The Chris Low Obscure Punk Tape Post…
The Apostles / Primal Chaos / Black Flag / The Heretics
Man about town, obscure punk enthusiast and general good guy, Chris Low late of Political Asylum, The Apostles, Oi Polloi, in the 1980’s and The Parkinsons in 1990’s, handed this tape to me on his birthday along with a load of others. I have uploaded this late because it is unfortunately been dubbed / copied onto tape by horrid mono means, i.e it only comes out of one speaker…bummer! Two other tapes Conflict at Brixton Ace 1982 supplied by Mark ‘Vegas’ Palmer starts off stereo then clicks into mono. Sadly to say Lugworm supplied a cassette tape recorded from Spaceward Studios of The Mobs LP recorded there. Not interested in The Mob LP as such but there is an alternative mix of ‘Stay’ which I was absolutely interested in. This track also plays on one speaker. Point of fact – nothing wrong with my cassette playback system!
Any how, I do not like putting up faulty or mono cassettes onto this site, but this has to be an exception because of the rarity value. The Apostles, Primal Chaos, Black Flag, and The Heretics all for the price of…well nothing. Not sure of the history of the tape, no doubt Chris will comment on it. Not sure of the line up, track listing or anything else. Again I hope Chris or his chum Nic will comment. On the B-Side of the tape is a Flux live gig and a Napalm Death practice. All I the info I got what was written on the tape itself, just band names basically. I actually have not heard this tape yet cos wifey needed me to do something so I just let it play…hope Bucks Fizz does not come on half way through the recordings!
Info from Nic:
The Apostles:
Pete The Plectrum (later formed part of ‘The Hunt’ on the first LP)
Some Men Are Born To Rule (the first song the group ever wrote)
Antichrist
? (This isn’t from this time period if I remember correctly – it features the drum machine: is it ‘The Island’, Chris?)
Solidaridad Proletaria (This is the original title at the time of recording: it was later changed to ‘A New World In Our Hearts’ and was re-recorded on both tape and vinyl)
Killing for Peace
Proletarian Autonomy (later re-recorded on tape and vinyl)
Time Bomb
Stoke Newington 8 (later re-recorded on tape and vinyl)
Primal Chaos – Rehearsal 1982:
Systems Slave (This isn’t part of their ‘Fighting for a Future’ rehearsal tape)
Black Flag – Rehearsal 1981:
The Master Race (Earliest version of this song that I heard)
Waiting for the All Clear (later recorded by The Apostles, but this version features Matt Mcleod on vocals
The Heretics – Rehearsal 1980:
No Character
Jake from Heretics on stage with Iggs of Crass 1979
The Heretics
February 29th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
The Apostles:
Pete The Plectrum (later formed part of ‘The Hunt’ on the first LP)
Some Men Are Born To Rule (the first song the group ever wrote)
Antichrist
? (This isn’t from this time period if I remember correctly – it features the
drum machine: is it ‘The Island’, Chris?)
Solidaridad Proletaria (This is the original title at the time of recording: it
was later changed to ‘A New World In Our Hearts’
and was re-recorded on both tape and vinyl)
Killing for Peace
Proletarian Autonomy (later re-recorded on tape and vinyl)
Time Bomb
Stoke Newington 8 (later re-recorded on tape and vinyl)
Primal Chaos – Rehearsal 1982:
Systems Slave
(This isn’t part of their ‘Fighting for a Future’ rehearsal tape)
Black Flag – Rehearsal 1981:
The Master Race (Earliest version of this song that I heard)
Waiting for the All Clear (later recorded by The Apostles, but this version
features Matt Mcleod on vocals
The Heretics – Rehearsal 1980:
No Character
All we need now is the Libertarian Youth ‘Burn the Witch’ rehearsal recordings…hehe…
Love that lyric: “Animal lust – let’s go hunting! There’s a ‘Paki’ – kick the cunt in!”
Pure poetry – they don;t write ‘em like that anymore…
February 29th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
hey hey – cant download right now but this is black flag aka black cross aka carnage – a band i was in with andy martin, matt mcloud and angie zoff – we played three gigs i think – at a cinema in southend with the sinyx in 1980, with the apostles at their first gig at the basement youth club in covent garden where stu from charge opened that the apostles set was ‘absolute fucking garbage’ (and you know what – he was probably / almost certainly / in fact definitely right) and then a bit later on with lack of knowledge at a gig in deepest north london with a few different people – i remember the songs as being more interesting than your usual anarcho fare – punk but with some weirded out bits – matt angie and andy all wrote stuff – got some of the original lyric sheets knockin about somewhere. i think there’s a longer recording about from the lack of knowledge gig.
sniper from the heretics used to knock about andy’s when we were practising there with the apostles and i used to go to school with sams little bro – he used to take the piss out of our crass badges….love the tg pic – …no character – in my ford cortina…did anyone ever see em live?
as for the apostles couplet, i’m afraid i must *ahem* take responsibility – but also highlight that the lyric does need to be read within the context of the rest of the song, ironic distance, 14 years old, blah, blah, blah…however, i do think that the iambic pentameters scan rather well actually…
February 29th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
Lack Of Knowledge gig in Ponders End, poor side of Enfield maybe?
February 29th, 2008 at 7:17 pm
dats the one – were you there?
February 29th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
Used to have a Black Flag tape that was better than anything The Apostles did. Thought it was of a rehearsal but may be wrong. They had some good songs like 1985. Would like to hear it again if anyone out there’s got it.
Matt’s still around but I don’t think he’s into nostalgia much.
February 29th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
hello luggy – hope all’s well…
think the only one is of ponders end – yeah i’d like to get my hands on it too…
anyways
have a good weekend y’all
February 29th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Nic, can’t listen to the tape the now as my speakers , but – yes, there was some more recent track that accidentally got recorded over a bit of Anti-Christ which is a Grade A wank as it was the best version of the song i’d ever heard. Grrrrrrrrr…..the scourge of technology.
Maybe Siii of The Heretics will pop up and enlighten us as to the title of the track?
I think at this juncture that photo from TG of them should be posted up just to show everyone just how ‘mental’ they looked
Would scan and send it to you Micky but my scanner is down too, perhaps someone else can oblige?
February 29th, 2008 at 8:22 pm
I remember that pre production tape of the mob album as being far superior to the finished vinyl.But I thought that of the antisect LP so maybe I dreamed it…..maybe I dreamed it all……
February 29th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
“sniper from the heretics used to knock about andy’s”
i once read an article in a sunday newspaper about ‘tramp punks’ it featured photos of black luke and another guy called sniper,same one maybe?
February 29th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
well, that would certainly be a more than apt description of their appearance, judging from the photos in Toxic Grafitti, so I imaging it could well have been!
Think Andy shared a flat with one of them. I doubt it was ever featured in ‘Ideal Home’.
February 29th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
would be good to see the photo from tg again,would be great if anyone could scan some pages from it as mine is long lost,appreciate its a bit of fuckin time consuming task though!
wasnt there a small peice in it about the correct method to wipe ones arse after taking a shit?funny how certain things stick in the fading memory…
March 1st, 2008 at 11:34 am
Notice how Chris nearly ALWAYS seems to have fag on in these pics?
March 1st, 2008 at 11:43 am
I had a live tape of Black Flag / Black Cross / Carnage, Dan, back in the mists of time (1981-ish)…and some rehearsal recordings (that I got from Andy Martin)…
I remember articles on the band in a few fanzines – New Crimes (by Graham Burnett out in Southend) being a particular one…
I imagine that stuff has been consigned to history somewhere along the way…
Thinking of the lyrics: Yes, ironic distance indeed – but it’s quite funny out of context…
The original lyrics to ‘The Master Race’ had some choice moments: “Haile Selassie? Highly suspicious!” and “This is a nation with a National Front, a government, a monarchy, a fucking cunt!” being two that always cracked us up back then…
Oh – and how could you forget “Child molesters, rapists too: they’ll and die…and so will you!”…Absolute genius…
March 3rd, 2008 at 1:14 am
Notice how Chris nearly ALWAYS seems to have fag on in these pics?
haha…i WAS the Bryan Ferry of Anarcho-punk!
March 3rd, 2008 at 10:00 am
I always remember you saying how much you admired Nazi architecture…
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Hi Guys,
Siii from the Heretics here, cheers for uploading the tape, your collective memories from that period are incredible and put me to shame I’m afraid.
That was definately the Heretics, but I’m not sure what song it is. I can tell you that Sniper had been replaced on drums by Scarecrow by that stage and I suspect that I might well have left the band by then. I’ll drop Sam a line and see if he can confirm the title of the track/history of the tape it came from etc.
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:00 pm
and please see if you can look out any other recordings anyone might have of the band while you’re at it mate!
March 4th, 2008 at 11:57 am
The sniper of “tramp punks” fame used to visit luke often at leconfield rd off of petherton,early 84 when we shared a house there.He habitually wore a “I am not lord lucan” t shirt which he was hoping would stop him getting arrested on spurious grounds on a daily basis.It didnt work.
Later that year I was subject to an unofficial banning order from their turf (as they put it) by highbury police and shown a list of unsolved burgalaries that they had assigned to me.And they meant it.From then on it was stop and search,thrown out of new squat and roughed up daily.Exit stage left to stonehenge and return to camden town.I knew then how sniper felt.
But I dont know if he was in the band as our conversations were largely centered around sulphate,codeine linctus and glue.
March 5th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Chris,
I think I’ve got a couple of Heretics rehearsal tape tapes and old photos of the band somewhere if they would be of any interest? I suspect the quality is a bit ropey though.
I haven’t got a clue how you do this uploading malarky, so if I can find them, maybe I could forward them on to you to work your interweb magic?
Sean, last known sighting of “our” Sniper was from the early-mid 80’s in Hackney, so probably the same fella.
March 5th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
yes sir!! that would be brilliant, please email me again and ill send you my address. glorious stuff!
April 16th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Lack Of Knowledge / Apostles.
Ponders End Youth Club.
Think it was on xmas eve 81.
Ponders End as featured on Thames News as one of the worst council estates in UK.HaHa. Just seemed normal to us.
Apostles were great.
April 25th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Yup all those Chickens come home to roost.
Its a recording of ‘No Character ‘ Written by me!!
the singer.Sam always wrote our songs except for this one.
recorded in Sams bedroom.Dunno how it got out of there.
Scarecrow (ex Chaos Uk or UK Chaos or whatever)was on drums.Although my ’singing was shite,’Sniper’ Phil, could not drum in any way at all..
Sii I think you were on bass but it might have been ‘wankstain’ Mark Darrington.I just cant remember.
How excellent there is a copy.I want one for me nieces.
How not so excellent that the article on us on ‘Nihilism on the prowl’ site has me tagged as ‘ a rich kid from Hampstead slumming it’
Pretty funny though.
Hello to any one who knew me from that time.
April 25th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Just listenend to it.Fucking hell thats awful.
I knew what it was ‘cos some random punk turned up with it once, to our gaff in NW6, a few years later. He seemed to think it was ‘an underground classic’.To this day i have no idea how it got out of Sams bedroom.I remember now the ‘line up’
It was recorded on a pissing single deck cassette recorder…
Crow had only 2 drums,one was from Sams drum major club days.And maybe a high hat.
Theres no bassist at all.
Sii had left but we hadnt got anyone else.My singing is truly rubbish. Sams, actually even then, an ok guitarist.
Crow the only one with any talent is holding it all together.Dont wanna sound nostalgic or any thing but somtimes I still miss him…Must be something to do with carrying on that life that killed him but surviving it, eh. blah blah
Can I get a copy of it or is it now on my hard drive.
My nieces will find it hilarious.
This site run by Tony D?
Hello mate good to see you’re still putting it out there.
Mr Simon.Hello mate. If u got some pics. I’d be interested.
My mail is ‘baronvonzubb@hotmail.com’
Cheers for all your efforts on this site
J
April 25th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Me again..
Sos to be boring .
But who were the Apostles? And why the fuck were they writing songs about ‘autonomia opereia’.
Can’t remember any punks in the London Autonomists (the Monday Group/went on to be Class war) ‘cept me & ‘wank’.
Once it all started getting serious in ‘80 & ‘81, my memory is that punks generally preffered to write rather than riot..
