical terms and told them to run and get the ‘big boys’ if they wanted. They never bothered us again! We were claiming our individual social space and it felt liberating.

Lots of young and not so young people like ourselves were doing the same all over the place. Punk had created a dynamic away from the dull monotony of formulaic entertainment and political manipulation, a society within a

B-Specials (Bogside)

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society. Revisionists will say that it was just another youth cult, but it was far from it. In the case of Belfast sectarianism had totally decimated the city centre. At night time it was a total ghost town barriered off and devoid of anyone apart from the army who manned the few barriers that were left open. The city centre was also the only truly neutral space in Belfast, the only place (for most of us) you could be seen that wouldn't automatically identify you as being from one religion or the other. Apart from the record shops (especially Good Vibrations) and the few venues which let the punks in there was no nonsectarian social space where we could congregate and get to know each other. Thus music became the common factor in the creation of the punk social space in Belfast.

My first exposure to the DIY(6) ethos I was later to espouse was the Good Vibrations shop and the Punk Workshop (which had its home in Belfast’s Harp Bar). Good Vibes, as we all called it, was part of a collectively run building which also housed a health food shop and a print workshop — the first working creative libertarian social space I had come across in Belfast. Terri Hooley who ran the Good Vibes shop had a passion for music and saw the potential in punk as a way of challenging the shit that we were being presented with as entertainment. With considerably more passion than business acumen Terri just did it and started to put out records by the local bands. Dave Hyndman from the Print Workshop printed the gatefold sleeves, Terri got the records pressed and the bands and their mates assembled. Rough and ready, utterly simplistic and cost effective there it was, the product of our local scene, the bands we jumped about to on a weekly basis in venues like the Harp or the Pound. The punk workshop was a collaboration between some of the Harp Bar punks and Good Vibes. It was my first experience of independent promotion in that bands from outside Belfast, bands who weren’t ‘big’ enough to be handled by commercial promoters, were brought in to play in the Harp Bar and whatever other venues would have them: the social space defining its own terms.

These examples, relatively short lived though they were, provided an inspiration in that they showed that people were capable of organising and producing outside of mainstream culture — that if you weren’t economically viable you still had the power to create. The Print Workshop relocated to a building which was to become known as Just Books. This was to my 46

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knowledge Belfast’s first Anarchist/Libertarian social space.

The building also housed an Anarchist/Libertarian bookshop and a wholefood vegetarian cafe (Cafe Hideout). They screened films (this is where I first saw the Shellshock Rock documentary(7)), provided information on local issues and activism and encouraged us punks to look more at the political context of our movement as opposed to the fashion element — the Anarcho-activist social space. Another thing the Just Books collective did was create the very short lived Anarchy Centre. The Anarchy Centre was my first glimpse of a truly Libertarian social music space. Run on Saturday afternoons in non-licensed premises the Anarchy Centre opened its doors to punks/hippies/gays/anarchists of all ages providing entertainment from local bands along with a wholefood cafe, films and much information. Local pressure from the council and cops via the media shut the place down, but not before influential bands like Crass and The Poison Girls got to play there. The Anarchy Centre and bands like Crass and the Poison Girls sowed the seeds of what was later to become the Warzone Collective and Giros(8) the Anarcho social space.

The social space became a political space. Everything we wanted to do creatively was controlled by people who only saw our worth in financial terms, and when we were no longer bringing in the money we were no longer welcome. A microcosm of the commercial world, and change is always best effected from within the microcosm. Punk learned many lessons but so often fell short of learning the most valuable one, that of protecting the social space from exploitation, opportunism and prejudice. It’s easy to indulge in simplistic utopias and reduce things to bite size clichés and think that that's enough to effect change. Many a night we spent debating the morality of the different approaches to revolution and our part in helping to change things. So many ideological dead ends and differences of method as most talking shops end up being because sometimes it’s much easier to pontificate than to actually get off your arse and do something. What united us though was a common hate of sectarianism and what it was responsible for. If there was a solid example of the fucked up nature of religion mixed with politics we were living in the middle of it. So what do you do?

Strap on a guitar, pick up a microphone and try to change the world? Yes! It was that simple for us. We saw the worth of 47

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organising as an anarchist arts collective and creating a space that was ours and that we could share with people who had nothing in their lives save the prospect of keeping their heads down in a divided society and paying into the wage slave system designed to strip people of their lives and their dignity.

We were the so-called disenfranchised unemployed who were supposed to be worthless to ourselves and to our community, nothing to offer apart from making regular withdrawals from the public purse, getting wasted and contributing nothing. We knew better.

Deciding to get up and do something is the easy part.

Justifying why you are doing it, not so easy. It was like I was back in the ghetto again with the very same people who saw a punk and thought ‘who do you think you are? Do you think you’re better than us?’ I don’t know what it is that makes people think you’re trying to be better than them when you try to better yourself and create opportunities for others to do the same. It’s the poison that contaminates the human spirit.

Forget racism, sexism, sectarianism, inequality and whatever perceived barriers to understanding you care to come up with, it’s the attitude that people don’t have the right to determine what they do with their own lives that is the rot and that creates the environment where inequality and its resulting violence and humiliation thrives. So much of our energy we spent or wasted trying to make people see the value of the social space and why it was/is important to have it on your own terms. A necessary part of finding ourselves in the process of working in the dark as we had to be sure what we were doing was coming from the heart as opposed to a cold ideological position. We shied away from ‘common positions’ and preferred the individual approach to resolving issues. We talked and talked, wrote letters, published fanzines and newsletters and invited all who came through our doors to be a part of it. Things can so easily get institutionalised and can seem from an outside perspective to be exclusive. It’s a difficult perception to contend with because of the nature of groups of people who work together on a regular basis. There is a large element of truth in the theory that organising, even within an anarchist framework, creates its own hierarchy.

Within that hierarchy a defensiveness can develop, in our case mostly because we were still on the dole and we getting all of the flack of the day for working ourselves into the ground to create a libertarian space for ourselves and others. It’s that 48

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defensiveness and how it is dealt with that will make or break the social space. It is that defensiveness that creates the clique that others perceive and becomes something solid and immovable, and from within it we can convince ourselves that we are doing the right thing in the right way and that it is others who just don’t see the worth of it.

It’s easy to get bogged down with all of that nonsense.

As usual it is your deeds and not just your words that move things along. Some call it the university of life because it is a process of self-empowerment and education. Whatever it is the social space is the beginning of human interaction, a structure that shines a light on potential and provides the tools to fulfill that potential. Like any learning process it is fraught with difficulties, inconsistencies and seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Tackling that challenge in a positive but realistic way, in a way which has people coming out the other end feeling like they have been valued rather than exploited, is the ultimate anarchist goal. This model is the antithesis of the world that is imposed on all of us and because so is the hardest one to sustain. It is also the only sustainable way of turning things around. When constitutional politics concerned itself with inequality and political correctness it made a vain attempt to control aspects of our lives which were beyond the power of the state. You cannot legislate respect. People are despondent because their social spaces, their lives have been encroached upon by power hungry opportunists who want to crush the human spirit because it is a threat to their influence.

Taking back the social space is the first step in taking back our lives. The hypocrites cry crocodile tears about injustice in other parts of the world — a justification for them invading other people’s social spaces through war and its subsequent terror — then at home send in their agents to pepper spray people who are being dumped on the scrapheap — burning their libraries, branding them terrorists because they dare to stand up and say ‘we are people’.

The potential is there for us to create our social space but it is also there for us to be criminalised and brutalised for daring to try to take it. Despite the latter threat it is happening all over the world. Despite the corporate media sidling up closer to their paymasters the networks are increasing. We were always termed as the usual suspects, but look at who the usual suspects are now. The idea of the social space is being taken up by people because the alternative they’ve been 49

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forced to endure has run out of steam. The fear of state violence is a powerful deterrent but one that will melt as we find ways to organise and reclaim the social space.

Music is a natural medium of communication that can transcend the limitations of the spoken word. Anarchism is much the same thing in a political context. The combination of the two can be a potent force for change. All of the radical ideas I grew up with had the desire for people to be free to determine their own future at their core. It is a natural desire to be free of externally imposed restrictions. The people who were standing up for civil rights in Northern Ireland in the late sixties were expressing that desire. Sectarian politics seen to it that this desire was going to be twisted into something that would be perceived as a threat to the other communities' way of life. The rest is tragic history. The outcome was a set of power bases vying for control. The radical activists of yesteryear became the politicians of today, more concerned with influence and affluence than people’s right to selfdetermination.

The tradition I came from had a great history of protest music. It had been a way of keeping the struggle alive when things seemed hopeless. Its shortcoming is that it never took it to the next level. So many influential people feathered their nests and those of the ones they knew could help them maintain and extend their power. What should have been a stage in the struggle for true freedom became the institution that shouldn’t be questioned because of the sacrifices of the many who gave their lives to change things for their community. It’s the emotive argument that shackles people to violent history and the belief that everything we have we should be grateful for because blood was spilt for it. So people are left with a sense of powerlessness because the hallowed ground can’t be trod upon for fear of upsetting the delicate balance of martyrdom. That same powerless path was mine before music, in particular punk rock — and to be specific punk rock mixed with the imagination and call to action of anarchism — shone a light on the limitless possibilities of the unfettered social space.

