Scritti Politti retrospective interview 2005

Scritti Politti / Green Gartside
director's cut, Uncut, 2005

by Simon Reynolds

Winceworthy (wins-wur’the), adj. 1/  embarrassing, specifically referring to the cringing sensation felt by a creative person confronted by his early gauche attempts at poetry, songwriting, record-reviewing, etc.

Actually, “winceworthy” isn't in the dictionary. It’s a freshly minted coinage, making its debut in Green Gartside’s sleevenote for Early, a collection of Scritti Politti’s do-it-yourself era music. Wincing appears to be how he genuinely responds to those EPs, unavailable for nigh-on 25 years, judging by the howl emitted when I quote some lines from one song: “Please, no more lyrics!”. Does Green really find this music--which sounds as weirdly gorgeous to my ears as when I first heard it in 1979--so excruciating? 

“All the music I’ve ever made makes me feel uncomfortable,” says the singer, speaking by phone from his home in Dalston, East London. “And I would go to some lengths to avoid having to hear it if I could!” So why, then, allow it to be reissued? Green deftly sidesteps that question, arguing that the final part of the process of music-making is “the act of consumption” and it would be presumptuous to interfere with that.

Personally, I reckon Green’s being a wee bit coy here. I think he knows that, alongside its immense historical interest as a window into the postpunk zeitgeist, the early Scritti music, under-produced and scrawny as it is, has enduring aesthetic value. Tangled inside its wilful fractures you can hear a latent poppiness that would later blossom with “The ‘Sweetest Girl’” and “Wood Beez.” Listening to early Scritsongs such as “Bibbly-O-Tek,” you hear a fascinating struggle between sheer melodic loveliness and an intellectual suspicion of such beauty as both "too easy” and somehow "not true" to reality. Early isn’t, then, just a timely release (chiming with the seemingly unflagging resurgence of interest in postpunk), it’s a long-overdue recognition of an achievement.

It’s hard for me to be objective about Early’s contents, though.  I’ve been a Scritti fan ever since hearing them for the first time on John Peel, and subsequently have followed every twist of Green’s journey, across the records and the interviews, delighting in the voice, the words, the intellect, and the exquisite difficulty. Appropriately, this story “starts” with Peel and the pleasures of difficult music. Growing up in South Wales, the young Green was starved for stimulus and turned to Peel’s show as a beacon in the banality. “I would tape record his show on a Saturday, and for want of anything else to do, I would listen to that tape every day until the following weekend. And what I discovered was that the music you found most challenging on the Sunday, by the next weekend had become your favorite.”

For Green, the challenging stuff included Robert Wyatt and the other Canterbury bands, English folk minstrel Martin Carthy, and above all the politicized uber-prog of Henry Cow. “They were astringent, even frightening at times.” Henry Cow’s ever-so-slightly didactic anti-capitalist lyrics and Carthy’s explorations of traditional music (folk as the people’s music) also correlated with Green’s other teenage passion: communism. He and Niall Jinks, future Scritti bassist, attempted to form a branch of the Young Communist League at their school. “After our inaugural meeting, Niall was beaten up quite badly.”  The local newspaper even wrote a story about them. “We were named, which heralded the beginning of a decline in my relationship with my parents.”

The same rigorous, demanding quality that Green admired in Henry Cow was what drew him to conceptual art. When he went around checking out art colleges to apply for, he gravitated to Leeds Polytechnic’s Fine Art department for its radicalism. “I went up there during the degree show, and it was quite fantastic. In one room, there was a chap making himself vomit, and in the next room there was someone shooting budgerigars with an air rifle!”  If Leeds became one of the UK’s leading postpunk cities, it was largely due to the density of art students there, not bands formed by locals. Among Green’s contemporaries at the Poly were Marc Almond and Frank Tovey (a/k/a Fad Gadget), while most of the future membership of Gang of Four, the Mekons, and Delta 5 were Fine Art students at Leeds University.

At the Poly, Green quickly became a troublemaker. He stopped painting and started producing only writing. This was conceptualism’s next step--keeping the concepts and ditching the actual artistic practice, the idea being that before you created anything, you ought to work out what was actually valid. The very free-for-all spirit that initially attracted Green to Leeds Poly now struck him as self-indulgent. “You know what art colleges are like, all these kids are basically left to their own devices, and they haven’t spent any time really thinking about why it is they are painting in the manner of x, y or z. I just thought, ‘somebody has to be asking some questions about what it means to be doing this, what it means to be in this kind of institution’.”  Provocatively, he started a kind of counter-curriculum within the art faculty, a highly popular lecture series that involved talks from members of Art & Language, a collective who had given up making artworks and generated instead an intimidating torrent of text, much of it devoted to tearing apart other artists. “I was encouraging all these people to come and basically say what was going on in our faculty was a crock of shit and everybody was wasting their time!” This combative approach--argument fueled by heavy reading and heavy drinking--would shape Scrittii, both in terms of how they operated internally as a band and how they dramatized themselves against the rest of the music scene.

First, though, came the “Damascene moment,” the life-changing experience of seeing the Anarchy Tour of 1977 arrive in Leeds. Prior to this, Green and Jinks had toyed with English traditional music. “Niall could play the fiddle and knew some Morris tunes,  I could play a couple of jigs and reels fairly badly!” After seeing the Sex Pistols, The Clash, et al, though, Green persuaded Jinks and their friend Tom Morley to blow the rest of their grants on a bass and a drum kit. After playing one gig as The Against, they took the name Scritti Politti, derived from a book by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Scritti was a highly conceptual and politicized project from the start. One of the key ideas was “messthetics”. Says Green, “We were anti-rock, because rock was too solid, too strong, and too sure a sound. We wanted a music that’s wasn’t strong, solid, and sure, because we weren’t strong, solid or sure.”  Despite his commitment to social justice, Green’s brand of Marxism was far from dogmatic. The fragmentary sound of early Scritti was meant to express the anguished precariousness of those for whom “raised consciousness” doesn’t mean the end of uncertainty but the start of a life dedicated to questioning everything--including your own opinions and innermost feelings, which might not be your “own” at all, but ideologically implanted.

By early 1978, Scritti had moved down to London and into a grotty squat in Camden. Soon the initial trio expanded into a collective numbering as many as twenty. If theorizing was crucial to the group, there was no reason why people who weren’t directly involved in making the music couldn’t contribute. Scritti held meetings at which ideas were feverishly debated, attended by a menagerie of lively minds, some of who would form their own DIY outfits, such as the Janet and Johns and Methodishca Tune. Although Green was always Scritti’s songwriter and typically the most voluble voice in the band’s numerous interviews, he never felt like the leader. “Being the songwriter, that would never have crossed my mind as some kind of privileged status. I knew that I wasn’t any cleverer than any of the people around me.” More important than the formal meetings, though, was the informal everyday life in the squat. Scritti put their home address on their first single, “Skank Bloc Bologna,” and as a result people were always turning up at their door. “Disaffected public schoolboys, French hippies, Eurocommunists….” recalls Green. “It was open house. We’d be going out to gigs most nights, and you’d come back and you never knew who would be there. We’d stay up all hours talking, about whatever books were of interest or maybe someone had brought round a new dub pre-release record.” 