What i cant believe is that we all lived through that period of ’street uprisings’ so it must have happened.But do they ever mention it when they do retrospectives on the box or in the papers about the ’80’s? .Do they fuck.Brixton & Winston Silcott get a fleeeting mention but the rest, its erased from history.
Bye bye
April 25th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Re the Black Flag/carnage gig at ‘a cinema in Southend with the Sinyx’ – actually it was Focus Youth Centre next to Southend Victoria Station, venue of many a classic punk gig back in the day, including The Erattics, and local lads Sinyx, Kronstadt Uprising and their many antecedents (Including Slash Wildly and the Cut throats who are mentioned in Alex Ogg’s Punk book, The Icons, The Nihilsist Corps, Stripey Zebras, 86 Mix (who were more a Fall/PiL/arty type band who never forgave me for getting them a gig at the old Wapping Anarchy Centre where they went down like a lead balloon with the open minded anarcho crowd because they were ‘different’…) and many others… I remember the Black Flag gig, it was in the main theatre part of the building (hence the understandable confusuion with ‘a cinema’), which was normally reserved for ‘proper’ gigs and productions, mostly the bands played on a little stage in the main social area, there would be a bout 30 or 40 punks and the like who’d come to see the band, whilst the usual youth club crew would continue their games of pool oblivious to the racket emanating from the stage…
April 25th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
Hi Rich Kid, yes I’m Tony D. and I’m running a site like this in the 21st Century!
Mainly for the reasons you put in your post at 1.03pm – we are erased from history.
But we live….and the time will live on.
April 26th, 2008 at 10:57 am
My poor nephew, hes so bemused, & confused.And amused that hes got a punk rocker uncle.His nick name for me is ‘unlegee’.Now ‘punclegee’
Simon if u got other recordings i’d be interested in getting a copy.
And cleaning them up somehow.
Particularly ‘what did I do’ & ‘victim’
Both written by Sam.’What did I do’ is actually a brilliant punk ballad.If we’d stayed together it may have become our ’sig’ tune.Showed Sams potential.
Sii when you left ,the band inmploded.Why did you do it?
Cheers Tony.Dunno if u remember me at all but good on yer.And hello to your sis too
J
April 26th, 2008 at 11:42 am
OK, I have stuck the photo of Jake (Rich Kid) with Iggs of Crass, and a picture of The Heretics up with this post, if you care to look at it now above…
I would love to upload more stuff. Photos and tapes if anyone has them at hand…Si if you have already contacted Chris on this matter then I can get them off him easily enough and then return.
April 26th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/be/Apostles.jpg
And heres a pic of The Apostles when they played in Southend at the Spread eagle pub in Victoria Avenue, about 100 yards up the road from the New Crimes HQ/my house, his was taken on 5th December 1981, and isn’t that Dan at the foreground of the photo? other bands that played that night were Stripey Zebras, 86 Mix, What Is Oil? and I think The Get, can’t remeber who else?? I do remember that DIY cassette mogul Dean Poole (later of Living Legends and Class War) came all the way from Penarth in wales to attend this gig…
When we booked the gig the landlord of the Spread Eagle, which was our local at the time (and still was up until about 2 years ago…) asked what sort of ‘concert’ we were putting on, we told him that it was ‘just a few local pop groups’ the night of the gig he rang me at home in a state of panic when all the crusty anarcho-squat crew who’d come down with The Apostles were camped out on the pavement outside the pub…
But by the end of the evening he was thoroughly enjoying himself and actually dancing to the Apostles IIRC – which probabaly upset them no end!!! He then got his mate up and they did some kind of R’n'B drums and vocals duet… surreal! but punk as funk when you think about it…
Just listening to the download right now and having flashbacks to the old days of roneo-ing New Crimes, turning the handle til 3 in the morning and pissing off my mum by getting ink all over the dining room carpet…
April 27th, 2008 at 10:10 am
G’day.
The deserved fame & notoriouty that eluded me thus far has arrived….
Youre a bunch of stars for still keeping on.
All the other bands on the tape were real bands..They gigged & recorded things.
Us , as I ve been informed by Chris(same one as above I know not) from of the article in ‘nihilism on the prowl’ ,only ever gigged once.(and he remembers where!!)This maybe true certainly no more than 3 times..I have vague memories of other gigs but possably with ‘The Shit’,the previous effort.
I do remember gorgeous Liz(now she WAS the daughter of some minor gentry) greeting me when we turned up in some squat in Kennington with ‘Oi, youre Mr I hate flowers’.
How & where she managed to
A) hear the song & B) remember it, was & is a mystery to me.
Penguin,cheers for your efforts.How you manged to suss out which pic is of me & ‘Iggs’ I dunno.Its the right pic, I remember it, but dunno who anyone is in it..
Seeing as this may be a place for info, a question.
Does anyone know what happened to Aussie Bob, & Ruth & Lisa.And Mitch?I know Bob & Lisa were in a band, made a single, were on peelie etc but after that ? And Ruth? And Mitch(the girl)?Saw her at the BGG 10 years ago but I never got to find her & rap.
Any ideas?
cheers agian
j
April 27th, 2008 at 10:26 am
Sos another double post…
Dammac you went to school with Sams little bruvva?
I cant even remember he had a little bruvva.His big one was a reggae/soul DJ though.
On reading all the posts now, its clear you all kind of still know each other.Like Sii knows Chris, (the same as who ive been emailing i realise) mails Sam in the US. Chris mentioned ‘womble’ & ‘Thing’ & & others who i doidnt know& someone knew Phil(sniper)and you all …Blimey
So any news on the above Q would be much appreciated
Eeh Oop
April 27th, 2008 at 11:45 am
Rich bloke, Bob is well and contacts this site every now and again. Some of his texts are on this site if you search for Bob Short. He has a myspace site
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=126146745
which he can be contacted on.
Ruth left a comment a little while ago on the Hagar The Womb Morterhate Records 1983 (search for this using search function top right). Keep that post alive by commenting on it, maybe she will see it and answer back. The Mitch I knew was not a girl, but a stocky bloke, used to be in Flack and Hagar, and since those days is a fixture of doing the sound at a load of London based gigs. Saw him about a year ago.
It must be said that myself, Tony D and Alistair have access to all emails addresses on the comments posted, but would not like to make these public to all and sundry. Hope you understand this. Many people commenting on this site you will probably know…hope you have not scared off members of your family with the sound of those tracks above!
April 27th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
I think the Ruth meant is not Hagar Ruth but Ruth-less Ruth – Pinki used to mention her when talking about Campbell Buildings. She may be mentioned in Bob’s writings.
Female Mitch – is there a photo of her in ‘Puppies and their friends’? Will have a look.
Lisa Kirby (Blood and Roses Lisa)… lost touch with her after I left London. Which is eleven years ago now. She was married to Ralph _____ who produced “You’re unbelievable” by EMF.
April 27th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
In Westbere Road section of photos there is a photo of a female Mitch taken by Val. See it here
http://s208.photobucket.com/albums/bb227/killyourpetpuppy/Westbere%20Rd%20-%20Puppy%20Mansions%202/?action=view¤t=Mitch.jpg
April 27th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Umm, yes AL, a decent example of different age groups there!
I was thinking early 1980’s, not late 1970’s!
I recognise Mitch the girl now though, think Val said she was the house best shop lifter, would that be correct?
The Bob Short link is good though Rich Bloke.
April 28th, 2008 at 10:33 am
haha, Rich Kid, i’m Chris Low of the Apostles, who Sii has been in touch with, but I think you may be emailing ANOTHER Chris!
You weren’t ‘Brixton Jake’ who was friend with Caroline K of Nocturnal Emissions? If so i met you lots of times in the early ’80s but had no idea you were the same character who had been in The Heretics.
Funny to read of the London Autonomists/Monday Group. I’ve known Martin Wright & Ian Slaughter since the early 80s, shared flats with both and still see them regularly. Met Martin at that RAR carnival in Victoria park yesterday in fact. Both are mentioned in Ian Bone’s highly entertaining autobiography and are still doing their own thing and well.
Hope you’re well. As soon as Pengy has some time off from nappy-changing I hope to meet up with him and get the Heretics tape (plus photos) to him so WATCH THIS SPACE!
April 28th, 2008 at 11:56 am
Nah, aint the bloke AKA as ‘brixton jake’.(I am apparantly I discovered recently AKA ‘Karakoram Jake’.But thats another time altogether.) Brixton?Never lived there.I think.And I dont think I know of Nocturnal Emmisions, the band.
But OK your not the Chris I been emailing .Hes Chris Clarke.I get that now.
But youre mates of Martin W?.Blimey.How come I’ve never heard of The Apostles?
My poor brain.You sound like you were in the thick of it.Maybe its a few years later?
Cos, we (our little posse) went off to seriuosly worship at the alter of Morpheous after the riots in early ’80’s.Then to Asia, so lost contact with the London Anarchos. I squatted again in Ldn briefly in the late ’80’s but not lived there since.
I did know a ‘Caroline W’, one of Mr Wrights ex’s . She is still mates with a mate of mine Ian , (Rising Free/Monday Group sort of)who Martin may remember.Or choose not to.
Also still mates with Angie who was with Andy Sutton.(2 Monday Group folk)and her daughter who goes to the anarchist bookfair regularly.
I also knew Danny Wright.(& Brian Gill etc, being ‘junkies’ our paths crossed…)I actually heard from somewhere that Martin died too, but obviously not.Good luck to him.
Glad to hear you were all at VP .So was my niece!!I stayed in & put on me slippers…All that noise & people !It rained , no?
Cheers for your inputs .Glad to hear of Bob – yeah Bob short was actually tall it all comes back to me…- and Lisa.
It is The Ruthless I was wondering about.
And Mitch.Yep ,she was a dabb hand at the old proletarian shopping.Werent we all?This interweb its a funny old thing , eh?
When i get aminute,Im gonna post some questions of a sociological – not scatological – type on the Toxic Graffity thread in Southern Record forum.(who ARE ’southern records’?)
Stuff thats erked me about the counter culture in this time. (Here it doesnt seem the place for that.)Might amuse you all ?
Njoy your day
j
April 28th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Yes indeed,yet another double post from me.
P, a great pic of Mitch.Noone knows where she is now?
And somewhere you must,surely must, have pic of I.
My vanity cant hold back.
Actually I have only one pic of me from that era so with the 2 on this site that makes 3!
Someone picd Del (Blibum)from Harrow squated in Kennington.(We later shared police cells together.oh what fun) and me in youre kitchen!
Does anyone remember an article in Paris Match(yep…)’the last of the punks’?Was from 1978 taken at the old street squat.I remember lots of pics of KYPP folk Mitch,Mark Darrington ‘Wankstain’ (Replaced Sii as our bassist- hes recently -coupla years ago- completed 8 [ouch] years in Morrocon jail.Makes my short sharp shock in Klong Prem ‘the bkk hilton’ look like a kids game…) the Aussie Crew, Ruth etc
Where might one find an article like that now?
Cheers RB
April 28th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Rich Kid, it was Danny Wright who died , but before departing to the great opium den in the sky he penned an autobiography (under the nomme de plume ‘Lux’) which has recently been reprinted: “Camden Parasites” on Phoenix Press books. here’s the press release I wrote for it:
“The Camden Parasites” by Daniel Lux
“I sometimes lay in the warm bath reflecting upon my misspent life. I’d lived the life of a star, girls flocking all around, drugs aplenty, yet without having to live onstage or have any achievement whatever…..I was just a thieving junkie living in a squat.”
Now receiving a long awaited re-print due to the book’s cult status and high demand, Camden Parasites is the real life autobiography of Danny Lux, long time heroin addict, con-man, petty thief and philanderer who died of an overdose just weeks before the first publication of his greatest achievement of all.
Written while resident at Arlington Road homeless hostel, the narrative charts Danny’s tragically short but turbulent life. From the extreme poverty of his childhood to his experiences of the world of extreme wealth in the social circles he penetrated.
Described as having ‘more vein-popping than Trainspotting’ Camden Parasites is a no-holds-barred roller-coaster ride through Danny’s first school-boy brushes with the law, introductions to drugs, crime, theft, squatting and the early days of punk in London through to mental break-downs, addiction, hepatitis, homelessness & destitution. The only light ever shining at the end of his tunnel being the temporary comfort afforded by the daughters North West London’s privileged classes drawn to his quick wits and rough diamond charm like moths to a flame.