Power has been, is being and will continue to be challenged in creative ways which engage people as opposed to destructive ways which alienate them. We claim our social space in our own ways and we have no desire to dictate what others do with theirs as long as we have the freedom to live 50

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as we please. We ask for nothing more than the dignity we deserve and we take nothing more than we are entitled to. If this is a threat to something then that something has outlived its value. The social space is there for the taking. Our day has come.

Notes 1.0The B-Specials (Ulster Constabulary Force) were a reserve police force recruited almost exclusively from the Protestant community which was set up in the 1920s as an armed counter-insurgency force. The partisan nature of the force led to its disbandment in 1970 2.0The police force for Northern Ireland.

3.0Sugar was put into petrol bombs because the burning petrol made it caramelise and stick to its target.

4.0Parallels were wide trousers which were the fashion in most working class communities throughout the North of Ireland during the seventies.

5 0Toilets.

6 0Do it yourself. Formerly the property of the home improvement market, the punks took the term DIY and gave it a more political context!

8 0Shellshock Rock by local film maker John T. Davis is a snapshot of the Belfast punk scene in 1978/79. Giros was the social space of the Warzone Collective in Belfast which ran from 1986 until 2003. The social space has been recently re-established by the collective. To find out more go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7R_tJpihHs or www.warzonecollective.com

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WHAT I DO Some thoughts on a personal musical odyssey from an anarchist musician widely considered to be one of the finest songwriters working in the UK, ‘An English original’, according to The Guardian's Robin Denselow.

by Robb Johnson

Robb Johnson

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I always think that performing can be a little bit suspect ideologically; while everybody starts off with an individual capacity for creativity and an innate delight in self –expression, as you get older you find opportunities for exercising this creativity increasingly decreased, and controlled by social and cultural hierarchies that reflect the dominant economic values. To keep on being creative suggests – variously – a worrying capacity for egocentric self-assertion, and/or a stubborn refusal to deal with a consensus understanding of reality, and/or uncomfortable undercurrents of privilege and exploitation. Too often, being creative as a grown-up means behaving like a twat. I was disappointed to read a biography of Dashiell Hammet that revealed that, just like Jacques Brel, another of my favourite creative artists, he buggered off for a life of enjoyable creative intensity cheerfully leaving a wife and several children behind. But it is this sort of tunnel-vision that seems a prerequisite of artistic success once you grow up in the ongoing lunacy of western capitalism.

Maybe it’s the success and the capitalism that are the problem, rather than the creativity. Even so, it’s something that I feel a bit uncomfortable with. It’s very nice to be asked to write this, but … would I be asked to write something for Arena if I was a plumber? Plumbing and anarchism? Or even in my dayjob capacity, teaching… never been asked about that, and sometimes I feel it’s as a teacher I have done more to … move things forward than as a singer. It remains that even in radical social groupings, we seem to attach some extra importance to acts of creativity, rather than acts of plumbing.

Which perhaps explains why I do what I do, on the very margins of the various opportunities for creativity presented by the existing system and available means of production and reproduction. A long time ago I tried doing what you were supposed to do, trundle round AandR departments, hawking

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yourself to the various haircuts working for various record companies. It was a pretty depressing experience, and none of them was in any way interested in what I was doing. My friend Bruce pointed to the punk DIY idea, and said I could and should start my own record label. So I did, and Irregular Records has been lurching onwards as a complete fiction and flag of convenience ever since 1985’s first preferably forgettable release. I think it falls under the term ‘sole trader’, whatever that means. It’s released albums not just by me, but also artists as diverse as Barb Jungr and Tracey Curtis, Maggie Holland and The Men They Couldn’t Hang. It never makes any money, and exists on whatever overdraft the building society decides the account can get away with. Artists have complete control over their work, obviously. The big leap forward was when, in 1995, I persuaded Topic, later Proper, to distribute it.

The bloke who I sent the album to that got us contracted was a bit unconvinced at first. ‘The cover… it looks like a photocopy,’ he said. ‘That’s because it is,’ I replied, ‘It’s… erm… referencing punk-rock fanzines artwork style,’ I added. I could also have added that I didn’t have a computer, and a colour photo-copier at the local ProntoPrint was, along with a Pritt stick and a scalpel, the height of my technological capabilities at that point.

So… again, you could say that this marginal position could be a matter of personal choice, resulting from the refusal or inability to accommodate what I do to the criteria of the market place, or it could also be that as a commodity, I’m just not that “good” at doing what the market place requires… or it could be a combination of both. But, anyway, what I do is this; I write and perform songs, with instrument of choice being the guitar – usually acoustic, it’s probably decades since I wrote a song on the electric guitar. These songs are articulations of my perspective of what it means to be alive and living when and where I am. I hope they entertain… stimulate thoughts and emotions, please aesthetically… the people who listen to them. While I admire immensely artists like Lou Reed and Iggy Pop who are often downright offensive to their audiences, I try to treat audiences with courtesy and consideration. That seems to me a requirement of our common humanity. Sometimes, apparently, I offend or upset or irritate some people – letters of complaint to Broadstairs Folk Festival, and the bloke at (of all places) the Raise Your Banners Festival who said I ought to have been 53

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dropped in a bucket at birth, spring to mind.

With some people sometimes I apologise for having spoilt their evening out, but not for what I have said that spoilt their evening out.

With people who don’t want to admit notions of common humanity, Nazis and Tories etc, I don’t apologise. What I do often get is labelled ‘political’… not all of what I write is overtly political, but that’s what gets noticed. I suppose if I was honest, when I started writing, I realised that saying something ‘controversial’, often putting into song political ideas or current events that were commonplace in conversation, got you noticed more than any amount of sensitive songs about relationships. Noticed but not, as I later found out, necessarily a booking. So it was a way of writing I happily developed, the idea of putting into song events and ideas that usually weren’t within the usual/accepted parameters of lyric material, that has stuck with me ever since.

It’s not something I think I would want to change, even though from time to time I find myself releasing a ‘nice’ album that I think might rehabilitate myself with a more mainstream audience. That never really works. Critics generally look for and find something they think is ‘political’ in the songs and emphasise that to the exclusion of the other material. I write what I like, to quote Steve Biko, and I believe that that means I can write about my son’s hamster if I want to, that I don’t always have to be translating the latest headlines into the latest song. Nonetheless, my understanding of the world is that no writing or performance or cultural artefact, whatever you call it, is ever politically neutral. At the start of the 80s, when I started developing as a writer, it was clearly a time for artists to take sides as Thatcher set about ripping up the past 100 years of social developments. To say nothing against this was to condone it. I wonder sometimes if my writing would have been significantly different had I not experienced the polarisation of the Thatcher years. I hope not. Certainly living under Thatch made manifest, without subterfuge or spin, the reality of class struggle, the fact that most of the planet is being significantly fucked-up by a relatively few rich bastards who control systems of social organisation based on privilege and injustice that operate to the detriment of the majority of the planet’s living organisms. Once you look under the plate on which they put the food, once you look at the subtexts 54

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haunting the superficial meanings attributed to the world of things and events, you realise like Orwell that that our lifestyles depend upon someone else’s oppressed sweated labour. Just because we happen to find ourselves in a relatively quiet section of the line, doesn’t mean we aren’t all nonetheless engaged, whether we like it or not, in the trench warfare of the class war. Once you start finding the statistics of how many children die of preventable diseases every day, you think it becomes surely immoral, impossible, inhuman, to write about anything else. and so you write these angry songs, you sing these angry songs… and the children still keep dying.

There is in addition every likelihood that unless you also learn to approximate the accepted mannerisms of the popular entertainer you will only ever get to play to people that are equally appalled by and angry at the fact that this planet appears to be one giant slaughterhouse. and how do we manage to continue to exist and maintain our outrage at the conditions of our existence, without our performances becoming acts of theatre rather than acts of commitment?

I think all the artists I like and respect, whether relatively successful or relatively neglected, attempt to address these awkward rhetorical questions. Their work is literate, adult, imaginative but also the wider political world is a present and acknowledged reality in whatever they do.

Indeed, it doesn’t take much looking outside of the confines that have been used to categorise popular song in Britain for the last 30 years to see that elsewhere songs are often chock full of intelligence and all too happy to engage with political realities, whether you call them folk songs, music hall songs, chanson, cabaret, rebetika, underground, punk, rap… you name it, once you get past whatever censorship the means of transmission tries to impose, I think you find a creative spirit delighting in embracing and reflecting a pretty wide spectrum of experiences, realising in song a representation of the realities of being alive at some particular time and place. In terms of the radical element to creativity, sometimes the very form itself is the revolutionary agent…that’s why sometimes, at particular points of history, genres that are typified by primarily a-Political content, like jazz in the 30s or pop in the 60s, nonetheless freight considerable radical weight – black culture and youth culture, “outsider” cultures, suddenly produce revolutionary and liberationist effects on the established conservative cultural discourse. Although what I do 55

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Leon Rosselson

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draws a lot of inspiration in terms of form from some of these elements, like the way punk openly confessed that the great secret of rock is that it is all really just a 3 chord trick, by now these formal iconoclasms are pretty much common currency, so much of the radical content about what I do appears to be solely in terms of the content, the lyrics. This looks like a simple matter, but once you start thinking about issues like authorial intention, and how your voice is positioned in a song, it becomes more complex. I also think, however, that people who write about the spectrum of human existence, rather than staying within the limited subject matter promoted by media and business mediated popular culture, are engaged in subversive and liberationist acts of creativity (so maybe my son’s hamster is political after all) and I certainly believe that the way those performances largely take place, in small autonomous venues organised by people’s interests rather than business interests, freights a radical and alternative politics whether intentionally or not.