Green remembers these few intense years as big fun: drinking, speeding, staying up all night, ideas whizzing about, music playing nonstop. But he also remembers violence as a constant presence. “We were young communists and punks and there was violence on an almost weekly basis.  We traveled in fairly large groups, of five or six, and we’d walk to, say, Stoke Newington to see a band at the Pegasus, and then walking back in the early hours you’d be attacked. You’d be attacked if you were out selling Challenge, the young communist paper.” “Skank Bloc Bologna,” the extraordinary debut single, captures something of the vulnerability of that period, the constant seesawing struggle between idealism and despair. Green observes a supermarket girl, an early school leaver, drifting through life, seemingly unaware of the forces that buffet and constrain her, and with absolutely no sense that the world could be any other way. It could be seen as condescending, perhaps, if Green’s desire to “tell her what’s possible” wasn’t so plaintively heartfelt.  You get an  glimpse of  the gloom of the revolutionary activist with his spurned pamphlets wondering why the passers-by keep… passing by. The song’s music, a dejected lope of white reggae overlaid with jagged folk chords, is as remarkable as the lyric.

Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis wanted to put the single out but had to bow to the reservations of the rest of the label collective, who thought the song, at nearly six minutes, was too long. So “Skank” came out on Scritti’s own St. Pancras label. But Rough Trade did release 4 A Sides, the early Scritti’s best EP. Green became a key figure in the Rough Trade milieu--then the power spot of postpunk culture--alongside likeminded bands like The Raincoats, This Heat and The Red Crayola.

If one sensibility united these sonically disparate outfits, it’s the shared conviction that “the unexamined pop life wasn’t worth living” (as Green puts it). He describes Scritti, but by extension the entire postpunk culture, as “a massive Romantic project”, in which the political dread of the time (Thatcherism, fascism on the streets) jostled with an awareness of music’s “utopian potential.” If music did have this immense transformative power, then there was a moral imperative to think hard about the right path to follow.

Partly because of Green’s eloquence and quest(ion)ing spirit,  Scritti became cult figures on the UK postpunk scene, emblems of  ultimate non-compromise. This image was strengthened by the group’s combustible live performances, which increasingly involved making songs up from scratch. “We did get less interested in chords and structures for a while,” Green recalls. “But making stuff up onstage was pleasurable, I should stress. Through everything, from the theory to the music making, there’s a central hedonistic streak.”

If  4 A Sides captures a group in their prime, the sheer joy of making music together overcoming the anxiety that riddles the lyrics, then  Peel Sessions, the last of the pre-pop Scritti’s releases, sees that “central hedonistic streak” disappear almost completely. It’s the sound of a group falling apart on record, compelling to listen to but you worry for the worried souls making the fractious racket. This, you suspect, is the stuff that’s most “winceworthy” for Green today. But he still finds something to praise about the “scratching, collapsing, irritated, dissatisfied” sound of “Messthetics” and “OPEC-Immac”, contrasting it with modern British quasi-indie music. “I heard some of these bands on the radio recently and I was struck by how there was no trepidation in their music, no sense that these people were playing with anything that they were slightly frightened of, or were going anywhere where they weren’t sure where they would end up.”

Talking of the twilight days of the early Scritti, Green acknowledges the vein of paranoia,  but says “there was even some pleasure in despair,” in fetishising a totally apocalyptic fascism-on-the-horizon scenario. “The trouble with that, though, is that it can tip over into making you properly depressed, completely inert and deeply unwell.” The crisis for Green came with that legendary Brighton gig in early 1980 (Scritti supporting their friends Gang of Four) after which Green famously had a “heart attack”. Actually, it was a monstrous panic attack, which convinced him he was dying.  “It was the whole ambulance with the sirens going to hospital thing,” Green recalls, queasily. He attributes his physical collapse to the group’s hardcore lifestyle. “We partied very hard, as they say nowadays. We were always pretty poorly.”  There’s also a sense in which questioning everything actually turned morbid. “Finding minutiae overburdened with potential significance, this can contaminate your whole life to the point where you might describe it as mental illness. Not that I was actually bonkers, but…”

When his estranged parents read about Green’s illness in NME, they set him up in a South Wales cottage to recuperate. “I got it back together in the country, man,” he laughs. Instead of giving up the band, though, Green embarked on a thorough reconceptualisation of Scritti. Even before the collapse, he’d been getting weary of  postpunk, feeling that the DIY scene had merely developed its own sonic messthetic conventions. Green had started listening to black pop. You can hear a fitful funk element coming into the music on 4 A Sides, especially on the glorious sinuous groove of  “P.A.s”. In Wales, he plunged wholeheartedly into funk, soul, and other forms of black music he’d not grown up on.

Scritti not exactly being your typical band, though, there was no way Green could simply announce a change of musical direction. Instead, he “sat down for months and months and wrote screeds of justification. There was that sense of having to have it understood and approved and thought-through by the group.”  The band came down to the Welsh cottage and took turns to read the book’s worth of notes. They were eventually swayed to the new pop vision and set to working up a whole bunch of Scrit-songs like “Faithless,” informed by Green’s immersion in Aretha Franklin and The Staple Singers.

Green’s first attempt to “go pop” was only half-successful, both in chart terms (1982’s Songs To Remember got to #12, but none of the singles were hits) and aesthetically. The melodies are beautiful,  but the production was shabby by the standards of the time (set by Lexicon of Love). Above all, Green’s lyrics hadn’t fully made the transition, combining the old hyper-intellectualism with a new poptimistic nonchalance, and ending up a bit cute. “Jacques Derrida” was titled after the French post-structuralist philosopher, while “Getting’ Havin’ and Holdin” includes both a Percy Sledge citation and the line “it’s as true as the Tractatus”. Trust me, that’s a real thigh-slapper  if you’re a philosophy student (Wittgenstein, author of said tome, is all about dismantling truth, seeing it as a mere figment of language).  But none of this was exactly the stuff of daytime Radio One,  which is where Green wanted to be.

Tensions had also emerged in the band. “Although the shift to pop was accepted in theory, I think the lived practice of it didn’t sit well, with Niall particularly,” recalls Green. 

One by one, the original members of Scritti quit, and the group was reinvented as a production company with Green as CEO. He also quit the indie sector and signed to Virgin, but not before Geoff Travis had hooked him up David Gamson, a New York based synth-funk prodigy. With Gamson and drummer Fred Maher as his cohorts, Green started making ultramodern dance music, all programmed beats and sequenced riffs. Paralleling Scritti’s mutation into a sleek, streamlined machine-pop, Green developed a style of lyric writing that secreted its subversive intelligence within words that could outwardly pass for common-or-garden love songs.

Green was still a bookworm, but for a while he was preoccupied less with theory than with mastering the technicalities of studio-based dance pop. The result,  Cupid & Psyche 85, “took a long, long time to make,” says Green. “And an awful lot of money. I was interested in exploiting all the new technology at the time, as well as with expressing those really black pop influences. It was a whole new world of sixteenth notes and syncopation, a language of talking about  music I had never spoken.” As well as enjoying huge UK hits such as “The Word Girl”, Scritti broke America with “Perfect Way”. And so it came to pass that Green Gartside--communist, squatter, Henry Cow fan and adolescent strummer of jigs and reels--ended up on MTV and in the Billboard Top 20.