Irrepressible, unrepentant and unromanticised, Camden Parasites is possibly the most accurate depiction of a life spent in poverty and addicted to drugs as yet committed to print. Debunking the popular glamorised myth of the opium-addicted author as brutally as it depicts the endless cycle of unemployment, poverty, homelessness and the marginalised lifestyle it creates.
Dying from an overdose just two days before his 41st birthday, “Danny”, in the words of his brother Martin, “spent his entire adult life either on smack or trying to come off it.”
“His modus operandi was: find a posh girl, get her to fall in love with him…allow her to pay for everything and steal from her friends”
“He was an extreme drug abuser from an early age….articulate and charismatic, with a slimy charm which people found irresistible. He had absolutely no ambition whatsoever to do anything if any kind. He contracted hepatitis through dirty needles and was quite happy about that because he got more money through sickness benefit and the dole stopped hassling him. He was one of the greatest bullshitters who ever lived.”
martin has also written a book about his battles with the NF/BM from the early to late 1970s called ‘Anti-fascist’ – by Martin Lux.
both well worth a read, and who knows, you may even be mentioned in one of them!
Caroline W. – yes, know her well. Stays in Archway now and I bump into her every now and then.
April 28th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Rich bloke, here is a picture of Old Street that we uploaded onto the photos part.
http://s208.photobucket.com/albums/bb227/killyourpetpuppy/Life%20before%20Puppy%20Mansions/?action=view¤t=ParisMatchOldSt.jpg
Loads of people photographed but quality (after 30 years) of being under in a box under Vals bed is not so great. Next photo is a pic of Bob Short taking it easy in one of the rooms.
There is at least two great essays if you search for Bob Short using the search function. Around the time span 1978 – 1980 that you were around. Old Street, Derby Lodge and Campbell Buildings being mentioned amonst other places.
Here is another interesting piece by Andy Martin (Andee Martian) who went on to form The Apostles probably when you left the UK? It is currently housed in the SQUATTING section
http://s208.photobucket.com/albums/bb227/killyourpetpuppy/Print%20material/?action=view¤t=KYPP12.jpg
Also seems like Chris has got a tape full of The Heretics. I will go see him and stick it up this week.
If you have any photos at all, see if you can get them scanned and emailed to me, if you know not what to do, then check a younger family member cos they seem to be wizards with the techno stuff. Get our details via the CONTACT option above.
I do need photos for this post of the band or relevent to the band (anyone got the Heretics in TG 4 to scan in? Actually maybe Chris has this also, will ask).
Tony, Val and Bob should add to this thread. They were there sharing experiances (as no doubt others were also, but these three are easy to write out!).
Also Rich Kid check out Blood And Roses material by searching for it, Bob and Lisa’s band. The EP on Kamera Records 1983 is immense.
April 28th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
yea, Micky, I’ve got some glorious high quality photos of The heretics from the same session as the ones that appeared in Toxic grafity were taken.
will get em to you with the tape when we meet. will try to give you a scan of the whole TG feature too as it’s an utter classic.
April 28th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
My pics of me as a 15 year old punky.Looking way too camp.It aint goin on the net…
Yep heard about this book .But thought he died much earlier like 10/15 or more years ago.Or maybe that was Eddie or Gill others from his crew.
Were The Apostles linked to The Mob? I got a vague memory of meeting a guy Andy maybe, in India or somewhere & we had a good old rap about the old days.Or am I making it up ? I dunno.
Cheers for all the links .And b4 that article gets put up , if it does, I never said ’squatting is a thing of intelligence’ Dibbol changed it.
I said ‘give us another go on that evostick Phil’ .Honest.
April 28th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
brilliant pics.
Christ that bit about St Monicas & Cambell bgs is very fucking moving.Im gutted to find something about it in print.
I went squatting cos I met ‘Sgt Heresy’ (while he was still on the run in ‘78) in Archway & met Cory & Phil and all that lot.Then later sorted him out with St Monicas where he got nicked & put in Armely.
When he got let out,as I was temporarly at me folks , they offered to put him up too.(they were & still are way too nice)
I fucking hated Cmble Bdgs I had a mate who was actually from the tennement opposite & he was fosterd out to a family in Queens Pk, where i met him.He couldnt understand what we were doing there.
Anyway ‘Crow died there, Robbo got in a bit of trouble(hopefully you remember I really cant mention the specifics as its still not ’settled’)and I got made ward of court by my folks .I didnt want to go on the run.(That was to be a few years later…).And i fuckin hated tuinol.For me that place destroyed many things.And fuck we really did have to barracade the door against fucking maruading scouse loonies .It was insane .
But man, that I never imagined anyone wrote anything or could have kept it together to keep it.
Its on my hard drive now
April 29th, 2008 at 9:21 am
mr kid – highly unlikely you met andy from the apostles in india but coulda been andy ashford who was a mate of the mob and myself and passed through asia on his way to oz in the mid 90s. did he have straw in his hair and talk about tractor racing and cider as he is a west country lad. re sams brother – last name morrow? mum and dad lived in west hampstead?
April 29th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Yeah thats Sam for sure.I just cant remember he had a little bruva.But as i speak I sort of do.Spose that is the Andy I remember.
After I came off line & prepered the caviar bellinis(vegan of course)or whatever us rich blokes eat, with a million memories of that time, from reading that bit about it.
There was dosser killed in cmbl bgds by one of ‘ours’.Awful.And ‘robbos’ mate from brum , rolled a queer , killed him by mistake, then jumped out of window 5 stories in panache & was paralised from the neck down.He was 17 for fucks sake & got HMP for his trouble.Im glad I was only actually living there a month.It was hell.
I remember Tony D gave me a ‘buddhist punk’ badge.
I thought it was hilarious & v excellent.
And if I am anything now it is those 2 seemingly conradictory things.
And it must have been the KYPP crew at Westbere Rd who told me about WHHA?
Which led on to some very mad places, 66A -the place TG Mike Dibbol lived after he first left home (and also Ian from SthnDeathClt for a bit).KYPP mate from germany lived there at the start too.Played bass.
There was also a Pirate Radio stn from there later. Kieth interviewd Mdme Xray spex herself in the kitchen & 107 Iverson more & worse of the same badness & then Medina Ave ,Basement .There were 8 of us in a 1 bedroom.
Then we all went west & opened some some big squats in Ladbroke Grove.
Think Sam must have been in Aus.It was Me ‘wank’ ‘mad robbo’ Ex Kennington & cmbl bdgs ,keith jones -ethnic Indian byron quoting skinhead from the Cmbl Bdg days,now also dead- Ian (rising free).gretchin (sister of ‘anna ‘ friend of Nihilism on the prowl person) ‘Slug’ , fostered out of tennement opp Cmbl Bdgs,Mitch the girl (I think.Was with Robbo)Tony Black bassist in Sam & Robbos reggae band from B4 & our mate Nick.
We knew Nick Brandt (‘Refuse’ pro situ rag).
In our place in the Grove he met Tessa also ex cmble bgds & off they went kiting together.Possibly with Mitch also.What a bizzare combo.Of course they got nicked.Neither of them ‘having the art’
Anyway Im sure Ive bored you all to tears by now,if youve got a sort of network going you probably heard all there is to hear by now anyway. once it comes it dont stop.
However I do remember now after being so moved by that piece about that time.There is another source for stuff like that.I plain 4got.I wrote this rubbish book that chronicles a fictional character ‘josh’ from getting expelled from school/punk/smack/Ldn autonomist etc to chucking molies at the boys in blue in ‘81.(It was written on a hill in Tamil Nadu in say, 1990 after Kumbh Mela.Consequntly,as a book its full of condesending pro situ garbage & other self important verbose guff & quite rightly got rejected by eveyone including AK press!)
However it does include some ok descriptions of squats in archway,St Monicas & lambeth. Also the uprisings in ‘81. I aint bothered in putting it on My Tube or Goggle books or whatever but if this sounds interesting to anyone I could scan a few relevent pages in & send them along to be included in ’squatting’ section on this site or wherever.If so I’ll dig it out.
Cheers RB
April 29th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Hello Jake!
Sam here. Me and Si have never lost touch and have often wondered what you were up to. Insane times indeed and I too wonder how we ever lived through it. But many didn’t. I’m in touch with ‘Robbo’ too who’s living in Manchester, married, 2 kids (and a Ford Cortina and a Vauxhall Viva). But seriously, I’m proud of him. More than any of us he had to pull himself up by the bootstraps and he’s got a life he loves. That’s hysterical that you think ‘What did I do’ was a great punk ballad. It was one of the many bitter songs I wrote about me and Anna splitting up and ended….”So why did I kill you?”. Embarrassing but that’s being 17 I suppose. I’m still playing music, albeit the banjo in a bluegrass band called The Dixie Bee Liners. We’re doing really well at the moment and had a #1 album for several weeks. It amazes me that we had a set of 15 or so songs (which as you say never really got played live) as we were only together for 6 months or so and were all musical idiots. They weren’t bad songs though. I remember No Character and recording it in my bedroom. This was after Si had left as you say. Wank may have rehearsed with us once but he had a similar approach to his hero Mr Vicious I seem to remember. Sorry to hear of his Moroccan incarceration. I always wondered what had happened to him. Me and Robbo assumed he’d died. The last I saw of you was in that squat in Ladbroke Grove. I was in Australia for a year and a half which did eventually get me off the smack. I got hepatitis in England before I left and like an idiot continued using. I worked as a roadie in Aus which was a shock to the system as none of us had done anything approaching ‘work’ for several years. Anyhow, when I got off the drugs I was definitely puritanical about avoiding users for a long time, but I think you have to be. I cut myself off from all of you and there was a fair amount of bad blood (literally) between us all. Funny looking back at that post-punk period and how fast everything went down the toilet. 66A was very creative for a bit, then the heroin and Iverson Rd was a dark pit of despair in my memory. I remember the bitchiness from all sides and robbing and the winter in Kilburn. Australia freaked me out because it was so sunny and people were comparatively wealthy and positive.
I live in Virginia, close to Tenessee and am attempting to be a professional musician, though I teach art at a local university. Are you living in London? I heard a rumour you were with the Convoy? That piece by Bob about Campbell Buildings is strangely moving. Amazing as I remember him as a drooling barb freak. Maybe Tuinol’s good for the memory.
Sam
April 29th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
66A is now a shiny office block by the way.
April 29th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Me and Si had a nostalgic trip back to Acton Central where Trax rehearsal studios was a couple of years ago. A charming day out. The hardware shop where Sniper purchased his dowling drumsticks is still there as is the caf where we had tea at 7.00 in the morning. Why we agreed to rehearse at this ridiculous hour is beyond me though ‘because we were stupid’ seems to be the most logical explanation. We did get a call from Discharge’s manager after the interview came out who wanted us to send a demo tape. We sent similar stuff to what’s available here interspersed with Indian music off the radio. I love the fact we took the piss and didn’t take it seriously. Yer youngster today’d have a flashy demo and promo materials ready to go in a few days. There is a tape of I Hate Flowers which is 15 minutes long and was undoubtedly our best number. It’s like a very retarded Syd Barrett song.
Here is a bit of dialogue that I meticulously copied from one of our early rehearsal tapes with Sniper. What a funny film it would make:
JAKE “What a cretin…he’s making a cup of tea…in the middle of a fucking song maaaaan!”
SAM “Phil…come on…”
SI “Phil we’ve only got an hour left…”
JAKE “I swear he’s definitely the thickest person I’ve ever met in my life…he makes a cup of tea in the middle of a song. What a gimp”.
[Si and Sam protest in the background]
JAKE “No….no let him make the cup of tea. He’ll be happy…I shall go and find the time, right? Let Phil have his tea”.
PHIL “Yeah let me have my tea”.
JAKE “Shut up idiot”.
SAM “Shall we find out what time it is?”
SI “No…leave it out…just keep playing ’til he buzzes”.
SAM “Does he buzz?”.
[ATTEMPT AT GETTING PHIL TO PLAY IN TIME TO STEPPING STONE]
PHIL “Hold it, hold it, hold it! Me bass pedal’s gone!”