Songs with ‘overt’ political content are often described as ‘protest’ or ‘agit-prop’ songs, and for various reasons, they have recently enjoyed a fair-amount of denigration in the mainstream media, who delight in insisting that ‘protest’ songs NEVER changed anything, didn’t win civil rights in America, end the war in Vietnam, stop the war in Iraq etc etc. and it is true that simply tacking a melody under a slogan can result in some pretty mediocre songwriting, that will look more mediocre as the currency of the issue fades into history. Partly, I think that’s true – but it doesn’t take into account the importance of the passion of the immediate moment, and the wish to make some noise about it. I don’t suppose the soldiers who sung ‘Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire’ in the trenches thought it would end the war, but it probably cheered them up no end just singing it, and likewise the civil rights activists who sang endless versions of ‘We Shall Overcome’. and so what? Once you realise that everything passes, everything has a limited shelf life (I got this reading Euripides, funnily enough.

What a brilliant writer, I thought. Who reads him now? Who reads Webster now? Apart from studes like me doing Eng Lit) you realise it’s pretty good going just being part of that process. There are also songs that are political, that freight a political perspective, that are more complicated and less direct and point less fingers. My friend Leon Rosselson is probably the best example of this approach to political songwriting; Leon isn’t that fond of the simplicities of ‘protest’, preferring instead

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to craft songs whose politics and engagements are always expressed through intelligence and wit. This approach is more in keeping with the European tradition of songwriting represented by Brecht and Weill, Brel, Brassens, Ferre… compare the elaborate, witty construction of Boris Vian’s “The Deserter” with ... I dunno, Dylan’s magnificently splenetic “Masters of War”. Different ways of having a go at the same bastards.

As for me, well, I try to do a bit of both.

I used to do lots of dramatic agit-proppy songs where I was adopting the voice, the persona of a historical reality. I think it was when I got back from a fortnight in Nicaragua in 1989 that I wised up the fact that, actually, I had always had a return ticket, and I was really only some bloke who worked as a teacher in west London, armed with a guitar, not a Kalashnikov. So after that, I have always tried to be more… honest in my songwriting, to pay attention to the voice in my songs, and not to appropriate spurious romantic revolutionary glamour. I decided I wanted to be able to put my hand on my heart and say: this is a true as I can manage to make it. So I tend to write a lot of ‘true stories’ (Leon also once observed to me that ‘true stories don’t necessarily make good songs’), to turn real events into songs, without resorting to the self-obsession and narcissism that characterises the stereotypical singer-songwriter, those awful introspective narcissists with nothing much to say about anything, but who insist on saying it anyway, who have a guitar but not a girlfriend….

So, in conclusion, then… it was all Chumbawamba’s fault, really. I had spent much of the 80s working diligently as a good member of the Labour party (where I did sometimes feel in a minority of one on a lot of issues) to overthrow Thatcher, end Apartheid, get rid of nuclear weapons etc etc. Most of what I wrote was deliberately political – I’d been in a splendidly small-A anarchic agit-prop trio called The Ministry of Humour that subverted and terrorised folk clubs the length and breadth of the Thames delta for a while, and we were very much concerned with the ideological correctness of what we sang and did. Then one day, in Our Price in Ealing, I found this record called ‘Never Mind the Ballots… Here’s the Rest of your Life’. It was a bit of a revelation; politics, and life, did NOT entirely depend on Neil Kinnock and the Labour Party overthrowing Thatcher etc etc. Anarchism seemed like I was

Boris Vian

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allowed to breathe again, to do what I liked as long as it didn’t fuck up anybody else (unless they were trying to fuck everybody else up, then you had to stop them, obviously), and to not worry if I wanted to write a song that wasn’t expressly designed to overthrow Thatcher. Simple really: I was free to choose what I did, and I was free to choose what I wrote. The ideas I started looking at expanded my politics, and offered more of a coherent and effective framework for my belief in the importance of liberty, equality and co-operation. That belief, I perhaps ought to add, is the result of both my education and my experience. I went to university and found a whole lot of radical ideas there that sort of extended the left-labour ideas I’d been introduced to by my dad and the general 60s welfare state-isms. My mates who hadn’t gone to university, who’d left secondary modern school to get a relatively untaxing jobs-for-life in a bank, or as a chippie, who I still played in bands with, all thought once I got a job in the real world, I’d forget all those leftie ideas. In fact, the opposite was true; the real world confirmed absolutely the accuracy of the socialist theories and ideas I’d been reading at university. My experience of the world is that the overwhelming 99.9999% of people are born absolutely beautiful human beings, but they are born into loaded, unequal situations that ensure most of that beauty goes unrecognised, and in some cases gets corroded and turned ugly. No-one chooses where they are born, no-one chooses to be neglected. A society based on need not greed would prevent all that waste and misery.

I hope that what I write, articulates, sometimes overtly, sometimes as a subtext, those ideas, and my songs sing in support of this, in support of liberty and autonomy, and beauty too.I think if we only sing ugly, negative songs, then we let our oppressors define us, and beat us again. I always think of Victor Jara’s songs in this context, because Victor always sang songs that insisted on our dignity and our humanity and our beauty. I hope my songs work on behalf of the collective, co-operative democracy and humanity that we need to establish in place of the oppression and misery that the current system imposes on us. I hope that what I do, and how I do it, demonstrates these

Victor Jara

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What I Do

principles in a practical manner.

Hmn…that was a lot of rather big words for just 3 chords. What that means in real terms is that maybe my songs provide an alternative perspective to the business and mediadominated discourses that describe an authorised version of historical events that excludes most people’s experiences, whether it’s writing a song about Captain Swing, Terry French, watching Brentford play football, the lives of the kids that I teach, or relationships that aren’t defined by celebrity and money. That’s what folk music’s always done, whether it’s being done by Joe Strummer, Woody Guthrie or some anonymous melodeon-monger in 1837. It’s us singing for the love of it, for our own sakes, not at the behest of whatever ruling class we happen to be lumbered with at any particular moment in time. I hope that one day, I too may be part of the process, as some anonymous guitar-monger in 2011. I also hope that I provide a good night out that doesn’t insult anybody’s intelligence as part of that process. Maybe I ought also to admit that I really enjoy writing, playing guitars and singing songs, it’s all I have ever really wanted to do, and regardless of whether it’s a personality flaw or not, I am chuffed to be still doing at 55 what I always wanted to do at 18 . . . and I am still also rubbish at plumbing.

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FROM RHYTHM ACTIVISM TO BAKUNIN’S BUM Reflections of an unrepentant anarchist violinist on ‘anarchist music’

by Norman Nawrocki

Norman Nawrocki

Norman Nawrocki is a longtime Montreal anarchist violinist/ front man, cabaret artist, producer and author who first set foot on the stage in 1985. Before that, he was an editorial collective member of the international anarchist news journal, The Open Road (1976 – 1981) and other anarcho publications. He has released over 50 albums with his various bands (e.g., Rhythm Activism, Bakunin’s Bum, DaZoque, etc.) and tours the world playing his own more or less ‘anarchist music’. He gives workshops about ‘Creative Resistance,’ teaches part-time at Concordia University, and helps organize Montreal’s vibrant anarchist cultural scene. His last book was Dinner for Dissidents (2009); his last album was Letters from Poland/Lettres de pologne (2006). www.nothingness.org/music/rhythm 1.THIS VIOLIN TELLS ANARCHIST TALES I have a violin that carries an old/new world in it’s ornately decorated aged wooden body. Every time I play it, this instrument resonates with a mix of hopeful dreams lovingly built into it by an anonymous early 1900s southern Polish mountain luthier, and added to by subsequent musicians who owned and played it, imbuing it with their feelings and spirits.

In popular mythology, the violin was the instrument of the devil, because it incited people to dance and have a good time instead of work or attend church. This violin is definitely infused with an anarchic and devilish spirit of its own. I named it ‘Janosik,’ after a legendary Polish Tatra Mountain Robin Hood, who it is said, robbed Polish landowners and their friends and distributed the wealth to the local poor. As an anarchist violinist, I use it not to rob banks but to help recount a myriad of historical musical stories, like the one about the Mexican Magon Brothers from the Tierra et Libertad movement, or about Quebec Mohawks resisting the Canadian

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Armed Forces. I pluck, scratch, whack and bow it to raise money for the Zapatistas, to protest the American Empire, to question Capital, to re-inact a moment from the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, to promote and publicize anti-war direct actions taken by contemporary rebels, to denounce the ongoing persecution of Roma refugees, and to contribute to drunken good-time dancing by anarchists and non-anarchists alike.

Over time, this slightly misshapen, somewhat tourscarred but warm-sounding handmade, abalone shell beautified Polish violin has become an anarchist violin.

Plugged into special effects pedals, a digital sampler/looper, an 85-watt amplifier, and a much larger sound system, with or without a full band or feedback, this violin tells anarchist tales in a very loud voice from Rome to Hong Kong. It can also surprise and entertain with its range of experimental, ambient, instrumental, electronically enhanced musical output.

Recorded, packaged into CDs and broadcast over airwaves, the internet and even TV, this violin reaches many more people than it ever did as an acoustic wedding dance instrument up in the mountain wilds. This ever so fragile and sensitive to the elements violin now provides a musical platform to help me explain ‘Why am I an anarchist?’ Maybe it could kill fascists, I’ll never know. It certainly helps raise funds and awareness for anarchist causes at anarchist events.