After that moment of crossover triumph, Green got tangled up in the music industry machine. Most of his joy in music-making was worn away during the protracted studio gestation of 1988’s Provision, with what remained obliterated by the global promotional tour that followed: endless TV appearances and interviews, compensating for the fact that Scritti refused to tour. ( Indeed Green hasn’t played live since the infamous Brighton gig in 1980). He withdrew for a second time to Wales, where he spent almost the entire Nineties. A few years back, he re-emerged to make the not-wholly successful but under-rated Anomie and Bonhomie, fusing Scritti slickness with hip hop (his great musical passion of the last 20 years).

Right now, Green is “very much in love” (not bad for a guy whose “love songs” have often been about the impossibility of love) and busy working on material for a new album. And Geoff Travis is managing him, resuming their relationship and making an attractive historical loop in time.  Last year, Green went onstage with Carl from the Libertines to present a music-biz award to Travis. In fact, says Green, it’s really down to Travis that the early Scritti stuff has been reissued at all. “It’s a consequence of just a persistent interest from Geoff. He kept asking…. and it would have been rude to say ‘No’!”

Postpunk London

It Came from London: A virtual tour of Post-punk's roots
Time Out London, April 2005

by Simon Reynolds

If you want to get a vivid sense of what London felt like in the late Seventies, rent the DVD of Rude Boy. Filmed during 1978-79, the Clash's semi-documentary teems with great footage of Rock Against Racism carnivals and National Front demonstrations. But what really strikes the contemporary eye is how crap everything looks. With its washed-out colour schemes, shabby clothes, and grey faces, London resembles an Eastern Bloc city compared to today's design-conscious and style-saturated metropolis.



Beneath the drab surface, though, late Seventies London was culturally vibrant in ways that make the sharp-dressed and monied capital of today seem frankly impoverished. Rock music, avant-garde art, critical theory, and militant politics cross-contaminated each other to create a ferment of creativity and dissent. Although the capital was getting an early taste of Thatcherism--spending cuts, attacks on public transport and council housing--courtesy of the Conservative leadership that took over the GLC (Greater London Council) in 1977, London still had plenty of spaces for alternative lifestyles. Squat culture and low-rent bohemia thrived during what was effectively the glorious last blast of the counterculture.



1977 was supposed to be Year Zero, as far as the punks were concerned. They scorned the lank-locked hippies, rolling joints on their gatefold album sleeves and blissing out to noodly guitar solos. Yet in truth punk rock was really a historical blip, a brief interruption in the continuum of progressive music and culture that stretched from the psychedelia of 1967 to the avant-funk and industrial dub of 1979. This explains why Ladbroke Grove and its surrounding neighbourhoods were so key during the postpunk period. Former stomping ground of Pink Floyd and Hawkind, home to the epoch-defing progressive labels Island and Virgin, the Grove segued seamlessly from the era of kaftans, flares and Afghan coats to the Doc Martens, drainpipes and holey out-size jumpers of postpunk.



One thing shared by the hippies and the postpunks was the white Brit boho veneration for reggae as the ultimate "roots rock rebel" sound. Former Island Records press officer, reggae journalist, and maker of the dubby post-punk single "Launderette", Vivien Goldman lived in W11 during this era. She remembers there being at least half-a-dozen illegal sound systems within walking distance from her house on Ladbroke Grove. Known as "blues," the parties typically operated out of someone's flat or house. "You'd pay a quid on the door, get a spiff and a Red Stripe, and rave all night to dub and lover's rock. Ladbroke Grove was much more scuzzy in those days, and much more like a village. It really was a scene where you'd run into everybody on Portobello on Saturday afternoon without fail, whether you wanted to see them or not."



A major hangout for West London's postpunk community was the Rough Trade record shop, which took over a building on Kensington Park Road that had formerly been the site of the UK's first hippie "headshop. "Rough Trade became a real magnet," says RT co-founder Geoff Travis. "You could just hang out and browse without anyone harassing you, and there were chairs and huge speakers pumping out all the reggae pre-releases. We made the connection with punk really early." Ladbroke Grove was The Clash's manor, after all. Their lyrics were shadowed by the Westway flyover and the Brutalist monstrosity of Trellick Tower (which now looks almost charmingly quaint with its utilitarian design), while "White Riot" was inspired by the disorder of the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival.



Rough Trade the label started almost exactly two years after the record shop opened for business in February 1976. Operating out of a little shed at the back of the store, between 1978 and 1981 Rough Trade released many of postpunk's defining records, some from out-of-towners like Swell Maps, Cabaret Voltaire, Kleenex, and The Fall, and others from London vanguard outfits like This Heat, Scritti Politti, and The Raincoats. As striking as its discography, though, was the idealism that informed the way Rough Trade operated. Despite being a privately owned company, it was run as a cooperative, with all the staff enjoying equal pay and equal say (just like Time Out, in those days).

Travis embodied the continuity between the counterculture and postpunk. He talks about growing up during the era of Schoolkids' Oz and the Grosvenor Square demonstrations, and living in squats all across London. "Mile End, Camden, Bloomsbury... I was living in a squat when the Rough Trade store opened." Later he became Vivien Goldman's housemate and tested her patience with the endless succession of Rough Trade bands from outside the city who kipped on the floor when in town to make records or play gigs.



A short walk from Rough Trade, at the far end of Portobello beyond the Westway, stood the former premises of Sixties underground paper International Times. By the late Seventies it was occupied by a company called Better Badges. Wearing your allegiances--political or musical--on your lapels was the thing to do in those heady days, and Better Badges was the market leader. But the guy behind Better was no "breadhead." An original hippie who had worked as an editor at International Times and legendarily hadn't cut his locks since 1968, Jolyon McFie started an idealistic "print now/pay later" scheme to help fledgling fanzines like Jamming get off the ground. The editors could then lug the copies down the road to Rough Trade, whose burgeoning distribution network would get them into independent record stores across the nation.



On their way from Better Badges to Rough Trade, the spotty zine kids would pass Acklam Hall, a venue tucked under the Westway flyover. Later renamed Subterrania, Acklam Hall started out hosting benefit gigs (including ones for Rock Against Racism), survived a neo-fascist arson attack, and blossomed as a crucial performance space for postpunk groups. Scritti Politti made their live debut there in November 1978, playing a four song set (because that's all the tunes they then had) and going down so well, the audience insisted they play the 15 minute set again. On the same bill were Latimer Road postpunks pragVEC, whose offshoot band The Atoms featured comedian/actor Keith Allen singing ditties like "Max Bygraves Killed My Mother."