JAKE “Oh God…[pause]…he never uses it so I don’t know why he’s bothered”.
SAM “Play it Si” [so Phil can try to play in time]
PHIL [incredulous] “I just lost the fucking beat completely”
[Si plays bass line very slowly. Phil drums roughly twice the speed of the bass line]
JAKE [Black person impression] “Right on mon…lay that funky beat on me!”
SAM “Just keep going…”
SI “Just show him how to play it Sam…”
SAM “Alright….”
[Sound of guitar being put down and shuffling around the kit]
SI “No….not on the drums! On the guitar!”
SAM “Oh I see, right…”.
[Sam plays the riff very slowly]
SI “He’s got it! He’s got it! He’s got it!”
SAM “OK…lets do the reggae version at the end”
SI “No…bollocks…”
[Si and Sam bicker in the background while Phil continues to keep time. Si comes in with the bass line and Phil starts playing a different beat]
JAKE “What’s he doing?”
April 29th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Fucking hell !!
I was gonna ask someone to ask Sii to get u to post…
Hello Sam.Great to hear ur OK. The guy from ‘nihilism on the prowl’ sed you were teaching art in the US .He didnt mention the music.Good on yer mate & lets hope for more # 1 albumns.
toonwise ‘what did I do? ‘is still a great punk ballad.I’d forgot the last line..But as we can see now , even then you had a songwriting talent..’Lambeth Skyline’ is a great song I remember.
Your posts are what I’d post, word for word mate.It was all very intense.I can add nothing.
And that thing about Phil (Sniper/Sgt Heresy)making a cuppa.I remember it now.I was shocked.Not only could he not drum in any way but he didnt want to either.Ooh such a loveable rogue.
Theres a tape of ‘I hate flowers’.? Oh no, as you said ‘retarded’ it was. Still, send it to these chaps and we can all get embarassed together…Oh and about that Disscharge tape.I bet they binned it cos they knew we were just too good.
And how brilliant it is that youre in touch with Robbo.Im proud of him too! He got an MA in nuclear engineering (?) But he was a reject from YP with ‘fuck society’ tattoed on his hand when we met him.Its a good story, that hes settled & happy.Give him ‘my regards’ or whatever the correct phrase is.Or if you see him, a big hug from me. Its superfine to hear that hes well, very supafine.
I contacted Gretchin through her dad a few years ago(shed not spoken to Anna in 10 years or something) who told me about Mark , who I aint seen in 20 years either.
She though,was not in a good state. Maybe an alki.And I think some relationship probs.Quite shocking to see her like that. She had a kid, living in Brixton
Then, like 6 months later, she phones me up out of blue says shes pregnant & needs a place to stay.She realy wasnt in a good space.I felt bad but I couldnt do it. You know sometimes we gotta keep up the barriers.But a year later she phoned up again , she’d left her geezer, moved to Wales , had another kid and was all OK .Very reticent about what had gone on.I might call on her if I’m ever in Wales.
So me?I never went on the rd with the convoy but did live in the west country & hung about alot on travellers sites when I was in the UK.But by then I didnt want to take anything , like you, got puritanical about it, not even ‘e’ so as I saw mates go from ‘e’ to ‘gear I sort of bailed out.
I’ve been overland to Asia 3 times & spent about 8 years in Asia of the last 2 decades.Some big trips of a couple of years or more.Just carried on the badness but in Asia.
Me & the missus both had the luck to spend my 25th Birthday courtesy of the king of Thailands ‘Klong Prem’ jail.Only 3 months but it did have the effect of indicating what the future held for me if i didnt sort it out.So cheers to the king!
Based in somerset on & off late ’80’s for a decade.’In recovery’
But now we’re in ’sunny brighton’ We? Yep, Im still with kay. thats 24 years folks.Did u meet her? [Robbo certainly knows her(too well...)She was with Tom Doyle before me.I think you might have been in Aus.] We saved each other from crime destitution & prison.
And replaced it with well, crime destitution & prison.Well for a bit.No seriously its all good.I do small landscaping jobs to keep it all going, inhabit a small but very nice & sunny flat 2 mins from the seafront.Got a 12 year old motor & run windows ‘ME’.Go to asia every winter, for a coupla months.No kids (by chioce), no mortgage,(cheap rent) 3 god kids 2 nieces & a nephew.
Thankfully none of our posse got aids but we all have hep C(if you aint been checked it might be an idea.Kids U got 1 orarnet 2usually born with it bust can get it from our ‘dirty blood’
April 29th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
Dunno why it posted in mid flow..
Anyway,about kids.If u got a family & aint been checked it might be an idea.Its realy not a problem to manage.
Its definately better to know than not to.
One has to get a bit herb T ish but never mind.
Blimey .
When I asked to trace a couple of old pics on the ’southern record Crass forum’ I thought I’d get some geek offering me an copy of TG for £££. I never imagained ‘the legend’ ,tapes & good news of old mates.
Its a blast, it realy is.
Give Robbo a bell & get him to post a hello .That would be fuckin unreal
Mr Sii, as enegmatic as ever.What u up to?
Must be bloody borin’ for the rest of yer on this heretics reunited subforum though…
If ur ever in the UK or Brighton we could go for drink .Its been long enough, probably..
Good luck to you & yours
cheers mate
April 29th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
Its funny reading back my post .My life sounds a bit daggy,’hep C’, old rusty cars & holy carpets.But it aint at all.No rust ,no holes. I got a suntan & we got some Ikea units too!!
No one seen Phil since the ’80’s? Is that right?
Sam Im gonna google youre band, u old muka
Eeeh Ooop
April 29th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Which Phil ? If it is Fast Phil/ Phil Ritchie I got an e-mail from him a few months ago. It had some photos. I will post them here on KYPP today.
April 29th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Oi Sam on your website there a pic of playerless banjo.Why pray tell might that be?You aint still got a Mohican ?
April 29th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
I read that rehersal dialogue & i just cant stop laughing.Its a masterwork.
April 29th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
Dont think Phils name was Ritchie but I’m not sure.Wasnt it some weird northern name, something we couldnt pronounce ?
April 29th, 2008 at 11:40 pm
Jake, I will upload those writings if you find them, sounds interesting, and am sure some of the folk on this site would get some interest in what you have to say esp as a lot of the ‘fiction’ may have touched other people that browse this site, who are old enough to remember, or to have experienced Kings Cross, Kilburn, Waterloo and Old St squats.
Get in touch when / if you find them and I will arrange either a pick up or a scanning session between us nearer the time.
Bob Short has a book out, it is a good read, but rather short if you excuse the pun. Find details for this book on this site somewhere by searching for Bob Short.
April 30th, 2008 at 12:30 am
Glad you’re doing well and well away from the junk. Nice to know I don’t have to add you to the list. The body count’s about 12 now for me. Sorry to hear about Gretch but maybe she’s ok now. I wrote to Peter too via his website but recieved no reply. I figured he thought ‘junkie scum’ and deleted the email. I wonder about Anna. Mike Clarke said he spotted her in Portobello a while back. What characters we knew back then. I remember that huge fight at Conway hall and Anna literally punching her way through all these skinheads and flying chairs to get to Gretchen on the other side of the hall. I’m sorry they had a falling out.
I’ll give Tony your email. It’s funny but he’s still the same character…just applying the same determination to nuclear engineering as he did to nicking pornographic Smurf comic books in Amsterdam.
I’ve got a 7 year old son and he’s not got Hep C, though I discovered I had it 15 years ago. My wife hasn’t got it either. Tony just found out he’s got it but, like you said, we were fucking lucky to avoid AIDS. You may be done with the past but the past isn’t done with you. Still, I wouldn’t change a thing and we lived through extraordinary times. I’d love to meet up for a piss up. I may be back this autumn or winter so I’ll let you know.
Sam
April 30th, 2008 at 12:35 am
This is the band’s MySpace page. There’s pics in the Pics section.
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=15184620
Sam
April 30th, 2008 at 12:38 am
You have to be a member to view them but here’s one:
http://a684.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/85/l_39a4c40cda6dc832320ecfee141f00cb.jpg
Hope this shows.
Sam
April 30th, 2008 at 1:02 am
Hi Jake! Well, I remember you. I remember sniffing zoff (or some such vile shit) and thinking you had a double line of eyes like Satan! No seriously, I think back and the picture that springs back to mind is that hallucination! That’s what happens when you open the doors of perception and forget to close the flyscreen door afterwards.
I wrote a story about St Monica’s called Halloween ‘79. I like to tell everyone it’s a work of fiction because no-one would believe it if I didn’t. I may have mentioned you in it but I haven’t read it back since I wrote it and I don’t have a copy here now.
I’m thinking the Phil you’re talking about was later known as Sniper. Phil Ritchie was known as Quick Phil (and not fast Phil) and the other Phil was Fat Phil AKA Doctor Who. (He used to go off into Time Warps which wasn’t nearly as exciting as one would imagine.) It’s been a while but I just have a vague memory that Sniper’s name was Phil. I may have been at the Dole Office with him when they said it! You know how it gets when everyone starts using their god damn super hero names and then they retire the cape. Last saw Sniper around 1981. He had a co-op flat in Stoke Newington in the Street than ran opposite to Bayston Road. Sniper constantly talked of the notion of the band the Heretics and I believe he considered them a going concern even in 81 despite their being no gigs, rehearsals or anything.
And Penguin, I apologise that the book is so short. Blame the Publisher. He only wanted books in that small format. As it was I had to fight for an extra two thousand words. Still, don’t talk about quantity. Let’s look at the quality! Look at the fabric. Admire the workmanship. Think of it as a flaming Ramones Song as opposed to a Yes Triple album box set!
April 30th, 2008 at 1:32 am
I remember a story about St Monica’s along the lines of a room spontaneously catching fire, then the flames completely disappearing. Wank told a great one about being accosted in the garden by a dwarf. Not a ’small person’ but an orc-like creature that spoke in a strange squeaky voice then ran away. Who knew such things hid amongst the gardens of Kilburn?
The best Heretics tapes we had were lent to Scarecrow who left them at his mum’s house. When he died no one had the heart to ask for them back. The tracks on the other page were from the first or second rehearsal with him. I remember the ones we lent as being much tighter with possibly less fuzz box squealing but maybe it’s rose tinted spectacles.
Jake – we had an idea for a N. London Jewish punk band to be named either ‘The Yid Kids’ or ‘The Boys Goyshe’. We were going to get one of your uncles to introduce the band:
“And now……The Yid Kids. What’s all the fighting about? Learn to live with your neighbours……………compromise a little………….”
Punk was blessed with a self-deprecating humour (which comes across in Bob’s book). This is usually absent from all the bullshit histories. There is a Jewish spoof Skrewdriver band called Hail The Jew Dawn, which I’d like to see.
April 30th, 2008 at 7:41 am
And don’t forget Jewdriver…
April 30th, 2008 at 9:23 am
G’day Bob.
You good?
Sam,How the hell can you remember the yid kids/boys goyshe? I still laugh to meself when I think about it.It would also have been legendery
You lost 12?Jesus mate.Did I know any of ‘em?Me, only ones I was close to were Crow & Keith. Theres a couple more but it came with the territory.
BTW I’m still very good mates with Tony Black.We were part of the same posse who went east.Hes in Wales married to Shamian(Chinese)They lived together in Taiwan for 10 years had a kid ‘Siddatha,’ which gives a clue to the influence & experiences we had in Asia.Of course ’sid’ now hates his name wants to go & live in kilburn with his cousins & be a ‘black alan sugar’.Hes one of our ‘god kids’, now 13.
Chinese /black mix, will no doubt be a babe magnet.
‘Spider’ – Neville- Sids favorite uncle is still in the same house .
‘Slug’ ,Simeon turned up there last year after 20 years.He’d been(bizzarly for him) teaching Yoga in California.But since then hes not contacted anyone.Shame , be good to see him.
Maybe I didnt make it clear but when Gretch called me later she was fine , coherent & a plaasure to talk to.So thats a good story too.
Alot of gossip but well y’know.I reckon the time is ripe for a reunion tour, web based fan club & the rest .C’mon blue grass king y’know it makes sense…
Actually I might do a wiki entry if i get off me middleaged bum, when i aint recovering from work.(landscaping is not ‘light duties’)Might be worth it if I can keep it funny.