But the question remains: does this violin play ‘anarchist music’?

2. DEFINE ‘ANARCHIST MUSIC’?

Few anarchists, musicians or not, will ever agree: is there a body of music that we can confidently describe and define as ‘anarchist music’ because it addresses anarchist themes, or because it is made by self-identified anarchist musicians/composers, or people who willingly admit to being consciously influenced by anarchism? What about music that speaks about anarchism or some facet of anarchist thought or practice, historical or contemporary, but was made by nonanarchists with or without any clearly articulated affinity with anarchism or the anarchist milieu? And do occasional musical ‘accidents,’ unintentionally anarchist in spirit and content, but perceived as such by listeners, count as ‘anarchist music’? It takes mental gymnastics to bend our minds around the concept for even a superficial exploration.

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But given the long-standing rich history of anarchist critiques of the arts, if we insist that there must be a bona fide anarchist musical aesthetic somewhere out there which could possibly help us examine, evaluate and understand this particular genre beyond the outer limits of free jazz, metal, orch-pop, surrealist experimental noise music, hyper or banal rock, or post punk psychedelic apocalyptic anarcha-polka, then what are the criteria? How do we define it? Is there a specifically anarchist body of musical work that we or some other anti-authoritarian musical academy recognizes, that Kropotkin or Malatesta might have approved?

Can we safely say, for example, that if a musician exercises total freedom in their creative process, if their music somehow embodies or conveys a social critique in an anarchist spirit, or could be interpreted as such, and that if this music also helps promote an anarchist vision, and is somewhat agitational or serves the purpose of certified circle @ movement activity, that this music could then fulfill an anarchist musical aesthetic?

Despite popular on-line anarchist opinion, the cultural heritage of our movement, diverse and long-standing as it is, does not yet include endless lists of ‘anarchist’ musicians – punk or otherwise. Thorough research is still lacking. Like other anti-capitalist, socially critical movements, too many anarchists tend to downplay if not denigrate the role of ‘culture’ in our fight for a new world, and thus, refuse to give active support or credence to those who try to develop and practice through self-expression a new anarchist aesthetic –musical or otherwise. ‘Where’s the struggle?’ hardcore, culturally-challenged anarchoids often protest, as Emma Goldman screeches, kicks off her dancing shoes and rolls over in her grave.

Not only are we confounded with on-going, popular misconceptions fed by the mass media about anarchism, sowing confusion and continuing to equate anarchy with violence and the odd broken window, but also by musicians masquerading as anarchists, wearing anarchist patches and tattoos as they play uninspired, boring music for diehard fans unaware that more engaging music does exist in and beyond the anarcho cosmos. However, despite the best intentions, just because the music is tagged ‘anarchist,’ doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good. More often it can be non-anarchist musicians who rock our socks. Then the question arises: if there are 62

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singer/songwriters who are anti-religious, anti-authoritarian, anti-war, anti-racist, anti-prison, and who will gladly perform at events to raise money or awareness about any of these issues, does this qualify them and their work as ‘anarchist’?

There is certainly music that inspires anarchist thoughts, inclinations, and the desire for full and total, absolute and unrestrained social revolution here and now, and it may or may not qualify as ‘anarchist music.’ But this same music can also fuel unthinking drunken frat boys, for example, to smash people and flowers in their way, in or out of the mosh pit. The Canadian anarchist band Propagandhi once remarked as much after a particularly rowdy concert where anarchists and nonanarchists were totally undistinguishable in front of the stage, but equally fans of the band: one, more so for its radical lyrics, the other for it’s testosterone igniting powerchords. If only Elvis had been an anarchist, think of the possibilities!

3. IS IT ‘ANARCHIST MUSIC’ or is it GOOD MUSIC? Like many anarchist cabaret artists/musicians, I’m always preoccupied by a significant, ever-present concern of not only how to break out of the ‘indie’ music ghetto, populated mostly by youthful hipsters who will always welcome something new and edgy, but also, how to reach the even larger non-anarchist potential audience. Playing for anarchists in home territory is never the challenge (despite sometimes the limited musical aesthetical appreciation of the hardcore, as in, ‘unless it’s punk rock it ain’t anarchist and I’m not listening to it’ kind of attitude non-punk musicians periodically have to confront within the movement). Performing for a non-anarchist, nonindie music public is. Consequently, the search for new or successfully recycled music, lyrics, and performance approaches is something many musical comrades take seriously.

How can we reach a non-anarchist public with musical work that offers a social critique, and succeeds in holding their attention for the length of the song, the duration of the performance? What kind of music, of anarchic harmonies, will open doors and ears and allow anarchist lyrical content to be heard? Which combination of words will ring true, best express the ideas, be equally listenable and hopefully move people to think and act? Under what conditions can this exchange take place? Where and how can we play to reach our target audience? Who in fact are they: the converted, or 63

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‘Albert Meltzer 1920-1996

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the ubiquitous non-anarchist but potentially receptive everyperson?

As I listen to the radio or online offerings, I wonder, too: do we have English language country and western anarchist music for fans of C & W? Not yet. The French anarchist milieu has easy listening anarchist music for the masses, from Brassens to Ferré and even Renaud. We have Utah Phillips, perhaps, but not really.

Do we have anarcho rock, pop, hip hop or dance that can match in catchiness, in listenability, in number of times it can make rotation lists, the commercial hits that dominate personal playlists and downloads, the songs people love to dance to in clubs? More than ever before, but still not quite visible or audible enough. Chumbawamba once made it happen on a world scale. So did the Sex Pistols and Rage Against the Machine. But beyond them, in the Englishspeaking world, who else?

I can remember the exact moment in 1977 when Albert Meltzer (1920-1996), the celebrated English anarchist writer and activist, introduced me to the Sex Pistols in his Lewisham apartment. He played their first 45rpm single, ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’ just released weeks before, on his vintage turntable as we sat there sipping tea. He was thrilled that for the first time ever, a commercially successful British band was singing about anarchism, reaching masses of Brits. I remember him nodding his head in time on this historical occasion and exclaiming excitedly, ‘Bloody good, isn’t it?’

It’s not farfetched to imagine an equally exciting new anarchist band or artist topping the charts and succeeding in planting the idea of Social Revolution in people’s ears simply because the music accompanying it is so irresistibly good that no one could not listen to it. And what if the group or artist toured to massive public acclaim, had its music playing everywhere all the time, its video clips viewed by millions of fans, its story told and retold in the world music press, on TV and radio, and as a result, convinced millions worldwide to further investigate anarchist ideas, read anarchist literature, form anarchist groups, become anarchist activists, and lead to the complete overthrow of the entire rotting social order, the end of McDonalds, bad beer and overpriced cheesy poofs, and the establishment of the new anarchist dream world here and now? Why wouldn’t we be thrilled?

Until then, yes, admittedly, sometimes nothing can be

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more gratifying to an anarchistic performer than to have a single audience member approach the stage post-show or write in a year later that this magical musical moment was a turning point in their life and marked a renewal of commitment, a blossoming of consciousness, a pivotal psychic insight that reaffirmed their anarchist convictions and practice. Thanks to the music, one more pair of arms for the barricades, one more match for the fire, one more point of resistance on the map towards freedom.

4. ANARCHIST MUSIC IN PRACTICE. A FEW PERSONAL EXAMPLES RhythmActivism One example of how ‘dissident chords for freedom’ can contribute to worldwide mayhem and mass partying is the experience of our 1980’s – 1990s, Montreal-based, internationally renowned anarcho ‘rebel news orchestra/rock ‘n roll cabaret’ band, Rhythm Activism (RA).

Originally a simple agit-pop poetry and music duo, RA grew over time into a hydra-headed artistic extravaganza with 50 other artists on-stage (dancers, clowns, acrobats, etc.) capable of staging a critically-acclaimed and clearly anarchotatooed musical community circus cabaret about the roots of poverty and how to fight back. (Montreal police tried to dissuade the public from attending this particular show, attesting to its anarchist content, guaranteeing its subversive success!)

In between, RA released dozens of albums (from original DIY hand-cranked and packaged cassettes to G7 Welcoming Committee Records CDs), toured North America and Europe to thumbs up reviews from the music press and the musically enlightened, and flew the black flag high and proudly wherever we played our brand of anarchized cutting edge music. Sometimes seriously, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, we always created and performed with an aesthetic sensibility born of our need for total and ever-changing self-expression, and the desire to respond to the political and social needs of the Fred Frith moment, or the movement, whichever demanded priority.

Like all anarchist artists, we would witness, comment on and protest the observable injustices of our times and offer anarchist-inspired alternatives. And if the cause of Social Revolution was advanced ever so slightly, then all of RA’s 65

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Linton Kwesi Johnson

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broken strings, blistered bleeding fingers and wine bottle hangovers were worth it.

Our perpetually self-re-inventing music, lyrics and stage shows were our cultural weapons; our urban decayed Montreal roots our launchpad. We borrowed heavily from slapstick, vaudeville, theatre, TV talk shows, cabaret, Spike Jones, punk, rock, 1960s pop, East European folk and wedding party favorites, experimented, improvised, cut and pasted, and in the end, chameleon-like, in the best tradition of anarcho-agit artists everywhere, slipped out of the margins into the mainstream media and consciousness.