Another key West London venue was The Chippenham, a dingy upstairs room of a Westbourne Grove pub, where bands performed without a stage. In 1979, it was the place to see Rough Trade's gloriously shambolic feminist postpunkers The Raincoats and lesser-known absurdists like The Tesco Bombers and The Vincent Units. Raincoats bassist Gina Birch lived nearby in the squat-infested Monmouth Road. "Some of the houses had been burnt out and were literally uninhabitable," she recalls. "The one we lived in was not a pretty sight. People would say, 'we're making a post-holocaust film, can we shoot in your house?' We had mushrooms growing out of the toilet wall."



Vicky Aspinall, the Raincoats' violinist, was recruited after she spotted the band's ad--"female musician wanted: no style but strength"--in Camden's late lamented radical bookstore Compendium. There were postpunk outposts across the city--John Lydon and PiL's bunker at Gunter Grove in the grubby end of Chelsea, the Cold Storage studio on Brixton's Acre Lane where This Heat recorded, Throbbing Gristle's 'Death Factory' HQ in Hackney--but in truth Camden was Ladbroke Grove's only real rival during this period as an alternative culture stronghold. It was home to Scritti Politti and the clutch of likeminded do-it-yourself bands who clustered around them, and to the London Musician's Collective.



"Being in Camden, it just felt like you were in the right place," recalls LMC co-founder David Toop. He says that the area's bohemian prime really kicked off with punk. "One time I took this musician from America to a local café, and the guy was utterly astonished when the Clash walked in. But that was actually totally normal at that time." The Clash were doubtless taking a break from rehearsing at their practice space, a disused British Rail storage shed on Chalk Farm Road. The LMC also repurposed British Rail property, taking over a former BR laundry-cum-social club on Gloucester Avenue and turning it into a performance space.



Originally born out of the UK's free improvisation scene, the LMC began to attract discontented ex-punks like Viv Albertine of The Slits and Mark Perry of Sniffin' Glue/Alternative TV, who chafed against the strictures of conventional rock. Fans of the early, chaotic incarnation of the Slits, Toop and LMC co-founder Steve Beresford wanted to foster a dialogue between the virtuosos of British improv and the non-skilled DIY types who'd emerged from punk. A spirit of irreverent playfulness and quirked-out whimsy informed the LMC scene's music, symbolized in a shared penchant for toy pianos and other unusual instruments. On one memorable night, Bendell from LMC regulars The Door and the Window played a solo set using the room's radiators. "The whole idea was 'to make music you don't need to have a musical instrument," says Perry. "'Fuck the rules'."



In 1979/80, the LMC became a real vortex of activity. "The monthly meetings were hugely well attended, and quite fractious," says Toop. Anarcho-feminist ideas were in the air, and inevitably there was a tension between wanting to dismantle conventional power structures and actually getting anything done. "A lot of people's typical LMC gig was, you arrived at 8 o'clock, nobody was there, so you'd go to the pub," recalls Toop. "You'd come back and somebody was collecting money on the door, but the musicians weren't there. Gradually the musicians might drift in, somewhat pissed. And it might be a great gig musically or it might just fall apart. Usually there was no PA system." In the end, Toop got worn down by being the de facto organizer and quit the LMC. "That's the main argument against collectivism--it's just too exhausting!"



Over the road from the LMC was The Engineer pub, whose back room became "the court of Scritti," according to Steve Beresford. Scritti Politti were also a collective. The core trio of musicians were surrounded by a think-tank of some 20 people who vigorously debated all aspects of the group's existence. As well as attending regular meetings at the band's Carol Street squat, some members of the collective would also come onstage at Scritti gigs to add extra clamor and commotion to the group's "scratchy-collapsy, stop-start mistakes, falling-over sound", a style that singer Green christened "messthetics."



"The squat was pretty squalid, there wasn't even a bathroom," recalls Green. Oi! band Skrewdriver lived a few doors down the road, and the contrast between Scritti (members of the Young Communist League) and the Far Right Skrewdriver neatly captures the political polarization of the time. In the May 1979 general election, the National Front ran candidates in every electoral seat in the country, prompting Rock Against Racism to retaliate with the 40 date "Militant Entertainment" tour. 1979 was a banner year for racial attacks and street violence, inspiring songs like the The Jam's "Down in the Tube Station at Midnight" and Fatal Microbes' postpunk classic "Violence Grows", on which singer Honey Bane describes people looking the other way as someone gets "kicked to death in a London pedestrian subway." Green remembers the threat of aggro as a constant presence. "A lot of my friends in Camden were beaten up. We'd get attacked coming back from gigs. I was doing some part-time work at the Communist Party HQ in Covent Garden and there were letter bombs while I was there."



Today the average price of a house in Camden is £420,000. At the tail-end of the Seventies, though, it was an edgy place to live. Compendium served as a crucial resource for radicals of all stripes, crammed as it was with small press periodicals, activist pamphlets, fanzines, critical theory paperbacks, and early translations of French post-structuralist philosophy of the sort that would eventually inspire Green to write a catchy ditty entitled "Jacques Derrida." "You could go downstairs in the basement and root about, spend hours in there," recalls Green. "It was a really important place."



One member of Scritti's sprawling collective in those days was Ian Penman, the legendary music journalist (in)famous for introducing the jargon of deconstruction to the ink-smutted pages of NME. He occasionally blew freeform saxophone onstage with Scritti, as well as playing on pragVEC records under the pseudonym "Reeds Moran." According to Penman, life for the amphetamine-fiending postpunk aesthete was organized around a clandestine cartography of "grotty squats, grotty art house cinemas, grotty record shops." All-night cinemas like Screen on the Green or the Scala were crucial hang-outs. This was an era, remember, before the mire of entertainment options offered by video stores and DVDs, satellite and cable. If you craved culture, you had to go to specific locations to find it, meaning that you would experience it not in the solipsistic pod of your living room, but in a collective environment, surrounded by fellow freaks and night creatures.




Postpunk bohemia started crumbling in the early Eighties when the Thatcher effect kicked in. It was time to "get real," clamber onto some kind of career(ist) track, whether within pop music or outside it. Hence New Pop, in which squat-punk fellow-travelers like the Thompson Twins followed Green's lead and ditched their saxophones and hand-percussion in favor of synths and drum machines, and embraced the aesthetic and promotional possibilities of video.



Boy George had lived in squats in Kentish Town and Warren Street, alongside characters like gender-bender Marilyn and Haysi Fantayzee's Jeremy Healey, but then his band Culture Club stormed the charts with a pop reggae sound even more sugary than Scritti's failed crossover bid "The 'Sweetest Girl'." Camden became synonomous with New Romantic club the Camden Palace, and with Madness, whose latterday hits included a cover of "'The Sweetest Girl.''



Partly impelled by losing hit-hungry bands like Scritti to big labels with the muscle to get them in the charts, Rough Trade tried to shed its "brown rice" collectivist image and adopted competitive practices in tune with the Eighties. They overhauled their managerial structure and hired radio pluggers. For those who didn't take the chartpop entryist route, the alternatives were to continue making marginal music in an increasingly discouraging environment, or... get a job. Sue Gogan, vocalist for pragVEC, briefly worked as a road sweeper for Camden Council after the band fell apart. One cold morning in 1984, working her broom at the bottom of a short steep hill near a photographer's studio, she saw "a pretty flash motor pull up. The driver got out and opened the back door of the car. Out stepped Green. I guess he'd 'made it'. Funny."