Where this other page with our music on then? I can only get the ‘no character’track at the end of the comp tape above.
Sii still being enigmatic..
April 30th, 2008 at 10:43 am
…we used to sniff ‘thixofix’.What an apt product name for the future.And much better than acid if i remember rightly.
And wanks’ dwarf episode.He acttually came back quite frightened..
.Its all in my miesterwerk.Penguin,I’ll dig ‘em out.The writing ’style’ can be described as ‘pretentious’ but whatever.
‘Double line of eyes like satan’ I like that.
‘jew driver’ .’hail the jew dawn’.oh lord, briliiant..
Sam if we do ever meet up for a piss up is it gonna be a nice fluffy Hep C lets be kind to our liver
pissup or nasty heretic bollocks to all of it kind of piss up ?…
April 30th, 2008 at 10:57 am
Well feck me, as I live and breathe Jake!
How the Devil are you fella?
Not being enigmatic, just incompetent. I’ve been looking at the other Heretics download section and all the time the party’s been going on here.
You”ll find a few other piccies and rough recordings towards the top of the links/downloads section.
Ah Thixofix, the 16 year-old single malt of adhesives.
April 30th, 2008 at 11:59 am
Indeed, Thixo always delivered the goods: it’s Toluene-tastic!
April 30th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Here you go Jake…it’s like helping an old man get on the bus:
http://www.killyourpetpuppy.co.uk/news/?p=751#comments
I must admit, this site is a bit confusing. Thixofix was officially, that most 70s of things, cork tile adhesive. Every time my mum asked what the smell was in my bedroom I’d tell her I was putting up another cork tile notice board.
Personally I’d prefer the Heretics style ‘cut me own ‘ed off’ style drinking session but we can take it easy if you like. Maybe an apperetif of butane followed by a couple of shandies and round off the evening with some nail varnish remover. Actually I remember sniffing Cas’ nail varnish on our adventure in Hemel Hempstead. Me and Sii often joke about that trip as our plan to get home was to ‘take the milk train’. I imagined us riding Woody Guthrie-like on this mythical transportation but how did you find it and how did you know it was going to Kilburn as opposed to say Glasgow? How did you get off the milk train? Was there anywhere to sit on the milk train? We just got attacked by the Whitton Mob instead and scrounged a lift with some Damned fans from Crystal Palace who’d hired a coach.
Amazing you still know Tony Black. Last I saw of him was when I bumped into him late at night in West End Green in about 1984. We exchanged pleasantries for 10 minutes or so, then he asked if I could spare 50p ‘for something to eat’. I’d love to see Spider again.
Me and Leah used to mourn for Tony Black. We would reminisce how he came to us as a sweet, shy young man and within months turned into a slavering dope fiend. I lost contact with Leah about 10 years ago. She was last spotted being a sculptor in Ireland. One of those people I always immediately get along with. Another unique character.
April 30th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Hi there Jake and Sam – well, its been very entertaining reading through all of this thread! Good to hear about you both. Last time I remember seeing you Sam, was at Westbere when you lived there with Brett and Angie, looking at your photos (doing an art degree at St Martins?). I love the idea of your current band!
And Jake – we already did this fairly recently… Good to hear you’re doing well in Brighton – do you see much of John (from DD)?
April 30th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Erm, old man looking for the bus here.
Erm which Leah?You mean Leah & her mate Bridgitte ‘Scrubber’, Leah?The Leah who once said to me ‘thank god for warm blokes’ ‘cos she didnt have enough tuinol in her?
Hi Val
Erm which John & which DD.
At least Sii is just as slow as me…
‘Ah Thixofix, the 16 year-old single malt of adhesives.’
Indeed.
I’ve now got to negotiate this, sams & bobs site.Its gonna take me days…
April 30th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
Ooh, its all over there, on the other page.
That interview.
I remember that I may have had Phil down as quoted as, ‘the thickest person I ever met’ but he made much more sense on that day.
Me? I was trying to be clever & just sounded like a ‘girls willy’, eh Mr S
Great pics.Cheers for your efforts.
But seeing as our best tracks were ‘what did I do?’ ‘I hate flowers’ & ‘Victim’ and they aint around the legend is just gonna have to live on…
BTW its all ‘Crow on drums.Mr Heresy, he just couldnt do that.
Sam, no jokes,I still hum the tune of WDID as im mooching about sometimes.And if something goes wrong I just speed it up .
Always works .Great therapy.A classic tune.
…’I hate flowers
They make me sneeze
I hate flowers
and I havent got a hankerchief ‘…
Superb couplet..
Yeah well, Im now a landscaper, lots of plants involved,so this has, at times, become a problem.
Its been diagnosed as …
‘rhinitous’
How middle aged is that?
But..I wasnt lying.
Righty ho then, better send the link to ‘the heretics’ page to me niece, so she stops revising for her A S levels, gets all heretical & goes off to join the circus.
Again,cheers for all your efforts.
April 30th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
Sii , you good? What you up to mate?
April 30th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Sorry about the bus comment Jake but no offence meant. I’m speaking as someone who needs reading glasses to work a cell phone. And I usually get my boy to do it.
I hadn’t thought about the landscaper thing in relation to I Hate Flowers. That’s hysterical. It’s a great tune. I think the full verse is:
I hate flowers pink and yellow,
I hate flowers in my garden,
I hate flowers they make me sneeze,
I hate flowers and I haven’t got a handkerchief.
WDID is one of the songs which isn’t just a bunch of barre chord changes. I managed to work out a semi-Steve Jones/Chuck Berry thing. Most bands at this time all sounded alike as we took the Mark P ‘learn 3 chords – now form a band’ thing seriously. I think Nazi Born and Bred (or as Si said recently ‘Nazi B + B including full German breakfast’) is a good song though the recording’s shite. It includes the memorable line:
“We make pork pies
We make sausage rolls,
It tastes pretty bad but it’s good for the ego”.
I realized recently the tune is the same as Havana Affair by the Ramones which we liked a lot at the time. No Character is a good tune too.
I was referring to Leah who was good mates with Mitch for a long time…probably did hang about with Le Scrubere for a bit too. A refreshingly blunt individual to this day. I’d love to hear from her. I miss her a lot. And Mitch or ‘Meesh’ as skinhead John used to call her. Leah said she bumped into her (would have been 10-12 years ago now) and said she was into motorbikes and living in Brixton. She had a magnificent photo collection of EVERYONE. Be good to get them up on this site.
Val…good to hear from you. The last I saw you was indeed during my brief stint in Westbere Rd. Yeah I was at St Martin’s and later Royal College. Where are you living now? I remember you were good mates with Mitch at one time. Any sightings?
Sam
April 30th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
Here’s a couple of pics from back in the day:
Me. Bald. Carling Black Label. Slaughter Badge.
http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/2237/mexs6.jpg
Looking sappily in love. With Anna ‘79.
http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/9189/newstuff4tq0.jpg
Me and Mr C. 78 I think. I was eating Gypsy Creams (I have a photograpic memory for useless details).
http://img219.imageshack.us/img219/2551/newstuff2yl8.jpg
Campbell Buildings era. With Brummy Sue:
http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/8617/newstuff6tb6.jpg
April 30th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
Sam – stuck these up in photo gallery under subfolder ‘puppies and their friends’ – check out the other photos, there are loads and loads, example Westbere Road etc you may recognise a whole load of people.
Pete Dochety (recentish UK tabloid bad boy in case you do not know) ripped of your style then from the look of the last photo!
April 30th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
Cheers Penquin. Some familiar faces in there. I’ve got some others that I’ll post if you’re interested.
Sam
April 30th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Yeah go on then, just do it like you did before Sam.
April 30th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Hi Jake
It’s BrummieTony here , having read the blog it really is a blast from the past, glad to hear that your still alive and well, i thought you may have went under a few years ago.The last time I saw you was at Victoria Station in London in 1988 I had just finished my second year at Uni. It is great that you are still with Kate (I think that’s her name sorry) give her my regards. What the fuck ever to that Irish lunatic Tom Dolye or worse still Tom ( from the grave ) covney from West Hampstead, Christ what a life we had, it was just like a big shit mixer that threw people out and if you were lucky you survived. I stayed in Manchester following my graduation and now work in the Nuclear Industry, I am a Project Manager on large design and build projects, but also still a member of the exclusive look after your liver club which I think I graduated from at Daniels flat in Kilburn. Did I read you write that Mark Darrington spent 8 yrs in a Morocan Jail, what a fuckin nightmare what was the story behind that?. I joined the parachute Regiment reserve battallion in 1992 and served for 3 years, It was real crazy shit jumping out of Planes at 800 ft over Scotland with a 100lb pack , so in 1995 I said fuck this for a game of soldiers and went to work in HK for 5 yrs which was wild and really enjoyable.We left asia (Singapore ) and went travelling around the world for 6 months before returning to UK in 2000. I would love to see you and Kate one day in Brighton, but I don’t travel lightly these days, god knows what happended to Mitch, Keith Jones died of an overdose, what a whirl wind, speak soon, all the best
Tony,
May 1st, 2008 at 2:09 am
There you are Tony.
I’ve just remembered that the Heretics interview (without pics) was printed in a French surrealist magazine. Why would a country famous for its philosophical minds print the barely cohesive rambings of 4 retarded north Londoners? Do the French not like soul boys? Did they adopt Phil’s political doctrine of ‘wandering about’. ‘Squatting c’est un methode intelligente’.
May 1st, 2008 at 6:10 pm
Bloody hell.
G’day Tony.Hows your Cantonese.? Mines non existent…
I got vague recollections of gretchin burbeling on about you being in HK but she wasnt making too much sense.Actually I remember & this is funny.I dont know where I got it from but I remember phoning HK, some random no. on the island that Id been led to beleive was yours.Of course all I got was an irate cantonese lady.Ive got absolutely no clue who gave me that no. or when it was.Possibly someone who thought that they knew ‘a brummie called tony’ that I bumped into whilst over there.I dunno the chronology seems to be all out though.The whole incident seems more likely to be a senile dementia thing..
Bad memories …Tom Doyle & Coveny.TD last heard of in Dublin after completing a long stretch in UK.But thats probably 10/15 years ago?Again I dunno where I got that from.TC no idea.
Darringtons story? No idea , Gretch said it was a smuggling thing.Went on about his missus,who was in there too, like I knew her.But of course I didnt. What could I say?We met in a pub in Brixton, not a good day.But shes Ok now so its fine.
I remember at one point we were all gonna do a parachute jump..
Good on yer that you did.Wild
Anyway Sam , Sii ,Tony if we give all our gossip now we’ll have fuck all to talk about when we go for this liver friendly piss up.
Sams back later in the year.If we still wanna do it then I’m sure we’ll be able to sort it out.Travelling lightly is not compulsory.
No worries about the bus mate.I usually get on OK in the end..
So back to The Heretics.
I read that ‘interview’.
Why anyone let alone a surrealist mag would want to print it is beyond me .
But possibly because of the 12 mins that are absent?
That presuumably was when Jake Obvious, polemicist extrordinaire,
put forth his bittingly sharp overview of capitalist social relations & set out the anti statist principles he became known for;those which made him both an underground hero & such a target of state repression later in life.
Actually I got a vague memory that there was no 12 mins at all & dibbol just agreed to put that in to stop himself, & us too, from losing face, as we’d said nothing, not one word of interest.Oh except the hamster.Jesus.
Anyway its brilliant.
A band that said nothing except in the 12 absent mins,
never gigged with the complete lineup & never made a record.
It really is the band that never was.
The look? ‘maximalist’ The content? ‘minimalist’
Maybe thats the surreal bit that the french instinctivly picked up on?
May 1st, 2008 at 6:14 pm
“We make pork pies
We make sausage rolls,
It tastes pretty bad but it’s good for the ego”.
Fanatstic
May 1st, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Saying nothing? How very dare you.
“We play chords that don’t like each other. Our music is fast with lots of drums”.
I especially liked my:
“Fetish split up because we didn’t have any money or anything…”.
‘Anything’ covers guitars, amps, drums, rudimentary ability to play an instrument and musical talent.