We defied circle ‘a’ or not button-holing, garnering press, radio and TV news coverage for our critical (satirical and serious) musical/theatrical messages, playing the grungiest of anarchist punk rock dives to prestigious avant jazz venues like New York’s ‘The Knitting Factory,’ or sharing world stages with music icons like Fred Frith, The Ex or Linton Kwesi Johnson. We performed in soup kitchens for the poorest of the poor and on trans-Canada buses for other paying passengers, for kids and grandfolks in church basements, and rednecks unknowingly hosting us in their favorite bars. Critics called us ‘the Brecht/Weil’ combo for the 21st century,’ and said we were ‘aligned with the Gang of Four, The Ex, Tom Waits, Fugazi, Chumbawamba,’ etc.

We gave workshops about creativity and spoke incessantly about our inspiration, vision and experiences on the musical barricades. We never specifically named our music ‘anarchist.’ We wrote and performed hundreds of pieces, and recorded dozens of them on theme albums. Our sometime surrealist, mostly heavily researched and realist songs and ‘news poems’ spoke about little known anarchists (e.g., Margarita Ortega, Helen Armstrong), about anarcho-syndicalist history (e.g., The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, the Beauharnois/Lachine Canal strike of 1843), about direct action for housing and food (e.g., Squat the City, The No Cash Polka) about anarcho-communist utopias like 7-11 Heaven, and Zapatista controlled ‘free zones.’

We considered ourselves purveyors of ‘alternative, electrified journalism,’ using music as the medium to convey anarchist-inspired reporting of and commentary on current and historical events, local and international. We created informational comedy musical cabaret shows at the request of community groups to help explain complex new social

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assistance laws to the disenfranchised and have fun at the same time. We toured satirical rock cabarets, like our ‘Welcome to Capitalism, Poland’ show, in post-Communist Party Poland.

In retrospect, we performed a valuable public service for the anarchist and would-be anarchist community in the predigital Dark Age when there was no global Indymedia network to speak of, when fax machines were non-existent, and no one we knew owned a computer. From the mid 1980s to1990s when snail mail ruled and long-distance phone calls cost a fortune, we provided the equivalent of a travelling alternative musical anarchist news service.

Fender Jaguar guitar and Polak violin strapped on our backs, we (guitar god and RA co-founder, Sylvain Côté and myself) started out as a duo and became a four-piece band. We were old-skool Canadian anarchist minstrels of the late 20th century, criss-crossing the continent and the ocean, developing a network of like-minded anarchist artists, poets, singer/songwriters, bands, painters, actors, film-makers and squatters from San Francisco to Tompkins Square in New York, from Leeds to Milano.

Pre-online networking communication, it was face-to-face contact, exchanging mailing addresses and phone numbers on paper napkins and set lists in an attempt to build a global creative anarchist network that could collaborate on future projects. Sometimes it worked. We would organize tours of anarchist musicians and poets from Europe or the USA or elsewhere in Canada. Mecca Normal, the veteran anarchist band from Vancouver and ourselves organized for example, the first-ever busload of anarcho poets and musicians, the mighty ‘Black Wedge’ tours of North America, our anarchist response to the fabled ‘Red Wedge’ tours organized by Billy Bragg and other leftoids in England. Like RA itself, the ‘Black Wedge’ offered anarchist music by anarchists, music that was challenging, music that allowed you to listen to the lyrics, music that tested your musical limits, from surrealist experimental opuses to simple folk creations. We helped spread boycotts (like the one against the KKK friendly, ultra-right wing financing COORS beer) and messages (like anti-World’s Fair facts), helped network at critical times (like for Zapatista support groups) and for critical causes (like supporting isolated Mohawk warriors), but as we all know, rock ‘n roll, anarcho or not, just isn’t revolution. We always saw our daily work, our cultural contribution, as only a small part of the equation.

The Ex in Ethiopia

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Bakunin’s Bum – an old anarchist with new tricks Post-RA, ‘Bakunin’s Bum,’ a musical/spoken word collaboration, between myself and anarcho beat meister/drummer Aidan Gert (from One Speed Bike and Godspeed You Black Emperor!) rose from the dark and recorded a benefit album, ‘Fight to Win!’ for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) – one of the most radical, anarchic community groups ever to appear on the streets of Canada.

We took an impassioned, inspirational, anti-capitalist, anti-globalization, anarchist speech from two OCAP members, cut it up, and set it to original music.

Aiden manipulated real and electronic beats, while I contributed violin, viola, cello and odd instruments. The result: an ambient musical hybrid of spoken word, beats and audio manipulations that received glowing reviews in the music press, raised money and OCAP’s profile, and introduced their direct action anti-poverty work to a worldwide audience.

Bakunin himself was re-invented and presented anew as a beat enriched anarchist muse for on the edge music lovers unfamiliar with his thinking.

SOLO BEATS, STRINGS & BRAINFOOD Beyond the bands, I plug that old Polish violin in, and as a solo cabaret act full of rad anarcho spoken word surprises, deliver a combo of musical, oral and theatrical creative resistance wherever people request it. Anarchist? Unabashedly.

Predictable? Rarely. Provocative? It’s debatable. As an amplified, modified string performer in a post-whatever context, I’m proudly non-traditionalist, but I take my music seriously and never empty a room. Instead, I try to communicate. It’s my contribution to cultivating a new, living anarchist musical culture.

The challenge, as always, is the sometimes demanding, rarely understated, omnipresent tension between the creative impulse and the political one, to create something both purposeful and enjoyable, relevant and exciting, in the name of anarchism and personal satisfaction. This is the motivational jolt that can drive anyone to drink, and drink some more.

There are those inspirational moments when I embark on musical adventures and transform my violin into a soundboard workbench, exchanging my bow for a modified bow, or toys, vibrating bass dildos, frying pans, spoons, or empty beer bottles in the name of freedom and art. I might 68

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run the resulting sonic stew through pedals, throw in a suitcase drumbeat or sing into my violin through a funnel.

But always the caveat: reign in the self-indulgence, and never forget, the attention span of an audience, anarchist or not, can snap faster than a broken G-string.

From my anarcho-techno-disco testimonial, ‘Why am I an Anarchist?’ (on my Duck Work album), to on-going personal experimental, ambient musical projects exploring the melodic potential of anything, to reinterpreting traditional Italian anarchist songs, or writing new verse about the latest popular rebellion or the best anarchist bar in town, I aim to do justice to anarchist music and the anarchist aesthetic as the drug of choice.

•NB: One of my newest anarchist songs below:

THE ANARCHISTS ARE COMING!

by Norman Nawrocki (Sing to the tune of ‘Gilligan’s Island Theme’) ‘You only see them when you fear them’ Northeastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists The media have been warning you for months about the storm ‘Lock up your daughters and sons!

Anarchists are coming to town!

Anarchists are coming to town!’

Remove your corporate sign McDonald’s!

Board up your windows you banks!

Don’t leave your houses people ‘Anarchists are coming to town!

Anarchists are coming to town!’

We Anarchists must respond We Anarchists must be frank Are we violent? Hell no!

Just ask the World Bank Just ask the World Bank We won’t set your city on fire We won’t beat people in the street But we will defend ourselves and others When the cops turn up the heat When the cops turn up the heat Those who are truly violent hide behind tear gas, guns and clubs They impoverish millions around the world They’re the real thugs They’re the real thugs

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ANARCHIST MUSIC They aren’t Anarchists it’s plain to see We’d never hang with them They’re bloated bosses and politicians How we’d love to kick their butts!

How we’d love to kick their butts!

Their Capitalism is a jail With walls that blind and chains that glitter But as long as the rich rule We’ll damn them to hell!

We’ll damn them to hell!

To hell with the rich! all bosses and politicians We Anarchists fight for truth and justice And we’re coming to your town!

We’re coming to your town!

Illustrations courtesy of ‘The Cunninham Amendment’

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IN DEFENCE OF ANARCHY An op-ed article commissioned by The Independent at the height of the 2011 riots (12 August 2011)

by Boff Whalley (Chumbawamba) I became an anarchist, gradually, after seeing the Sex Pistols on our black-and-white TV in Burnley in 1976. Thirty-five years later, I still label myself an anarchist, albeit with various philosophical explanations and political definitions. For most of those 35 years I’ve played in a band – Chumbawamba – whose crowning moment (according to the demonising press) was chucking a bucket of water over the deputy prime minister John Prescott at an awards ceremony.

Chumbawamba began life in 1982 as an anarchist collective; it remains so to this day. Our working principle, inspired less by theoretical posturing than by the practicalities of working together as a group, was (and is) ‘equal pay, equal say’.

Unlike most pop groups – which appear to wallow in the bad-vibes hierarchy of songwriter-as-boss, drummer-asslave – we choose to put equal value on our separate roles in the band. And not just in the band – lead singers have to wash the dishes and drive the van, too.

Anarchy – or, to be more precise, anarchism – gives me, and gives the band, a framework for working respectfully and equally with each other. We manage ourselves, we don't vote on decisions (in an eight-piece group, that might mean three disgruntled people bent to the will of the other five). Instead, we discuss, compromise and eventually reach an agreement we're all relatively happy with. Yes, it sometimes takes a long time.

Anarchy. It comes from the Greek anarchos: ‘an’ meaning without, ‘archos’ meaning leaders or rulers. Without leaders. It could be that simple; instead, this is where it gets complicated.