Politics and Pop - a personal journey

A personal journey through politics and pop

director's cut version of Pitchfork Review essay, fall 2016

by Simon Reynolds

SEX PISTOLS, “Anarchy in the U.K.”; “God Save the Queen” (1977)

I first heard the Sex Pistols in mid-1978, a full year after “God Save the Queen” convulsed the United Kingdom in the summer of ’77. Living in a small English town far from the action, my 14-year-old head was elsewhere all through ‘77, sideways glimpsing punk’s existence only in photo spreads of outrageous haircuts in Sunday newspaper magazines. When I finally heard Never Mind the Bollocks, the Pistols story affected me as a rock-myth fait accompli, rather than unfolding as a real-time historical sequence with an uncertain outcome.

It was my brother Tim—a few years younger, far better endowed in street cred because he went to a state school—who brought home a cassette of songs by the Pistols and Ian Dury & The Blockheads and who later bought Bollocks. Because I wasn’t going to gigs yet, or reading the music press, and only rarely seeing groups like these on TV, punk’s power manifested itself to me almost entirely as sheer sonic force: I’d never heard anything so domineering, never even imagined that “pop” could be this unbridled, such an attack.

The record covers were thrilling too, thanks to punk’s aggressively innovative graphic language (Bollocks’s ransom-note newsprint lettering, for instance). When the Pistols’ The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle came out in 1979, me and Tim and our younger brother Jez pored over the double album’s gatefold sleeve with its stills from the forthcoming movie (then still a long way from completion and release). But most of all, it was the voices in punk, a kind never heard before in pop: tones of jubilant bitterness; a sense of malevolent power conjured up from with the singer’s body through sheer will and blasted out at the listener. The voice, above all of Johnny Rotten. That, and the things he sang about. Like anarchy, an intoxicating and unfamiliar concept.

It’s moot whether “Anarchy in the U.K.” should be taken as a Political Statement; it’s more like prophecy or poetry. If the song corresponds to any ideology, the closest thing is the 19th century stripe of anarchism associated with German philosopher Max Stirner, who imagined the state being dissolved in favor of a “union of egoists.” Anarchy, in this worldview, means absolute sovereignty for each individual, who would no longer be subject to higher authority or constraints to the free exercise of desire. Anarchism, in other words, that has nothing to do with the placid, orderly decision-making of communes or workers’ councils; rather, it’s an apocalyptic unleashing, a chaos of wills, with each individual ruling his or her life like a tyrant.  That’s how I hear the chorus “I wanna be/Anarchy,” which Rotten drags out like a triumphant jeer.

As a vision for how society should organize itself, “Anarchy in the U.K.” is literally puerile, the sort of thoughts entertained by adolescents with no inkling of how challenging life is. But I was 15 when I heard the song, just the right age. The Pistols spoke most intoxicatingly to boys between 13 and 17: a period in life when you have an innate flair for recklessness, an awesome ability to disregard consequences. Boredom—and something darker too, an appetite for destruction—drove the brothers Reynolds and our peers towards vandalism, risk-taking (“dares”), and pranks. It’s the nastiness of punk—the “I wanna destroy” side, the (Sid) Vicious-ness—that gets written out of the validating histories, which invariably accentuate punk’s idealism, the empowering and constructive do-it-yourself ideas. But in our suburban bedroom, we thrilled to the tales of the Pistols puking at airports, Sid slashing his chest onstage, and the seductively cynical notion that it had always been a swindle, a Malcolm McLaren cash-from-chaos masterplan.

Age 20 when he recorded “Anarchy,” Rotten was already a bit old for this kind of thing—and in truth, he wasn’t a “Smash It Up” punk at heart, but a book-reading, record-collecting hipster who shrank from real-life violence.  McLaren, at 30, should have been well past this way of thinking. But the Pistols manager idealized, venerated—and also envied—teenagers as the only really revolutionary class. Existing in a liminal limbo between childhood and duty-bound adulthood, emboldened by the dawning sense of their own physical and mental independence, the Kids were the only ones who could ever change things, because they had no stakes in the status quo.

Where “Anarchy” is timeless Gnostic-Romantic poetry, “God Save the Queen” diminishes itself slightly by being topical, as well as having the shape of a Classic Rock Anthem. The historical peg was the Royal Jubilee celebration of Queen Elizabeth’s 25 years on the throne, “a mad parade” of imperial nostalgia that covered every town in Britain with bunting and Union Jacks. The Pistols’ single was such an affront – the lyric described the monarchy as a “fascist regime” -  the song led not just to a BBC ban, but to enraged patriots violently assaulting members of the band. Despite the embargo, the single reached #2 on the UK chart; some believe that devious conniving by the authorities kept “Anarchy” off the top spot to save further embarrassment to the Establishment.

The scandal of “God Save the Queen” set up impossible expectations for what politics in pop could achieve. It restored a belief in rock’s power to incite and to threaten that had waned steadily since the heyday of the Stones and the Who. But it was “Anarchy in the U.K.”—and other Bollocks songs like “Bodies”—a foaming fulmination, explosive with expletives, against the horror of human biological existence—that set the true challenge for rock going forward: How to equal the expressive force of a voice, and a sound, that felt so corrosive it would surely shake the world? The Sex Pistols songs were rock’s equivalent to the theses nailed by Luther on the Wittenberg church door: They made a decisive break with the Old Wave, while also—like the Reformation before it—opening the way for further schisms, the proliferation of sects pursuing different ideas of what punk now meant and how that dramatically revivified power should be deployed most righteously.

TOM ROBINSON BAND -  Power In the Darkness, TRB 2   (1978-9)

The only fan of Tom Robinson Band I ever knew was a boy in my lower-sixth class (equivalent to the eleventh grade) called Sandbrook, who had daubed TRB’s clenched-fist stencil-style logo onto his satchel. Although my own tastes already leaned towards post punk groups like Public Image Ltd and the Slits, Sandbrook’s passion for TRB and protest-oriented Ulster punks Stiff Little Fingers was close enough for us to feel like we were on the same side, at a school where most boys were still drawing perfectly executed Genesis, Yes, and Pink Floyd logos on the desks. His satchel also bore the insignias for Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League, other indicators of simpatico values that stood out at a school where: 1) the Conservatives always won the mock elections; and 2) where the parents of one of my friends could declare that the world should quit meddling in South Africa’s affairs, because the system there worked well for everybody—and they weren’t hounded out of polite society.  

Talking of sides, one of TRB’s anthems was titled “Better Decide Which Side You’re On.” Tom Robinson conceived of his band’s constituency as a rainbow coalition of the disadvantaged and marginalized: the unemployed, racial minorities, gays, squatters, feminists, drug users. In reality, TRB’s following was largely composed of progressive-minded white middle-class youth, very much in the mold of Robinson himself—a clean-cut, well-spoken, smiley chap who came over as earnest, unthreatening, and “straight” (although actually openly and vocally gay). Those who’d been energized by punk but wanted something constructive and more clearly aligned in its Left allegiances rallied to TRB’s banner.