And yet I recieved 2 or 3 phone calls a week for at least a year. My mum would dutifully write stuff down on bits of paper. “Yes dear, the Ejaculations from Bristol are interested in hearing a demo tape and Scum from the Clitz is interested in a gig in Leeds.”
Maybe they were even stupider than us? Si reckons the French liked it because they saw it as an example of British comedy.
May 1st, 2008 at 8:37 pm
Sam
Re Jake’s note above, do you have a date when you are thinking of coming to the UK this or next year, that liver therapy class in Brighton is gonna take some planning and a lot of browny points, but it’s got to be done .
Jake
Do you have a contact for Morocan Mark , it makes Simion Rose’s excursions in the Indian Bush seem like 2 weeks at centre parks , not that I have been there (honest). Jake do you recall an event in 66a or in 107 Iverson rd called the ‘Indian Lover’ it had a theme tune that said ‘Indian lover you’ll never recover’ and featured you in some long johns with a full on errection with a lot of scratching, quite sick really but then I think we all were in those days
May 2nd, 2008 at 1:43 am
I’ve got no idea at the moment Tony but I’ll let you know ahead of time. Have you got a regime Jake as far as your liver’s concerned? I’ve not had a real test in 15 years and just try to take it easy but I do like a drink of a weekend. I can’t imagine giving everything up.
Sam
May 2nd, 2008 at 1:46 am
BTW…if you check the other page you’ve turned into a belated sex symbol.
May 2nd, 2008 at 1:25 pm
U 3,Im actually burning with curiosity about the missing 20 years and would like more than nothing else to rabbit on about my own story, post photos of me balding bonce etc.But it would be more superfine to do it face to face,collectively or individually or whatever suits you.You’ve all got family responsabilities so I’ll fit it around that.And you as a group are in contact with each other so you got your own way of doing stuff already.
Our lives a pretty regular & routine but were flexable.
Tony I’d love for you & your family to come down here, but I fear our 1 bedroom flat would just be too uncomfortable for you all.
Still via this site or email something. I’ll get sorted out.
I’ve had a nice day doing some garden maintainance in the sun, thinking about dixie music.
Hope everyone elses was good too
J
May 2nd, 2008 at 1:37 pm
I’d like to see some recent pics of you and please post more. Not sure I’ll be able to get back this year and I’m sure there won’t be any embarrassing silences when we do meet up.
Here’s one of my boy JD. He’s a better guitarist at 7 years old than I was at 17. He’s got a band with 2 mates at school called ‘The Heretics II’.
http://img230.imageshack.us/img230/9803/img0534smallbu7.jpg
Sam
May 2nd, 2008 at 2:18 pm
For some reason all the last comments wernt visible to me until after I’d posted so its a bit out of kilter
Cheers Tone, Long johns & a hard on.Nice!
What a superb image for those folk at KYPP to dwell on.
Moroccon Mark? No idea but I have got Gretchins current – 3 years old – no.
Shes still in contact with him I think.
Myself, I dunno if I can deal with
seeing him after so long
combined with the fact that hes still recovering
from those 8 years.
Obviously I met folk inside in BKK who were doing long stretches & youre never the same again.Something like that, to coin the cliche, scars you for life.(Read Waren Fellows ‘the damage done’)
No disrepect to anyone here who may have or know folk who have done the same & who are now cool, but nah, its too much for me.I dont want that type of damaged people in my life.
Sorry to say it & call me a cunt, whatever.
C’est la vie
Maybe a few more years down the line when hes more settled, I dunno
My mail ‘baronvonzubb@hotmail.com’ Mail us & I’ll get Gretchins no. to you if you want.
Sex symbol?Oh no its gonna be embarassing aint it…
Edit :dreamy aint I..
Did u really get that many calls? Wish I’d known at the time…
Its excellent comedy that.But we could actually string at least half a sentence together but well, not on that day.
But yeah,the ‘wandering about’ theory is a classic
Regime? I’ve given everything up but I was going that way anyway, b4 I found out 10 years ago .I use milk thistle when I remember.My LFT count is just under the line, actually a bit lower than 10 years ago.
I aint interested in going down the interferon route.Some of ‘em are going on about how they’re developing new & better pharmas but for me whose symptoms are slight, I cant see the point.Its all about management.
May 2nd, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Your boy looks cool
May 2nd, 2008 at 3:41 pm
I just had an overall physical for the first time ever. Aside from being a fat bastard with high cholesterol I’m ok apparently. The wife buys me milk thistle but I’m hopeless at remembering to take these things. I did get a liver biopsy when I first heard and I should probably get a new one. I agree regarding the Interferon. Sounds a bit experimental still and it knocks you out for a year or so. However, my dad died of liver disease as a result of Hep C (he was a haemophiliac) and it’s not a good way to go. Maybe we can all sit round in a circle and have a ‘workshop’? We can cry together and build a big bonfire.
May 2nd, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Here’s me and the boy:
http://a875.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/101/l_df6c7caa8f6570d9a8f5977e6597323a
I imagine you Jake as quite a lean man.
May 2nd, 2008 at 4:21 pm
That didn’t work. It’s all very confusing:
http://img241.imageshack.us/img241/9273/img0799akf8.jpg
May 2nd, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Children Of The Corn, Sam?
May 2nd, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Portly gentleman of the corn.
May 2nd, 2008 at 9:01 pm
Not as lean as I’d like .
I seen ur pics you aint overweight.
Or is that a photoshop thing?
We all got them bellies
Imageshack , sometimes its a real headfuck..
Yeah Bog bin fires.Fab.
May 2nd, 2008 at 9:30 pm
Tony re; Morrocan Mark. If you dont wanna go via Gretchin theres an organisation called Prisoners Abroad who will have been in contact with him whilst inside.They may have aftercare contact details that they wont give to you, but may be able to pass on yours to him
May 3rd, 2008 at 11:44 am
Oh dear
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=26404638
they need to be told..
May 3rd, 2008 at 6:39 pm
I accosted someone at the Electric Ballroom who was wearing a Heretics badge at the same time we were going.
“Is that us?” I asked.
“No…it’s us” he replied.
The rest of the conversation went:
“We’re The Heretics”.
“No you’re not…we’re The Heretics”.
I think there have been a few ‘The Heretics’ over the years. It’s a good name. I remember you came up with it Jake at your parents’ house. We were after something that sounded like The Damned. Something with religious overtones. We brain stormed to the best of our ability and eventually that popped out. Another we toyed with was The Disciples.
I think my two favourite punk band names are The Dentists and Shag Nasty.
May 3rd, 2008 at 6:41 pm
By the way…I’ve just informed Leigh Kendall of this thread. Hopefully he’ll show up and post.
Sam
May 3rd, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Here’s 3 photos I dug out of dearly departed Keith Jones. These were taken in Brixton in ‘83.
http://img225.imageshack.us/img225/9864/keefkm9.jpg
I heard he OD’d but I never knew the circumstances. Anyone know? He was against shooting up for a long time but they all cave in the end.
Here are two of me and Mitch. Taken early 81, also in Brixton. We were signing on for a certain Robbo I recall. I also remember this was the day before the first Brixton Riots. I am wearing a tiny doll’s spoon earing given to me by Michelle. Bless her.
http://img91.imageshack.us/img91/2531/keef1zp9.jpg
May 3rd, 2008 at 8:45 pm
some mates of mine had a band called the hysteretics-they never made it into the pages toxic graffiti although they actually did do a couple of gigs-oh and they got onto telly on a documentary presented by old pisshead ray gosling…….
May 3rd, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Mitch Sam photos up in ‘puppies and their friends’ subfolder in photo gallery.
May 3rd, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Nice one. Cheers!
“Jake do you recall an event in 66a or in 107 Iverson rd called the ‘Indian Lover’ it had a theme tune that said ‘Indian lover you’ll never recover’ and featured you in some long johns with a full on errection with a lot of scratching”
We made our own entertainment in those days.
May 4th, 2008 at 8:19 am
Keith didnt exactly OD
He got sectioned.After they booted him out he was never the same.The drugs they gave him left him unable to take care of himself when he stopped taking them.
As told to me by TB & Roz who were his mates at the time, like they weined him off those drugs & wiped his bum , literaly , for a while
He stopped going to get food , by whatever methods ,got thin , ill and then wasnt seen . weeks later hes was found dead in his place on the Finchely Rd.He was taking drugs but not in any great quantitiy .He just wasnt capable of ‘living’ anymore.I was out of the country but it all sounded very sad.I saw him immediately after his release from being sectioned & he looked 50.
Still making our own entertainment , eh.
But of a different nature I guess.
There was others..’fleshhead’ cant remember, but many more.I do remember you did a very hilarious comic strip about that. I thought you were gonna be a cartoonist.Maybe you have been?
May 4th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Blimey…never knew that about Keith but it doesn’t surprise me. Did they ever diagnose him with anything? I think he was first introduced to drugs at Campbell Buildings and that probably tipped him over the edge but who knows? I last saw him off Cambridge Circus in 1984. He was washing dishes in some restaurant and had a big Rasputin like beard but he seemed in good sorts. A Jam fan extraordinaire.
May 4th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
You saw him quite soon b4 he died by the sounds of it.Actually I aint sure if it was that year or the next.
I think Keith was diagnosed as psychotic.He tried to kill Nicky,went catatonic & was sectioned by his dad after not moving for a week .You saw him after that event I think.
Ok was gonna scan this in but its knackered it seems
There was along with ‘… i want your giblets…’,(mark)The lunar beast’, (jake )The Rubber Boy’ (tony)’Derek the Mellow Gallowsman’ (tony)’victor ‘(jake) ‘The white Nun of Kilburn(jake)’The heat Queen(mark)’Father Murphy’(not sure who, Sam maybe?)
May 4th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
I remember ‘I want your giblets’. That was Flesh head wasn’t it? A Fleshist member of the Nasti Party. Wank had a dream that his real name was ‘Quizbit’. Earlier bullshit from 66A was:
‘The Wah! sausage plantation’ (meat humour well ahead of Vic and Bob).
Teabag slapping.
Pointing the bone.
Rogue Bullock (Simeon as street fighter).
Who was Nicky? Didn’t realize that about Keith. One of the last times I saw him he came round my mum’s and we went out with Si for a drink. We got back and he had something we called a ‘warp spasm’ where he convulsively slapped my mum’s kitchen cupboards for a minute or so. Bizarre really.
Talking of Nickys….I don’t know if you remember Nicky from Amsterdam…very cute English punk girl? I got in touch with her friend Louise (who’s now a Dutch TV celeb) a couple of years ago. Turns out Nicky also OD’d sometime in the eighties. It was weird…I had a dream in around 88 that she’d OD’d and I knew it was true.
I’d like to mention Hogging Out but too many references to Iverson Rd will depress me. That place was evil.
May 5th, 2008 at 3:36 am
Just listened to ‘No Character’ again. I really like it! Good intro and I think this must have been closer to how we sounded just before we split up (but with the addition of a bass). Much tighter than the other tape anyhow. I’d love to hear the tapes we lent Crow.
May 5th, 2008 at 3:39 am
As I remember it, it goes:
I wanna be in Berlin
So cold I want a new sheepskin
Let me do my mummy in
Through the wall I can see them leering
No Character
Maybe a red
No Character
Who needs character when I’ve got friends
Can’t remember the other verses.
May 5th, 2008 at 3:43 am
I lost my tape of the recording we did of ‘Lambeth Skyline’, ‘And the Pylons Went By’ and something called ‘Run Smile Fall’. It was me, Leigh and Tony. Leigh did have a copy. I wonder if he’s still got it?
May 5th, 2008 at 9:35 am
‘Pylons went by’ Yeah,was brilliant. I liked it better than LS I remember.
The Dam?U know Branko died? & Manuealla went nuts.That must have been late ’80s too.
Heard this year in Vietnam from some dutch ‘rockers’ we met on the beach, that she recovered. Dam is a small town.
107… I remember me & you fell out , no doubt about nothing, some foolishness -
You were coming out of the smack haze so probably had a more accurate perception of its evilness.Me, I just carried on for a few more years so it doesnt stand out as being that different to other places.