The political and philosophical idea that is ‘anarchism’ has become, headline by headline, dislocated from the current use of the word ‘anarchy’. Anarchy used to mean the

Boff Whalley

John Prescott, 1998

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state to which anarchism aspires. Now, of course, it has come to mean disorder – the kind of disorder that comes with photographs of boys throwing bricks at riot police and kicking their way into electrical-goods shops. Anarchy is modern shorthand for the law of the jungle. How did this change come about? Where was the semantic leap from ‘without rulers’ to ‘disorder’? That change came from above.

There are several ways that words can change their meaning over time; popular culture especially loves to shake up the Scrabble letters and create new meanings from old words.

But there's also a tradition of words being redefined to suit the needs of those in power: from ‘Luddite’ to ‘friendly fire’ to ‘hoodie’.

The latter is now used to denote those opportunist consumers who are, according to The Sun, "anarchists", despite not having the slightest idea of who Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was. He was the first self-declared anarchist, who in 1840, in What Is Property, defined anarchy as ‘the absence of a master, of a sovereign’. Later, in The General Idea of The Revolution (1851), he urged a ‘society without authority’. See, no mention of disorder or chaos. Whatever we might think of our latter-day looters, they're not anarchists. But this current crop of masked lads is not the one bandying the word ‘anarchy’ around, after all. All they want is to do some free shopping and have a laugh. Perhaps it would be a good thing if these disenfranchised, disengaged kids did learn a bit about the brush they're being tarred with – anarchist? Wot, me? Then again, they're growing up under a government that seems to actively dissuade poor families from pursuing higher education.

The headlines following the rioting that broke out at the London anti-cuts demonstration in March and at last November's student protest noticeably avoided the word ‘anarchy’. Student hooligans, thuggish, disgraceful – but not 72

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quite anarchy. The inference is that those riots weren't the dreaded hoodies, and that and smashing Topshop and McDonald's has a political explanation. The current rioting does bring to mind a very specific form of anarchist politics, that of Situationism. Guy Debord, Parisian anarchist and Situationist philosopher, first described the so-called Society of the Spectacle in 1964. This classic anarchist text described a world where consumerism would run rampant and the acquisition of ‘things’ would become the dominant force in society. The representation of that world – as a spectacle – would supersede reality. Debord knew about reality TV and the Nintendo Wii decades before they were invented.

Again, reading Debord, there's no mention of disorder, of mob rule, or of victimisation, bullying or mugging. But his critique of the alienating effects of capitalism – and the spiritual vacuum of modern life – chimes with this week's TV images of youths roaming the city. When I first discovered anarchism as a teenager, I was relieved to discover a political idea that looked like fun – unlike the earnest, po-faced championing of wage-slavery or the careerist élitism of the major political parties. Anarchism seemed relevant and contemporary. It changed according to the way the world was changing – unlike the old dogmatic socialist stuff, it was able to accommodate new ideas like feminism and environmentalism. There wasn't a party line but yes, there were parameters, albeit loose ones. These encompassed respect, equality and mutual aid and were never broad enough to allow whatever definition The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail or The Sun have put on the word this past week.

Proudhon, in his book ‘What Is Property?’ (1840), explicitly rejected the conjoining of anarchism with destruction and disorder: ‘I am not an agent of discord. Man’s government of his fellow man, no matter the name under which it lurks, is oppression: society's highest perfection lies in the marriage of order and anarchy.’ Similarly, Mikhail Bakunin answered the criticism that getting rid of leaders would result in the law of the jungle: ‘Do you want to make it impossible for anyone to oppress his fellow man? Then make sure that no one shall possess power.’

As a teenager I turned from the gang mentality of hanging out on street corners into an idealistic and hopeful anarchist, more concerned with scrawling peace signs on my schoolbooks than setting fire to things. There was still 73

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cynicism; but there was also hope. Noam Chomsky depicts anarchism as ‘based on the hope that core elements of human nature include sentiments of solidarity, mutual support, sympathy and concern for others’. To me, it's still that way.

Some self-proclaimed anarchists you may have heard of: George Melly, John Cage, Noam Chomsky, Emma Goldman, Germaine Greer, Henry Miller, Joseph Proudhon, Malcolm McLaren, Mike Harding. If you can picture any of them amongst the mugshots on the front of this week's Sun you could grab yourself a reward. Do you think any of the people I've mentioned would use the description ‘anarchist’ as meaning ‘one who loves disorder’?

When the Spanish anarchists in 1936 declared war against General Franco's fascist coup, thousands of British people (including George Orwell) went to help them. The British government stood by and watched as the fascist Italian and German forces came to Franco's aid and installed a Nationalist government. Three years later, strengthened by the victory in Spain, Nazi Germany and its Italian allies declared war on the rest of Europe. I like to think that this was a time (during and after the Spanish Revolution) when all right-thinking people reflected on an opportunity lost. A three-year span when, along with fighting a war on several fronts, the Spanish anarchists were collectivising land and property and organising according to libertarian principles.

Over the years, as a musician and as a writer, I've watched how traditional hierarchies in the workplace create divisions and arguments. I don't think I'm alone in not wanting to have a boss tell me what to do. I refuse to have a boss tell me what to do. The bargaining tool that's unspoken in that statement is that I will happily relinquish the power to tell other people what to do. That, for me, is anarchism. I won’t order you about, if you don’t order me about. And together we’ll make it work.

It sounds so naïve. But I'd rather have that sense of possibilities, of something better, than the all-too-obvious battle being waged between dislocated youth and millionaire politicians. As the Prime Minister ups the rhetoric – egging on the police to stick the boot in harder – it's easy to see the similarities between the two scrapping factions.

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neglected, ridiculed and dismissed people in Britain. I don’t sympathise when they’re breaking into my house. I don’t sympathise when they're setting fire to local shops, when they're mugging and intimidating.

But when I see the TV shots of them in Manchester city centre, breaking into the Arndale Centre – a truly Debordian Palace of Consumerism – stealing shoes and tracksuits, I find it hard to be overly critical. These are kids brought up in an age of buy and sell. Labels, logos, status, advertising. This is the world we've given them; a world they're throwing back at us.

Andrew Maxwell, an Irish comedian, put it best: ‘Create a society that values material things above all else. Strip it of industry. Raise taxes for the poor and reduce them for the rich and for corporations. Prop up failed financial institutions with public money. Ask for more tax, while vastly reducing public services. Put adverts everywhere, regardless of people’s ability to afford the things they advertise. Allow the cost of food and housing to eclipse people's ability to pay for them. Light blue touch paper.’

Anarchy is not disorder. Anarchy is a state that is arrived at through the philosophy of anarchism. Mutual aid.

Without rulers. Living together. Working things out together.

David Cameron returned from his holiday in Italy this week and stood outside Downing Street, declaring to the media that the rioting was ‘criminality, pure and simple’. More lazy semantics, more meaningless shorthand. ‘Criminal’ isn’t an explanation, it's a word that begs an explanation. Yes, they

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committed a crime. What was the crime? What was the reason for the crime?

These kids who are being labelled with pure and simple definitions are becoming little more than cartoon baddies playing out roles for the front pages. Why ask questions (Where are they from? How did they get to this point? What can they learn? Can they begin to understand what they're doing?) when you can just call it anarchy? And anarchy, unlike questions, sells.

The politicians and the press are able to bandy words around without depth or explanation because they last for one day. Instant hit. Tomorrow, there will be a whole new set of semantics to frown about, to criticise. But by the time you've written a 2,000-word diatribe, it's time for the next day's edition.

I love words. I always loved words. When we started Chumbawamba in 1982 we decided that our raison d'etre would be topicality. Change. Keep up! Over the past 29 years we've tried to keep faith with that simple ethos and along the way we’ve realised that words are flexible, adaptable, up for grabs. That’s a lovely challenge for any writer, songwriter or poet. Some words you want to let go of, get rid of, kick out. Some words you want to keep close and protect. Right now, subsequent to the newspaper headlines, I'm almost prepared to let the word ‘anarchy’ (as opposed to ‘anarchism’) go. But you know what, I can't do it, not to The Sun and the Daily Mail. It’s like letting the burglar look after your house.

Anarchism, anarchy, they're only words; but they’re my words, they're our words. No manner of headlines will take them away from us. As Johnny Rotten once said: ‘I am an anarchist’.

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ANARCHISM AND MUSIC: Theory and Practice Anarchist band Chumbawamba’s lead guitarist discusses what anarchism means to him personally, how the band functions as an anarchist collective and ponders the question ‘is it anarchist music, or just a bunch of anarchists making music’? by ‘Boff ’ Whalley I’ve been an anarchist for well over thirty years now; two thirds of that time I’ve also been a professional musician. I couldn’t begin to squeeze the conflicts, questions and conundrums this has thrown up over the years into a couple of pages, but I can boil down the essential relationship between my particular anarchism and my own music to the single unanswered question – is my anarchism a theory or a practise? Lurking in the background, several other related puzzles: is it possible to stuff libertarian ideology in with the capitalist pop-cultural fluff of my tiny pocket of the music industry? Does the fact that the music is trying to express vaguely anarchist ideals excuse it from being a part of an unfair, unequal and mostly unpalatable music business?

Most of us work for a living in jobs that don’t give us the chance to express our politics as part of the job. I think I’m lucky in that I’ve been able to sing about the rotten state of the world (and celebrate those who’ve tried to change it) for a quarter of a century and call it a job. But the question is still there – is it anarchist music? Or just a bunch of anarchists making music?