Robinson’s approach to music was means-to-an-end: he wanted to bring his message to as wide an audience as possible.   Accordingly TRB’s rousing sound was rooted in the Old Wave more than the New Wave, finding a stomping, if stiff-hipped, groove midway between Free and Mott the Hoople. Well-played and cleanly produced, the road song “2-4-6-8 Motorway” was commercial enough to crack the Top 5.  But the group’s single and album covers were plastered with contacts for every imaginable pressure group and activist organisation.


                                         

TRB were huge in 1978: Critics hailed them a positive realization of punk’s promise, there was an hour-long TV documentary devoted to the band, the tours took in ever larger concert halls. But almost instantly the music press turned on them for “preaching to the converted” and for being too straight in their angle of address (lyrically and musically). Reaching the unconverted became a crucial concern going forward. But equally important for those looking to both live up to and extend punk was the idea of challenging and unsettling the converted. Musicians and critics began to explore the idea that politics was not about the transmission and reception of messages but the initiation of a thought-process. In the next stage, “Question everything” and “personal politics” became key buzz concepts.

CRASS -  Stations of the Crass, “Bloody Revolutions”, “Our Wedding” (1979-81)

Crass, a collective of former hippies and new punks who lived in a communal farm cottage called Dial House, took the “anarchy” in “Anarchy In the U.K.” literally. Punk, for them, was about self-rule. Crass opposed all forms of hierarchy: State, Army, Church. They brandished slogans like “Fight War Not Wars. Destroy Power Not People” and “You can’t vote anarchist, you can only be one.” Politics was “politricks” and a power game (another black-flag slogan was “Whoever you vote for, the government wins”). For Crass, the Left was just as bad as the Right: Stations’ “White Punks On Hope” equated socialist violence and fascist violence as “just the same old game.”

My brothers were Crass fans and one single they played a great deal, “Bloody Revolutions,” picked up this theme, criticizing macho hard-left militancy in much the same way that John Lennon, in The Beatles’ “Revolution,” jeered at dogma-indoctrinated radicals with their Chairman Mao placards. At university in the early Eighties I encountered this divide within the anarchist community itself: gentle hippie-ish types largely concerned with getting their minds right (feminist consciousness raising groups for both women and men) versus the hot-head street guerrilla types happy to leave the chicks and the wimps to their navel-gazing and get down to serious business like brick-hurling confrontations with the Pigs.

Although later their music got more sophisticated and experimental, early on Crass treated sound as a mere delivery system for the messages. That was one reason the British music press initially scorned the group and the anarcho-punk movement they spawned; Crass were also accused of puritanism and sloganeering.

Yet Crass had a mischievous side, a McLaren-like delight in the publicity stunt as a form of subversive media theatre. Most famous of their pranks was the Thatchergate hoax: a 1982  record purporting to be a telephone conversation between the British Prime Minister and Ronald Reagan, during which were revealed dirty secrets about the Falklands War and the President’s plan for a showdown with the Soviets using Europe as the  arena of conflict.  The intelligence services got in a right flap about it, with the U.S. State Department initially identifying the record as a KGB ruse. 

But the one that really tickled me was in 1981, when—in the guise of Creative Recording and Sound Services, which acronyms as C.R.A.S.S.—they persuaded Loving, a mushy romantic magazine aimed at young women, to run a special offer for the free flexi-single “Our Wedding.” Sung by Joy De Vivre, the band’s second female singer, to the accompaniment of strings, church organ and wedding bells, this supposed celebration of marriage was really a sardonic poker-faced expose of matrimony as mutual bondage: “Listen to those wedding bells/Say goodbye to other girls”; “Never look at anyone/Must be all you see.” Hundreds wrote in for the flexi before the prank was revealed in a newspaper article. Talking to NME in June 1981, the band’s Penny Rimbaud railed at Loving-type magazines as “obscene and despicable rags” peddling “teenage pornography” that “trivialized love and relationships.”  “Our Wedding” later appeared on their 1981 No. 1 indie-chart album Penis Envy.

Virtually all of Crass singles and LPs topped the UK’s independent releases chart: their following was huge, especially out in the provinces where punk achieved its greatest and most lingering impact a few years after the big cities like London and Manchester had moved on musically and sartorially. You saw the Crass stencil all over the UK: on walls, on paving stones, and on the leather jackets of the punx mooching in clutches around bus shelters and the fountains outside town halls. For most of the fans—including my brothers—Crass’s appeal was as much to do with the visuals as the rather rudimentary sonics. The records came in elaborate packaging that folded out to form posters featuring Gee Vaucher’s beautifully drawn photo-realist counter-propaganda, dream-like tableaus in which Maggie Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth were leather-clad punkettes, the Statue of Liberty had a Mohawk, and Pope John Paul II wore a “Destroy” T-shirt.

GANG OF FOUR -  Entertainment!, “Why Theory?”  (1979-81)

Aged 17, I believed two things about Gang of Four—that their music was funky as hell and that if these songs got on the radio and onto Top of the Pops, they would be subversively consciousness-raising in a simple cause-and-effect way, at the point of contact with the listener’s brain.  Go4’s funk, though, is quite some distance from Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall or Chic: not a release but a girding of the loins for the struggle ahead, a stark and staunch sound clenched with commitment. As for the lyrics, they are certainly a big step forward from the soapbox screeds of Crass and Tom Robinson, designed to unpick the threads of ideology that stitch together our sense of the world as “a natural fact” (a line from “Why Theory?” on Go4’s 1981 album Solid Gold).

Still, each song is making a statement, which the listener has to work to uncover. Go4 are not preaching to the converted; they’re critiquing on behalf of the predisposed. For example, on the 1979 debut Entertainment!, “Natural’s Not In It” can easily be deciphered as an analysis of the way capitalism ensnares desire via advertising’s “coercion of the senses”; “Contract” is clearly a structural diagram of marriage that reveals its fault-lines and contradictions. “At Home He’s A Tourist,” Go4’s near-hit single, is more opaque, ranging from commodified sexuality to bourgeois culture-binging as a way of filling the void. 

Gang of Four signed to EMI, the same label as TRB, for similar reasons: To get their ideas across to a mass audience. They agonized over whether to appear on Top of the Pops to perform “Tourist” to the show’s 10-million-plus viewers, because the price of admittance was censoring the word “rubbers,” a slang term for condoms, in a lyric. Torn between integrity and crossover, Gang of Four decided to opt for the former and torpedoed the evangelising raison d’etre that had led them to EMI in the first place.  This principled refusal alienated the record company and as the moment of potential breakthrough passed, the group’s career never really recovered.