It got mentally ‘heavy’ for me in a brief stint in bedsit land in Earls Court, between foreign trips.Living under a false name,on the run, lots of silliness etc.I spose that was the ‘evil ‘ time in my memory.
May 5th, 2008 at 9:36 am
That ‘gooning’ at 66A was bloody funny…
May 5th, 2008 at 9:43 am
Nicky(W***e) was keiths girlfreind, from fulham.
Shes been on the tele as a sort of spokesperson for the S&M community a couple of times.Kieth, he knew how to pick ‘em.
Kays telling me that she married a well known alcohol heir
We visited him whole he was sectioned in Herne Hill luny bin. It wasnt great.But the rasputin beard was after that I believe.Its hard to get the chronology right.
May 5th, 2008 at 9:56 am
Hey Mr S you & me seem to going down the road of doom n gloom….
Its a beautiful day 24dgs sunny .Were goin to the bluebell forest, then possably the beach. (its always good to put off chores…)
Had a great weekend , my niece down , always good to spend time with ‘the kids’.Were tight with them
Were ‘ the stable but “kool” ‘ uncle & aunty.Nieces parents splittin up as we speak so its hard for them.Its happened on both kay & mine sides of the family..
So get out into them sunny cornfields withyour family & a picnik & have a great day .
jake
May 5th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Didn’t know about Branko…that was the ‘Braakmaraak’ bloke wasn’t it? Drugs? Just heard from Mike Clarke that Sniper died in the late eighties.
But you’re right…this is getting a bit gloomy. I’ve never been able to truly get warm and fuzzy nostalgic about punk.
I vaguely remember your brothers…they were a lot older than you I seem to recall. Good that you’re close to your nieces. Me and JD rented a boat yesterday and zipped about on the lake. Very nice weather over here at the moment.
May 6th, 2008 at 1:07 am
Hey y’all
What a find this place is! Never thought I’d get back in touch with you all. Did Lambeth Skyline go something like this?…
One day you’d pay the price,
You even said it yourself…
Life’s design is wrong,
It’s based on health
Now’s the time
Reflect no thoughts
Commit your crime
Lambeth Skyline
Feel the pain
Your fractured vein
Will heal sometime
Lambeth Skyline
(I seem to remember it went like that anyway. Great song). I wrote a song on the same kind of subject called “A Place Of Our Own” some time in the mid-80s. Not a patch on yours though, Sam.
On the Campbell Buildings front…
Just a few other names that I’ve remembered:
Russ. Skinhead guy who looked a bit like the famed St Monica’s Goblin. Died in a fire started by bikers apparently, in Brixton. Too off his face on Tuinal to get out of the place. Was wearing my suit at the time, I seem to remember. Does anyone remember what his girlfriend’s name was? Me, Russ and Ruth all shaved our heads, then the next week decided to use Immac instead. Bad move. Russ had got distracted by Big John the previous week and had run the razor horizontally across the side of my head. Spent next 2 days with head in bucket of water trying to get Immac out of brain!
Evelyn (black punk girl, very short hair. Main claim to fame being genital warts. Worked brilliantly, nobody ever wanted to shag her).
Karen (cute little girl about 16 from Manchester. Not punky looking at all. Huge Stranglers fan. Once told me that Jean-Jacques Burnel had told her (after a lengthy game of plug-the-jack-in-the-Fender-Precision with her) she had “T’Purrrrrrfect Boddeh” (haven’t got my mancunian keyboard driver loaded)
Beano (Alex?) Posh-ish bloke who shared a flat with Yorkshire Phil (lots of cargo netting on the ceiling). Always wore a dinner jacket and went off on extended bin-raking trips every night for stuff for their flat. Might have been (briefly) ex-Army. Had a puppy called Misha, after the Russian Bear symbol for the Moscow Olympics. Damn nice bloke. And, btw, I didn’t think that Leah was the “slave” as Bob said in his article, I thought it was some young kid that Ruth put through a “Kangaroo Court” and kept locked in Beano’s spare room. Could be wrong though.
Alan. The dope dealer and ex-junkie who lived in the next block. Always had the Floyd on the record player. Swapped my electric razor for a ‘teenth of Red Leb.
Leslie. Stocky Brummie girl and mate of Pinki who was sporadically on the game but would I think have been quite happy to be an amateur at the same sport!
Pat and Marilyn. Pat was a BIG ex-Para and Marilyn was his boyfriend. Marilyn went the whole hog on the Monroe looky-likey thing. I remember coming out into the courtyard one morning to find them squaring up to each other. Marilyn took the fingernails to Pat’s face, and he drew his fist back to punch back. I ran up and shouted “hang on mate, you can’t hit a Wo……. Er, sorry fellas, carry on!”.
Has anyone heard anything of Lou? What a nice woman. Funny, sweet and clever. I last saw her in 1981 when she’d moved back to her mum’s in Ewell and was doing some music with Mick Wahee (from The Satellites).
I do remember that Mitch had a pet plastic shark called “Smegma”. When you opened its mouth she’d written inside: “Hello, my name’s Smegma. Pleased to MEAT you”.
I had such a tear in my eye the other day when I stumbled upon Bob’s recollections on here. Particularly the bit about Crow. Now that guy could play drums, couldn’t he? And smile too. Peter Locke was his name, wasn’t it? I was only talking to my partner about him a month or so ago.
I remember the Scousers too. Dunno if it was the same occasion that Bob was taking about: Big Phil was laying on the door, and I got Ruthless to stump up a can of hairspray to make a bomb with if they managed to get in. But they got fed up and fucked off in the end, which just left us to throw the hairspray bomb at the wall. Lovely sticky sheet of flame! I remember walking back through the courtyard one Friday night and finding a wage-packet (about £40 in it). Realised it was one of the Scousers’ so went and knocked on their window. They came out, I gave them back the packet and got chatting. They were really decent blokes, it turned out. Good socialists: The reason they didn’t like us lot was that they’d misunderstood some of the Nazi insignia that some of the punks had (never went down that route meself) and thought that we were in the National Front!
One recollection that comes flying back to me from the St Monica’s days is getting chased round Trafalgar Square by a gang of imaginary rockabillies from the all-night cafe while on a bastard of a speed comedown. Finding a copper and saying “can I stand here mate, them Teddy Boys are gonna give me a kicking. He told me to fuck off in no uncertain terms! And then running back to the cafe where the rest of you guys were (can’t remember exactly who) and saying “thanks a lot, they could have killed me” only to be told that said Teds hadn’t moved from their cups of tea for an hour!
And the other, goblin-related, is of being with Ruth in her room and hearing Bob go downstairs for a piss. 2 minutes later, there’s a blood-curdling scream and the sound of running upstairs. Discretion being the better part of valour, we stayed well put behind the locked door. AAAAAAHHHHH, FUUUUUUCCCCKKKKK! we hear, in strident Aussie tones. Bob kicks in the Americans’ (at the end of the corridor on the top floor) door. Turns out that while he was pissing, he’d seen the goblin bloke standing next to him as well. Can’t remember whether that was before Wank saw the little fella or afterwards.
Anyway, enough for now: if anyone wants to contact me directly, it’s misterwomble@hotmail.com – would be nice to hear from you all. And if there’s a non-alcoholic pissup going, then include me in! (the old bipolar meds don’t really work with the golden throat charmer, sadly!). More recollections when my brain lets me!
May 6th, 2008 at 1:33 am
Oh, and great news that Mark Darrington is still with us. I knew him from a teenage disco in Morden in ‘78 and he was a top fella. It was him that got me up Portobello with you lot. I’d assumed that he might have been another loss over the years.
Just out of interest, a few names of people from Portobello:
Mitzi (my ex)
Claire (Clarabella)
Martha
Pete Oliver (woke up at Mitzi’s party the next morning with a Galliano bottle up his arse. Anyone unfamiliar with the geometry of said bottle, check out your local offie!)
Dino and Lisa (from Harrow, enjoyed the odd Tuinal as I remember).
Little Ken (skinhead mugger. Arsehole extraordinaire.)
Big Ken (nice skin).
And Thing of course (Jerry)
The Satellites (Mick Wahee etc)
Chaos (Paul Hardesty).
The Two Sues (Big Sue – black punk girl with afro, Little Sue – usually blue hair).
Julie from Chislehurst (straight ginger hair, big blue eyes. Kinda New Wave-y rather than punky).
Anyone remember much about them? Or got any other names?
May 6th, 2008 at 1:39 am
And Slug, whatever happened to that off-license?
May 6th, 2008 at 2:18 am
Hello Pork…good to hear from you again. I can’t believe you remember Lambeth Skyline. The first line is:
You didn’t have long
you even said it yourself
Aside from that….spot on.
Interesting to hear about the scousers. I find it hard to believe that they thought Quick Phil and his fey friends were members of the National Front. I decided to take on the whole of that Mod pub across the way one evening whilst under the influence of Madam Tuinol. They seemed quite intimidated at first but eventually a large surly pack of them emerged from the pub and naturally I got a hiding. I also got my home made Damned T shirt ripped from my back which I think was taken by the Modernists as some kind of smelly prize. I was escorted back to the squat by a couple of mates, ranting and raving all the way, when I was suddenly gripped around the throat and lifted off my feet by a stocky little scouser. About 5 feet tall and built like a brick shit house, I promised to shut up if he’d let me breath again.
I wasn’t there, but a couple of days later Mad Dog went on a lone mission to avenge the loss of my T shirt. He cooly kicked over a stack of scooters and sat on the bar in the pub demanding the return of said shirt. Naturally he got a hiding too but I don’t have too many mates like that anymore.
I seem to remember Pork was present at the ‘Night of the flying clitoris’.
May 6th, 2008 at 11:56 am
Proud to say I was there that vulval night, and it damn near had me eye out!
I don’t think that sexual orientation was ever an issue withe the NF: just look at Martin Webster – one of the campest men ever to have lived (or perhaps I just misread him!)
It just occurred to me (looking at one of the earlier posts, that Liz was the daughter of Lord and Lady Cottesloe (I remember that because Claire’s family lived in Cottesloe House on the Lissom Green Estate up the Edgware Rd). She worked in Battersea Dogs’ Home. You guys nicked a framed pound note of her brother’s that was signed by Paul Weller: “To [so-and-so], Cheers, Paul”. Then you replaced it with a Monopoly pound note that said something to the effect of “Cheers for the fags money, Sam”, didn’t you? Nice job!
There was a mate of hers who’d got raped by a punk called Ricky who started hanging around Campbell Buildings. Me and Keith found out (basically she went troppo when she found out he was around) and pulled him out of his flat and gave him a fucking good hiding. Old Bill turned up from Kennington and started asking questions. When they found out what he’d done, they gave us a pat on the back and put out the description on the radio “short white male wearing makeup, bleeding heavily and wearing only his underpants”. Think they got hold of him pretty damn quick!
Did Robbo’s mate Crap really do that murder? I remember him vehemently denying it at the time, saying that there were a couple of geezers waiting for him inside the flat who hit the other bloke with a hammer (a lot) then threw Crap out the window. Sadly, at the time, he said that he didn’t mind going down for it because he’d probably end up dead inside a year otherwise.
And how about the Great Schism when Campbell Buildings divided into “Cowboys” and “Indians” and everyone had to make up your mind which side they were on?
Dunno if anyone else was there but does anyone have anything about the “punks v Blitz kids” game of British Bulldog in Richmond Park (prob early 79)? I’m sure Philip Sallon, Boy George and Steve Strange were there in fully ponced up silk outfits (Pierrot doll etc, and Sallon had a blue silk parachute jumpsuit on). I recall it being a very muddy day indeed!
Just to be un-PC for a further moment or two: “Kilburn High Road, Uber Alles, How I wish that Ruth was Bra-less”. There, that’s got it out of my system. Ah, the smell of hairspray and greasepaint still does it for me to this day!
May 6th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Yeah we did nick Liz’s brother’s pound note. This was during an extended stay at her house which involved myself, Mad Dog, Tessa and Mr Locke. I remember her dad as a kindly old gentleman, similar in manner to JR Hartley. After a couple of days he poked his head in the door of Liz’s bedroom and asked if she could turn the music down. “Fuck off you stupid old cunt!” she shouted and slammed his head in the door. He retreated to the other end of the house. That same night I stole a couple of bottles of his Cognac and probably some very valuable wine and passed out. I was woken the next day by him poking me with a walking cane and inquiring:
“Got a head…eh? Got a head?”