When people ask Chumbawamba about our politics, about ‘why you call yourselves anarchists’ (and believe me, that’s undoubtedly the most asked question we’ve had over the years), I have an off-hand and well-rehearsed answer. It’s not designed for the readers of Arena, or for any anarchists who happen to be listening or reading, in fact. It’s shorthand, broadstroke politics. It comes in two parts and goes like this: Firstly I’m an anarchist because I believe in anarchism as a theory, I believe that we can make a revolution without leaders, that I can live my life fully without either you telling me what to do or me telling you what to do. Of course there are many problems to be overcome, problems which I believe are mainly the products of an unequal, unjust system of

‘Boff’ Whaley

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government and a corrupt version of society. I believe in overthrowing that current state and working towards a fairer, more caring society.

Secondly we’re anarchists as a band in the practical way we work together. We believe in ‘equal pay, equal say’. There are no leaders, although we do specialise within the band: but essentially the lead vocalist has no more power than the person who drives the van (or, as is the usual way in bands, than the drummer). We organise as a collective, making all decisions not by voting but by debate and discussion. This means we’ve never had any disagreements and fall-outs over power and money.

Those are the two answers. Usually I would add something along the lines of this all sounding very po-faced and boring, and that in fact the main guiding principle of the band is to first and foremost to enjoy it, to have a laugh. Ha ha! And that, no, this isn’t an exercise in political theory but something we do because we love music, love to sing together and to an audience.

In this way – through those two simplified strands of thought – my anarchism can be both practical and theoretical.

Of course it’s only practical on this micro-level, six or eight people in a little bubble. Some would say that’s not anarchism at all, it’s a cottage industry. It’s pretend anarchism without the troublesome real world messing it up. I’d answer that by saying that dealing with the music industry, that perfect example of capitalist growth and waste adorned by the decadent filth of egomania, arrogance, greed and ignorance, has been three decades of bloody hard work. If I wanted a cosy cottage industry I certainly wouldn’t plant it in the stinking bowels of an industry full of lazy arses, wannabes, coke-heads and megalomaniacs.

At some point along the way (by virtue of a single song with a catchy chorus) Chumbawamba toppled into a world where you’re judged on your record sales and TV appearances, a world where everyone around you seems to be telling you how good you are – and never once did my disgust at the way the industry conducts itself waver. It’s sad to see that even those people in positions of tremendous power will belittle themselves to grab a little more. And they expect everyone else to do the same. In the music industry there is very little ‘solidarity’ between workers, rarely any ‘us and them’ – it’s probably much like top-flight football – as 78

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soon as the workers get a sniff of the money, they forget the millions below them struggling for attention.

When we first got the band together, in our early 1980s’ squatted house in Leeds, we straight away began to accumulate a clear set of ideas and principles that were cobbled together from Crass record sleeves, small press pamphlets by Bakunin and Malatesta, and stacked-up copies of Freedom and Black Flag. Along with, of course, our love of revolutionary symbolism and culture – Andreas Baader’s cool trousers, Frank Zappa’s sneer, Bernadette Devlin’s House of Commons slap, Woody Guthrie’s battered guitar – and it’s not unfair to say that developing that initial blueprint was the best thing we did. Our music was pretty rough and ready, we weren’t sure how to play our instruments, didn’t know how to construct harmonies. But we did know how to have meetings, how to print and collate booklets, how to design and make T Shirts, paint banners, use the stage as a theatre. All those nuts and bolts were products of our anarchism.

That our music has consistently changed over the years – every three or four years we sit down and decide to do something completely different musically, to challenge both ourselves and our audience – is testament not only to our love of adventure but to our unwillingness to see any type of music Chumbawamba (l/r): Neil, Lou, Phil, Jude, ‘Boff’

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as inherently more anarchistic than any other. I love the instrumental music of self-professed anarchists John Cage and Eric Satie as much as I love the lyric-heavy polemics of, say, Crass. Holland’s The Ex have developed as an anarchist band over the years by throwing themselves into jazz, noise, dynamics and any kind of aural experimentation they can grab onto. It works beautifully. For me, they’re as anarchist in spirit as Chumbawamba (in fact, they would scold us for holding too rigidly to the conservative traditions of 4 beats to the bar, choruses, etc. Good for them).

When we toured with The Ex (two decades ago now) they reminded us how possible it is for the theory and practice of anarchism to work in such different ways; how the musical expression of radical ideas can take such different forms. In historic terms I’m inclined to be inclusive rather than picky about the music that informs and excites me politically.

Early post-punk pop band McCarthy made the most compelling and strident anthemic anti-capitalist rants sound like beautiful love songs; the fact that they were rumoured to be aligned to the Revolutionary Communist Party didn’t put me off. Similarly, some of the political alliances forged by notable musical lefties like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Ewan MacColl can make me wince – but while I wouldn’t describe them as anarchists, I would see them all as utterly essential cornerstones of radical culture. Heroes, even.

Most people who have lived and worked through various changes in how anarchism is portrayed over the years will realise how important it is to avoid getting backed into an ideological corner by strident, single-minded converts to the cause. The history of anti-Chumbawamba rhetoric from selfdescribed anarchists would fill half my house, never mind this article. Sell outs! How dare you claim to be anarchists and yet participate in the consumerist commodification of art! There’s even an EP of songs available about the band featuring songs with choruses of “Chumbawamba, you’re shit!” When people claim anarchism as something pure, rigid and narrowlydefined I tend to take great delight in my long-standing view that, if anarchism is to mean anything in a world that undergoes huge and constant change, it must be an adventurous, changing concept – the failure of the Left can be traced in large part to its adherence to a pre-feminist, pre-ecoaware, pre-technological revolution Marxism, to its inability to adapt. I think of old Marxist Ewan MacColl with his anti-rock 80

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‘n’ roll rants. I don’t know whether to laugh, cry or prepare for a long argument when people claim certain kinds of music as being culturally superior (dyed-in-the-wool folkies can be particularly keen on this, taking as their cue the blinkered patriotic ruralism of folk song collector Cecil Sharp). Radical and libertarian music, by its nature, can’t be defined musically.

Like the world, it must develop, change, go off at tangents.

What can be defined is the intent and the organisation behind the music, a subversive and open-minded approach to making that music. It’s often in the intent, and not necessarily in the content.

Sometime in the late 1980s, Chumbawamba were ‘banned’ from being reviewed in the then-influential US magazine Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll because we ‘weren’t punk anymore’. We’d made the cardinal sin of recording an album of radical English rebel songs, sung acapella. Historic songs of defiance and revolution, of anger and hope. The human voice presumably didn’t constitute enough of a ‘punk’ attitude. Of course, we loved this – it gave us a chance to discuss what exactly ‘punk’ was, what it had become, who had earned the right to decide what was punk. To us it prompted little more than a giggling discussion about theory and practice – was all this collective living a sham if we squandered it on harmony singing instead of loud rock ‘n’ roll guitars?!

I discovered anarchism through music. I was a kid who loved rock ‘n’ roll, but I was also a racist, homophobic, ignorant idiot. A friend gave me some back copies of anarchist magazines (including, most influentially, the gloriously freeform and startling Anarchism Lancastrium). I began to read, listen, talk, join the dots. It took a while, but eventually I worked out what this strange and compelling idea meant to me. Those ideas (little did I know) would set me off into a world of half-answered questions and unrealised theories; practicalities and dreams; a life of trying to fathom the gap between the everyday and the future. Between theory and practice. And mostly in the key of D (with the occasional E minor chucked in).

As a footnote to all this internal bone-worrying about anarchism as theory and/or practice, I have to look back at the various bizarre situations in which I’ve found myself trying to explain anarchism and libertarian ideas (‘why do you call yourselves anarchists?’) to all the people who’ve had the time to ask that question. From early morning radio presenters in 81

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the US mid-West, to East German teenagers in secret gigs (before the Wall came down); from national prime-time TV hosts wanting a cheap laugh, to a roomful of prisoners in a northern English jail; and all I can conclude is that, for all my love of music, and art, and great pop hooks and concept albums – for all that, I’m proud to be a musician who has to consistently answer that same question about political ideology rather than poetic influence, chord structures or band fall-outs. And the answer to the question, ‘Is it anarchist music?

Or just a bunch of anarchists making music?’ is that I’m not sure. I haven’t got the answer, but I’m still enjoying trying to work it out.

For more information, see www.chumba.com

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FALLING OFF THE EDGE ‘I am therefore I think — ‘I am an anarchist, I am the anti-Christ.

Jeez, I’m a celebrity, get me out of here’

by Penny Rimbaud Penny Rimbaud is a writer who has spent the last thirty years of his life attempting to convince a whole generation that there is life beyond Crass and the anarcho-punk movement which it spawned.

The first thing I ever said that made any kind of a sense at all was ‘you’ve gotta be joking’. I must have been around seven years old. Prior to that, my self-expression had been confined to variations on the theme of ‘mummy, daddy, please, thank you, and our father which art’. Heaven? By that time I was coming to realise that heaven, if heaven there was, was something that I’d left behind at birth. Every Sunday lunch, Dad used to say grace, ‘for what we are about to receive’, but I didn’t want to receive what we were about to. Okay the roast and Yorkshire puddings I could stomach, but it was the bigger picture which worried me. For no reason that had anything at all to do with me, I had been born into a world at war. Dad hadn’t even been around to welcome me on my arrival into this particular corner of Jerusalem. He’d been away, fighting his battles, writing his own story, a story with which he regaled me at every given opportunity: ‘you see, son, in the real world…’ By the age of seven, I’d come to realise that I didn’t like his world one little bit. War and the avarice which drove it just didn’t fit into my picture, but if I dared express that point of view, I’d simply be told to eat up my meat, that people in Africa were starving, and to stop dreaming (of sharing the Sunday roast with those poor buggers on the ‘dark continent’). It just didn’t add up and, bit by bit, I was expected to abandon those dreams. So, if the dream faded, where had it begun? How come I’d known something better in the first place? What was the essence, where the light, or was this only a one-way ticket drive-in?