SCRITTI POLITTI - Peel Sessions EP, 4 A-Sides EP (1979)

Born out of the same Leeds art school scene, Scritti Politti took the next step forward from Go4. Catalysed by the Anarchy Tour of 1977, Scritti began as a straightforward punk group, The Against. But almost immediately, things got a lot less straightforward:  punk’s negative drive (its against-ness) turned on itself, with the launch of a potentially interminable project of undermining one’s own ideological assumptions.  From the start that made the Scritti sound far less staunch and stable than Go4’s: wracked with uncertainty (“Doubt Beat” is one song's title) to the point where the music feels  on the brink of nervous collapse. In singer/lyricist Green Gartside we encounter a mind so sharp it lacerates itself, thought that ties itself up in immobilizing knots.  “OPEC-Immac,” for instance, makes oblique connections between the cartel of oil producing nations and a beauty product, before dissolving into a lacuna of impotent confusion: “how much do you ever stand to know?” The word “stand” suggests both a limit to how much you are ever likely to understand the workings of the world, but also how much knowledge – how much disabused lucidity – can an individual bear before succumbing to despair.  Inverting the Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s maxim, pessimism of the intellect defeats optimism of the will.

Aged seventeen I found Scritti Politti – whose name, taken from a collection of texts by Gramsci, translates roughly as “political writings” – genuinely enlightening. They introduced my young brain to a large, confounding idea:  the notion that, rather than being a transparently useful tool for radical thought, language itself might be a mechanism of oppression. In “PAs”, it’s “the language” that “shuts down” in 1920s Italy and again in 1930s Germany – and that might yet collapse in a fascist U.K. of the coming Eighties. “Bibbly-O-Tek” argues that language, wrapped around clothing, creates fashion, which then creates money.  In the song, phrases like “secondary pickets” and “Eastern Bloc” are recited in a pointed, withering tone, leaving the listener to work out the ideological freight with which they’re loaded.  “Secondary” implies that workers in one unionized industry have no business striking in solidarity with workers from another (as with dockers cutting off the supply of imported coal to help miners during an industrial dispute);  “Eastern Bloc,” as a menacing term for a  Soviet Empire, obscures the fact that NATO nations are satellites too, a Western Bloc of vassal states twitching to the tune of a different superpower.

This disorienting - yet also darkly exhilarating -  idea of language as the prison-house of consciousness was pursued not just in the songs but in the photocopied text wrapped around the Peel Sessions EP, pages from an imaginary book titled Scritto’s Republic. “The rules of a society are embodied in the rules of its language,” wrote its unidentified author (Green obviously, although Scritti liked to present as a collective to the world). “It is through common sense speech that we are reproached and directed.... Language pre-exists our entry into it and defines what is normal and represses that which will not or cannot be covered or developed by its framework.” 

Green carried his “linguistic turn” through to Scritti’s next phase of pop crossover, with deconstructed love-songs like “The ‘Sweetest Girl’” (which vows to look behind “the strongest words in each belief”) and the huge UK hit single “The Word Girl.” But as with deconstruction in the academy, this abstruse close-work seems to have little to say about the world outside the text. Scritti’s domain became the politics of and inside pop, rather than bringing real-world politics into pop.  

DEXYS MIDNIGHT RUNNERS - Searching For the Young Rebels (1980)

Post punk hatched an ascetic streak latent in punk. Entertainment for its own sake was escapist, a narcotic: music needed to carry a higher purpose of consciousness-raising or critique. Sometimes accused of being didactic and dour, groups like Gang of Four, The Au Pairs, The Pop Group, and Scritti Politti were my kind of postpunk puritan, perfect for a young mind that was beginning to approach the world critically. But there was another kind of puritan around on the early Eighties British music scene: mod-influenced figures like The Jam’s Paul Weller and Dexy’s Midnight Runners’s Kevin Rowland. Both made great singles but for some reason I was never swayed into become a follower of either of these men. I think partly that’s precisely because they both so clearly wanted converts; each band became a cause in itself for their following.  

Dexys retained and intensified punk’s will-to-power—they are named after a brand of amphetamine, after all. Rowland’s first response to punk had been The Killjoys, the name itself indicating a puritanical zeal seemingly at odds with his Irish Catholic background. Depressed in the aftermath of punk, Rowland rallied his spirits with the horn-pumping, muscular soul of ‘60s performers like Geno Washington. This became the template for Dexys’ sound: brassy, uplifting, pugnacious, and, in its own retro way, as staunch as Gang of Four. Searching For the Young Rebels, the debut LP, starts with the sounds of a radio: Bursts of Sex Pistols and The Specials (another politics-in-pop byproduct of punk) are heard amid the hiss and crackle, before Rowland’s exasperated voice cries, “For God’s sake, burn it down.” Dexys set themselves up here as both next in a series of insurgent renewals for British music and as the upstarts who will surpass their failed precursors. The LP title is an open call for recruits, an attempt to conjure a new youth movement out of nowhere.

The nature of “young soul rebellion” remained unclear, though. Political specifics figured here and there. “Dance Stance,” the debut single, took issue with derogatory stereotypes about the Irish, defiantly reeling off the nation’s list of illustrious literati. The LP cover featured a Catholic boy from Ulster being driven from his Belfast home during the sectarian clearances of 1971; one song concerned Rowland’s unsuccessful attempt to set up a union at his workplace. But the overriding emphasis was on the internal politics of the British music scene, on Dexys’ candidacy as a messianic force, and on Rowland’s belief in, well, belief.

“There There My Dear,” the follow-up hit to the #1 “Geno,” was a paranoid rejoinder to a journalist or musician who refused to “welcome the new soul vision.” Almost thrown away in the accusatory bluster was one of political-pop’s most provocative thought-bombs: “The only way to change things is to shoot men who arrange things.” The implication is that music can only ever be incidental to the struggle. But given that Rowland and his Dexys would carry on being pop stars, recording another two more ‘80s albums before dispersing for a couple of decades, you might well draw a further inference: They are not really that interested in changing things. That raises the perturbing possibility: Is pop an arena in which those with the temperament of revolutionaries can experience all the self-aggrandizing excitement of leadership, without any of the unglamorous costs or consequences of actual struggle?

KATE BUSH, “Breathing”; YOUNG MARBLE GIANTS, “Final Day”; UB40, “The Earth Dies Screaming”; FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD, “Two Tribes” (1980-1984).

It is almost impossible to convey to young people today what it was like to grow up during the ‘60s, ‘70s and (first half of) the ‘80s, with the awareness that nuclear annihilation was a real prospect constantly hanging over you. One of my high-school projects was a paper on the effects of a ten megaton bomb dropped on London. Our hometown was about 35 miles from the capital’s center – the bull’s eye in the target for Soviet bombs - and so it would escape the fireball and direct blast, but receive some very fierce winds, following by radioactive fallout. Around this time, I joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which was then resurging after the government’s consent to base U.S.-controlled cruise missiles on British soil, a decision that would turn the UK into a launch-pad and thus a prime target for Soviet retaliation—or a preemptive strike.

Pop picked up on these currents of anxiety with a string of songs about nuclear war. Kate Bush’s disturbing, if overwrought, 1980 single “Breathing” described “chips of plutonium” penetrating the bloodstream shared by a pregnant mother and her unborn child. Young Marble Giants’ “Final Day” was a hauntingly still and soft vignette—somehow more terrifying for its brevity—about our compliance and complicity in the madness of mutual deterrence. Despite the melodramatic title, UB40’s hit “The Earth Dies Screaming” was even more chillingly subdued: its dread bass and funereal pace turned the atmosphere ashen in the Top of the Pops studio.