We are the runaways, fractured and removed: all for one and once and for all. From the very start, if start there was, we

Penny Rimbaud

Belfast, 2010

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have been forced to flee from ourselves, flee from totalities, to create inhibiting creeds with which to stifle absolutes, establish moralities and baffle imperatives. We have tiptoed to the woodshed, stolen the garden shears and clipped our wings: lest we fly. That once we were albatross. That now we are absurdity; sad prophylactic ciphers defining existence through our denial of it.

Thought is the bedfellow of justification. The past is a sequential set of rationalisations. We think because we feel a need to do so, and, sure as eggs is eggs, there’s no ‘therefore’ about it. However, far the more crucial issue is that of why we should need to (think) in the first place. Need is lack, but why should I lack in a world of plenty? Why should I need or, indeed, be forced into needing anything at all? American Express? It’s just another yellow star to be worn on our faded Che T shirts. But why should I be obliged to apply the gift of consciousness to such pithy consideration? Surely there is something better beyond commodity culture where even ideas are copyrighted? We could have done a lot better than this.

As a good a start as any, let me categorically say that there are no saviours. no heroes, no saints, no sinners, no bearded prophets high upon the hillside to prescribe our fate.

While Zarathustra rose to those icy peaks, those pinnacles of wisdom, his founding father made for the valley and courted the vanity of insanity: thus spake. God is dead, but there is no greater ego than that which through words or action states that it does not exist. Oh, my Lord, see how those angels fall.

Then why is it that we so readily shuffle as barely animated cadavers within the asylum walls? ITV, CCTV, ECT: frazzled.

There is nobody left: no body: only our fifteen minutes fame masquerading as the celebrity which, each in our own way, we imagine ourselves to be. Lord, what fools…

There are no myths, no legends, no histories upon which to hang the cloak of identity or rest awhile in the quest.

The stone of Sisyphus is the accumulated mass of distorted desire, the matter of failed passion, the tempest suppressed to become a block in illusory time and space: granite rich, irradiated, waiting its moment. Rome was never built. The Coliseum never existed. The wolf children are homeless still, chewing on the bones of what we profess to be civilisation.

There is no family, my friend, no friend, nothing to which we belong, nothing to which we are attached. This is all idea, only idea. There is no crowd, no swarm, no masses, no 84

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gathering: not even the self reflecting itself. The lumpen proletariat was a death wish.

There is no you, no I: nobody, only reflection, reflection of an idea. We are neither passive sheep nor lambs for the slaughter, lest that is our desire, yet even then we might not fulfil it.

We, which is, of course, you and I, are of my imaginings.

You play no part in that, and nor, indeed, do I, for I too am of my imaginings: construct with no provable substance, the is which isn’t. In this context, I am as invisible yet irreversible as you are. Each one of us, if such separation is in fact possible, is a series of irreversible transient ideas until such time as the irreversible is reversed: the existential leap. We are static only in imagination: the butterfly imagining itself to be.

We are cast in impossible riddles, looking backwards that we might see forwards, constantly leaving behind the substance that we imagine ourselves to be. In this we are shadows, never belonging.

I think therefore I am able to assert an existence even if I am consummately unable to prove it. In any case, to whom am I attempting to prove what? Okay then, for the sake of convenience (the very root of philosophy), I exist for the moment, but beyond that, everything is up for grabs: existence before essence: the day of creation every second of the day.

We are constantly arriving only to be baffled by our departure, forever leaving ourselves behind.

So, essence is a canvas awaiting the brushstroke and, more paradoxically, a master awaiting a slave which it calls its master. Hence our impotency, our courtship with negativity, our pathetically flaccid resignation. But why presume essence when that too is clearly driven by our consideration of temporal constructs? Why so readily step out into this theatrical thrall to sport the armour of generations, long in tooth, short in mind? We have forgotten before we remember: a magnificent memorial to the failure of futures. Thus, having already fallen, we stare back at the precipice in dumb disbelief. We are the ‘might have beens’ who could never have been because we never were.

The mirror confirms the construct while exaggerating the conundrum, passively reflecting us the maker who, in truth, is us the taker. Forever on the move, we are nowhere to be seen. At the very best, we are no more than memories of ourselves. Alice stepped through the looking glass even whilst 85

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Descartes had ensured that she couldn’t. Then Einstein proved our invisibility and let us off the hook: we were neither here nor there. ‘Curiouser and curiouser’. Suddenly we are nowhere, forever elsewhere, never where we are, because, like the end of the rainbow, we are in constant flux. Yet even that maintains the assumption that we have some form of substantial existence within all this (all what?). Yes, we have an idea of self every bit as much as we have an idea of other, but never can that create substance, even less prove essence.

Definition is by definition the denial of possibility, the lie of Ms Liberty: the huddled masses named, numbered, yet nonexistent. This is the this which is not the that, the throat-cut rabbit in the magician’s hat. No wonder, then, that in preference to natural dissolution we cling so resolutely to Enlightenment mechanics: a street car named desire, a face-lift for the mask of the consensual .

Every arrival is a departure, for we cannot stop. But where are we going? If we can so readily assert, as we do, that we know where we’ve been, could we not, then, equally assert that we know where we are going? Logic knows no time and space, for logically, being constructs, there is neither. We define matter through a series of endings which are carefully contrived to preclude beginnings. That way we feel that we’re in place, feet firmly planted on solid ground. That way we are able to ignore the molecular flux that gives rise to what appears to be the self-contained block we like to call our existence.

We’re so busy inventing our very own creative ideas that we become totally divorced from creation itself. We are, in fact, merely busy body-ing in a huge act of evasion. Being the antithesis to perception, this is profoundly contra-authenticity and anti-bohemian. It is, in short, predefinition: we see what we expect to see or, to give it the Cartesian ring, I think therefore I expect certain results. Thus the philosopher’s stone is humoured into existence and then hammered into empty eye-sockets, solid as the rock of ages. Quite simply, we are blinded by the conceits of insight. The same malchemic applies to events, these being complex, symbiotic happenings which, through predefinition, become a form of self-contained and self-consuming unit: a commodity. This is soap-opera consciousness weighing in to defy the natural order of chaos in which permanence is an empty armchair, an unworn suit or an idle memory stashed away in a faded kitbag.

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Never are we here or even there to make these solid judgements, but still we seem to be able to do so. Then in what form do we appear to ourselves? Aren’t we always just gone, out for lunch, back later, trailing behind our lost selves like shadows divorced? Now then, where was I? There is no past, only forecast of forepast. There is no consideration, only forethought of form-thought. We are déjà vu viewing itself, a dream not yet dreamt. In this sense, life is not for the taking, but for the undertaking. Planet earth is a crystal ball fulfilling its own prophecy of absolute stasis, invisible within the multiverse yet indivisible from it, and so us too.

We talk in tongues, deaf to each other, deaf to ourselves, chanting our kabalas of faux intimacy, our mantras of madness: the closed-circuit art of masturbation (intellectual or otherwise). There is no rule, no morality, only laws, laws applied by ourselves upon ourselves. There never was a Moses, less still a Christ. There are perhaps mountains and oceans, but religion there is not. Neither is there any philosophy which is not convenience: at yours, up yours. And as for politics…

Yet I do not speak here of the cosy prophecies of apocalypse in which we have swaddled consciousness, nor of the false assurance of the finite in which we mince words, shackle action and die in abdication long before our deaths.

Neither do I speak of the lonely place which, desperate in our flight from infinities, we call life. There is no cosier a construct than that of conclusion. We have come to seek these reassuring ends in denial of each beginning, thus ensuring the safe securities of non-being. Oh, that we should be dead yet.

There is no more whilst there is so much more. It is up to us to find it, yet we can never do so through the seeking of it. The shooting star needs no confirmation. There is no authority but yourself, but who or what is that self? Et tu, Brute? Not you, Judas. Not you, my friend. Not any one moment of despair. Not any one of us.

Oh, my brothers, my sisters and all your skills, all your jazz and all your jokings. You Jackson Pollocks and Albert Einsteins, you Edith Sitwells and madmen on the brink. You lonesome walkers and late night talkers. You fine crafters of silver, you carvers of stone, you pearl divers. You birdsong above the moorland, you salmon in the stream. Oh you mists and mellow fruitfulness. You, you who describe the 87

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flamboyance and are the key, you who make the celebration and are the door. But I hear no knock, see no lamplight, no bare-footed Christ seeking absolution.

We are but a moment away from liberation, so close to passion’s stream. It is here that the walls have fallen, to here that we have been driven, and from here that we might at last take wing. For it is here, in the very place that is already deserted, that there is nothing but love, the great incendiary that has no name and gives not a moment’s notice. We are the fire, consumed and consuming. * CRASS - There Is No Authority But Yourself! (full length documentary)

Illustrations courtesy of ‘The Cunninham Amendment’

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