                                     

A few years later came what was intended as the ultimate protest record: Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s single “Two Tribes,” a follow-up to “Relax,” released by the arty-provocateur label ZTT. Lyrically inane and emotionally ambiguous (at times it seemed almost to exult in Armageddon, the excitement of living in a world “where sex and horror are the new gods”),  “Two Tribes” nonetheless brought the issue to the biggest possible audience, colonizing the No. 1 spot on the UK singles chart for nine weeks during the summer of 1984. 

                                        

The sleeves of its numerous 12-inch mixes resembled my school project, caked in data and diagrams about what a superpower showdown would entail for short-term lethality and long-term species-extinction. (A stylish chart totted up the death toll in categories ranging from nuclear winter and famine to disease and psychological trauma.) Yet as ZTT’s conceptualist Paul Morley noted wryly, “Two Tribes” was replaced, after two months atop the charts, by George Michael’s “Careless Whisper.” Nothing changed, not even in pop, let alone in the outside world.

                                                

THE STYLE COUNCIL -  “Shout To The Top”;  THE REDSKINS -  “Keep On Keepin On!” b/w ”Reds Strike the Blues!”; THE SMITHS - “Still Ill”; WORLD DOMINATION ENTERPRISES—“Asbestos Lead Asbestos”; THE MEKONS - “Darkness and Doubt” (1984-85)

                                                    

During the 1983 general election, while still a student, I did some canvassing for the Labour Party: a door-to-door, unswayable voter to unswayable voter trudge so discouraging it permanently soured me on the front-line grunt-work that’s the dreary, but indispensable, essence of political involvement. In the years between Labour’s resounding defeat and the next election in 1987, a cluster of prominent left-wing musicians—Billy Bragg, Paul Weller of The Style Council, Jimmy Somerville of the Communards—formed an organization to mobilise the youth vote: Red Wedge. That name made aesthetes like me recoil. (Although the phrase’s provenance turned out to be supercool—the title of a 1919 propaganda poster by Soviet modernist El Lissitzky—it probably sounded a lot better in Russian). 

                                          

                                                   
Me and my kind were also turned off by the overall aura of well-meaning worthiness that clung to the Red Wedge project, the demeaning use of music as a mere vehicle. But by this point – I’d started writing for the UK weekly paper Melody Maker -  I had become persuaded that politics in pop was a busted flush anyway. To me, the only artistically potent expressions of the political in late ‘80s music were expressions of impotence: the flailing rage of World Domination Enterprises; the dissident defiance of The Smiths; the despondency of The Mekons. (Well, there’s also Public Enemy, but that’s a whole other knotty story).

                                           

Despite Red Wedge’s efforts, the 1987 election was another resounding defeat for Labour. This served to propel me even further into blissed-out anti-politics: the most adventurous music then being made, it seemed to me, hid from the world in gorgeous clouds of noise. Today, grown-up and worried, I feel retrospective sympathy for Red Wedge and the soul-influenced, militantly optimistic groups of that time, like The Redskins (aligned with the Socialist Workers Party rather than Labour). Why was I so down on the idea of preaching to the converted? When History is against them, the converted need to have their morale maintained, their spirits kept stalwart.

 

SPIRAL TRIBE, “Breach the Peace”; “Forward The Revolution” (1992)

It’s May 1992 and almost by chance I’ve ended up at the largest public irruption of subcultural dissent the UK has seen since the concerts and rallies of the punk/Rock Against Racism era: Castlemorton, a  mega-rave that takes over an area of unspoiled and secluded countryside in West England for a full seven days and draws crowds estimated at around 40,000. Castlemorton is “Anarchy in the U.K.” for real, what ‘90s theoreticians call a “temporary autonomous zone”: an instant city formed through the tribal alliance of urban ravers and the post-hippie travelers who for decades now have driven back and forth across the UK in their caravans and trucks visiting a summer circuit of free festivals.

I’m only there for the first night—by the time I get back to London, still blissed and babbling to anyone who’ll listen, Castlemorton is a front page story in all the papers and the lead item on the TV news. Questions are asked in Parliament about what should be done to end the menace of nomadic ravers who could descend in hordes on any genteel village in the country, inflicting their noise and outlandish dress sense upon the powerless locals. Rumors abound of hairy, smelly travelers taking a dump in the front gardens of Castlemorton residents, or trying to sell drugs to local children.



Spiral Tribe, canny media operators and aspiring martyrs, take all the credit and all the blame. All 13 members of the techno party crew are prosecuted for conspiracy to cause a public nuisance, in a long drawn-out case that will cost the public 4 million pounds but end in acquittal.  For the truth is that there were no ring-leaders behind Castlemorton: its mass confluence was a viral happening, a swarming that anticipated the flash mobs of digital days to come and that spiraled way larger than the instigators had anticipated. 

                                              

In the immediate aftermath of Castlemorton, while other sound systems -- DiY, Bedlam, and Circus Warp - shrewdly keep a low profile, Spiral Tribe do loads of interviews, talking about their aim to create a “public new sense,” about how days and nights of nonstop drugged trance-dance can take you outside the limits of reality. The collective are given a record contract from a label convinced they are techno’s Sex Pistols. Actually, they’re closer to Genesis P-Orridge’s Psychic TV: literally a cult group, believers in conspiracy theories and magical-mystical forces, prophets for a new primitivism that has paradoxically been enabled by the do-it-yourself autonomy provided by digital technology. 

                                            

In addition to the ultimately unsuccessful Spiral Tribe prosecution, the British government extends the clampdown on illegal raves with the Criminal Justice and Order Act 1994, which vastly expands police powers to thwart rave organisers and to make life difficult for squatters and travelers. While the laws are still working their way through Parliament, their intended victims organize a protest movement, the Advance Party. This alliance of  sound systems and civil liberties campaigners stages a couple of demonstrations in the summer and fall of 1994. The first, in July, is one of the few marches I’ve been on in my life. It winds up in Trafalgar Square, as is traditional for demos in the UK, but everything else about the protest—the garish, tatterdemalion clothes, the creatively designed placards—is a wildly different from the drab norms of Left activism.

I’m aware, though, with every step I take in the midst of this joyous cavalcade, that resistance is futile. Squatters, ravers, and travelers have few friends in the mainstream of British life: Ordinary folk are repelled by their appearance and talk, see them as parasitic layabouts, while figures of influence in politics and the media know that standing with “the crusties”—as they are popularly demonized—will do them no favours. The Criminal Justice Bill passes easily; Spiral Tribe splinter, with one faction moving to Europe to spread the “teknival” concept across the Continent.

                                                   

Like the Sex Pistols, Castlemorton proved once again the extraordinary power of music to upset and disturb; how noise and words can shake reality, momentarily upturning common-sense ideas of what’s normal and proper and possible. But it also showed once again the limitations of that power in the face of the forces that control the world.  The idea of changing things through music is arguably a useful illusion, creating an urgent sense of mission and high stakes that again and again results in inspirational sounds and statements. But it could also be seen, more severely, as a diversion from the dirty, dreary work of struggle.