Mad Dog reckoned he was going to give a speech at the House of Lords:
“We must do something to get these punk rockers out of our houses!”.
Liz used to bring home needles from Battersea Dogs Home which we’d use after sharpening on match boxes [involuntary shudder]. Of course I had to make a little trip to the Septic Theatre at St Thomas’.
I wonder if we had post traumatic stress disorder after this period? I spend my early 20s being distrustful of my body, convinced some hidden, lurking thing was going to dislodge and get into my bloodstream. Talking of self-destruction – why did everyone used to cut themselves up with broken bottles? There was also a fad for burning yourself with fag ends.
May 6th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Here’s an interesting document. Me scoring at Junkie Allen’s, Campbell buildings 1980.
http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/1934/keef3cf1.jpg
Note: Kung Fu stars, jossticks, alternative comic book, Rizla papers, giro, 70’s hi fi and small silver bowl for small things. I’m doing the “Waaaankerr!” thing with my hand. I realize, 30 years on that my jeans need a good wash.
Allen was a strange, quibbering South African. Definitely a 1960s casualty.
May 6th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
I have to say that – as fascinating as it is reading these accounts of social history – you didn’t really manage to embrace the more ‘fun’ aspects of Punk, did you?
Can I ask: why did you do it to yourselves?
May 6th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Excellent question.
May 6th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
There weren’t all that many fun aspects to punk at the time.
Police, Teds, Skins, Bikers, Mods, Soul Boys, blokes in Cortinas etc ready to stove yer head in with the nearest blunt object.
Unemployment and recession (…think it’s bad with a bit of a pinch on mortgages now? Think again).
Thatcher ready to rock and roll.
Anyone who had a good reason not to be at home with the parents couldn’t get a place to live (and I remember there being a LOT of good erasons from the people I spoke to at the squats).
Dole money at £5.35 a week. Speckled blues at 3 for a quid. Math done!
Why did we get into it? Youth. That’s all. That time when you think you really can be part of another Kronstadt. When you’d rather spend your time bumming cigs and ten-pences at Waterloo Station than being told 8 hours a day by a man in a suit that you’ve fucked up again. When you’d rather spend your time with people who didn’t look like you but didn’t look like anyone else either. But you knew they thought like you and would stand in there with you when it got bad.
And punk girls, obviously.
May 6th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Just out of interest Nic…which fun bits did we miss out on?
May 6th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Alright Pork, glad you’re still about. I metamorphised from Mick Wahee into Mick Luggy not long after I knew you.
Lou’s still about, lives in Barnet these days. I told her about this thread so hopefully she’ll get in touch. She’s still got a tape that I haven’t heard in years of us all doing a gig in suburbia as The Spasm Ensemble!
May 7th, 2008 at 9:26 am
@Sam -> Nice one mate!
@Luggy -> Good to hear you’re about too mate! Don’t think I’ve seen you since about ‘81, probably that rehearsal in the pub down in Esher? I’m down in Portsmouth these days, not doing much but enjoying it nevertheless.
Are any of us others still doing music (I know Sam’s doing the bluegrass)? I knocked it on the head about 5 years ago when a guy I knew nicked one last guitar off me. And was supposed to be a musician. Bastard! I keep meaning to get some software and start doing something PC-based, but I never get round to it.
May 7th, 2008 at 9:45 am
BTW all, anyone know what happened to Pinki (Rebecca?)? I remember being told she’d made a shedful of suicide attempts at The Buildings, including walking down a tube tunnel towards a train (it stopped a few yards in front of her apparently), throwing herself out of a second storey window (ostensibly she winded herself and got up unharmed a few minutes later), and she was then reputed to have banged up a whole barrel of air, only to find that she’d skin-popped it, and ended up with no more than a bit of a sore arm.
One time that I do have first-hand experience of was that she took a heroic amount of Tuinal and crashed out naked on a bed. Someone just supposed she was dead after a day or so and threw another mattress over her. She woke up about 4 days later as right as ninepence.
The optimist in me says that someone that seemingly indestructible MUST still be up and running. Mind you, my overriding pessimism tells me she might well finally have got her life where she wanted it only to discover a peanut allergy a moment too late!
May 7th, 2008 at 9:47 am
And Mick…
The only song title of yours I remember was “C’est En Revenge”.
Remind me, how did it go?
May 7th, 2008 at 9:54 am
I think that my half-serious comment was perhaps a little obtuse…
Sam – to clarify, the ‘fun’ aspects for me would exclude drug addiction, catching diseases, stealing from people, ‘kangaroo courts’, and the like…
Reading the threads, the predominant tone is one of an angry and unfocused nihilism which courted ugliness (to the point of seeming as if people were actively wishing misfortune upon themselves)…
It just seems a little melancholic that there are quite a number of people (or so it would seem) who seem to have very bad memories of the time they spent around the ‘Punk’ scene…
My experience was on-the-whole very positive: ‘coming of age’ at a time when Britain had the highest unemployment figures in recorded history, my time on the dole (over 10 years with the odd gap here and there) was a time of much creativity and interesting exchange of ideas, of taking advantage of the free time that not working afforded (such as lying in the park reading with a bunch of friends, writing, travelling – particularly when we were gifted with 8 week signing on, walking around the city exploring, playing music, hitching out into the countryside and so on), of spending good times living in communal housing with good people, and of generally enjoying what life had to offer on a very tight budget…
)…There was a lot of hassle from the police and squares, but that is par for the course…
There was a lot of drink and a lot of substances, but never to the detriment of health (well, perhaps in the short-term
I’m not in any way trying to suggest that this is necessarily ‘better’ than anything else which occurred (so please don’t take it that way)…just that it seems very different…
However, I’m aware that this all occurred outside of the ‘pressure cooker’ of London, so it is a very different topography…
For one thing, out here in the other cities it seems to have been easier to get somewhere to live in comparison to London, and there also didn’t seem to be a problem with gear…
May 7th, 2008 at 10:50 am
Blimey, Nic, that lifestyle sounds like the punk version of Brideshead Revisited, dunnit? Jeremy Irons with matchstick-sewing needle-indian ink tats, Domestos and soap-flake hair and rotting brothel-creepers with pink and green unmatched sox. And a lovely first-edition Nietzsche under his arm.
Seriously though, I don’t think any of the people from the squats would say that we didn’t have good times. They’re taken as read. But most teenagers spend time lying around in parks, playing guitar, exploring and generally sodding about.
There was just more to be had if you wanted it (or less, if you will – nihilism is the ultimate minimalism, innit?). Some of us did to a greater degree than others.
It’s left me with a great tolerance (not to say encouragement) of difference, and a very healthy suspicion of people in authority and their supposition that they know what’s better for me than I do. I may not agree with people’s chemicals and/or diseases but I defend to the death their right to bang it up their arm or the end of their dick!
May 7th, 2008 at 11:59 am
I may have forgotten them or just not known them in the first place, but what’s this “Band Of Holy Joy” thing about? Certainly someone who knew Keith, and Ian Pigg too. And Robbo’s mate Crap by the sound of it.
Check out: http://www.bandofholyjoy.co.uk/newcross2.htm
May 7th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
“Reading the threads, the predominant tone is one of an angry and unfocused nihilism which courted ugliness (to the point of seeming as if people were actively wishing misfortune upon themselves)…”
Sums it up well I think. But this was punk before it merged with hippy, though you started to see ‘hippy punks’ in ‘79, largely due to Crass. I think the whole thing became much more sensible after this with definite (anarcho) ideals. I think punk was always suicidal, in the way you describe it. Although I was never a worshipper, Sid Vicious set a fine example of how to hurl yourself repeatedly into brick walls. Shane MacGowan walked around the West End with ‘IRA’ written on his forehead. The Pistols playing working mens clubs in Huddersfield in 75 was suicidal too. I don’t think it was self-conscious or political at all, I think it was an instinctive desire to confront the tedious world we’d all grown up in. I think early punk was closer to Borat than anything political. There was a wicked, confrontational sense of humour to it that was lost later on when political lines were drawn. I remember going into a jewellery shop in Oxford Street with Wank. This sweet shop girl emerged from behind the counter and asked:
“Can I help you with anything?”
“Yeah…bury yourself alive”
said Wank, which was unnecessary and unkind but fucking funny.
There was a lot of creativity though. The Heretics tapes on this and the other page were the result of about 1 year learning to play an instrument. We covered Stepping Stone and wrote the rest of the songs. I think at the heart of punk was this idea that you had to get off your arse and do something. Punk was a very untidy explosion, and one of its strengths is that people are still unclear about what it was 30 years later.
Anyway, this is getting all sociological. I like what Mick Mahoney said when asked about the causes of football violence: “It’s a laugh, innit?”
May 7th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Yes, thinking about what you’ve written, Sam, the main difference is probably the injection of ‘anarchist politics’…
I think that I didn’t experience the ‘nihilistic’ phase of Punk as I was just far too young: the brash swagger and posturing of ‘Punk’ was very appealing to me as a 10 year old in 1978, but it seemed redundant as soon as I heard Crass and Posion Girls (and Crisis) a year later…
I experienced a more nihilistic aspect to ‘Punk’ later in the 1980’s, but that in itself was almost a kind of retro-nostalgia for a time which people had missed (and was – possibly – a result of the more trenchant political angle of the ’scene’ at the time)…
Yes, perhaps a little sociological, although I’m with Socrates when it comes to analysis…
Having said that, I’m always ready to do the Grapple to The Users, V2 or The Scabs at the drop of a bondage strap…
May 7th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
Pinki – went back home in 1980, went to Stroud College took A levels then joined Stroud CND. Went with Stroud CND to Greenham Common in November 1981. Stayed on and off for three years. She became a very well know Greenham Woman – featured in film Carry Greenham Home. In 1983 she and Dave Morris (McLibel Trial) got given a house in hackney by the GLC – something to do with an anti-nuclear march from Faslane to Greenham. helped Dave ‘organise’ Stop the City. Also in October 1983 she had a son – Sky and planned to give birth at Greenham but got talked out of it -she had AB negative blood which can cause complications.
I met her in January 84 and we started living in sin in Hackney (Upper Clapton) 1985. 1986 she went to Hackney College and got 3 more A levels. At same time involved in Stonehenge Campaign see
http://www.horusmaat.com/silverstar/SILVERSTAR2-PG38.htm
for how she annoyed the Druids in 1984… became an active pagan/ thelemic/ chaos magician…
Started studying social anthropology at School of Oriental and African Studies in 1987- a very prestigious/ academic place… still a student there in 1995, had changed over to study public international law – studied Islamic Law, Indian and African Law, Law and Development…
Meantime became an anti-road protestor at M11 and Bath… and had another three children -Elizabeth, Alistair and Callum.
But the Campbell Buildings days plus living at Greenham and her pursuit of the road of excess generally wore her down. She died 5th January 1996 aged 33. Thanks to Dave Morris and Richard Cabut, had an obituary in the Guardian. Would have been a grandma by now – Sky has a five year old daughter.
May 7th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Sam/Jake:here’s what I got from Martin (Sons Of Bad Breath):Sniper/ Sgt.H died of heroin OD Summer 1985,perhaps ‘86.Martin said that he’d helped them all to squat when they first came up to Hackney in early ’80s.
I pointed out that you were sure you saw him in the late 80’s,but Martin has a good memory.If true,makes you the Spinal Tap of punk I guess,if not then maybe he’ll make a ‘Back From The Grave’ appearance on this site!
Jah Pork Pie:to continue the Death theme,I remember hearing that your friend and ours ‘little’ Kenny (skinhead mugger-twat up Portobello) also resides upstairs (or down,preferably,if you believe in all of that) due to the needle,circa 1982-3.Last I saw of him was in Ken Market,he’d got a swallow tattooed on his face and photographed in the Face or ID.He was from Stonebridge Pk or Harlesden,but used to fancy himself as one of the Ladbroke Grove mob.Had a friend called John,another skinhead,often known as John Big Ears,nice bloke.I had several run-ins with Kenny,once down Eagles Club where I decked him.He ran to the bigger skinheads,one of whom butted me rather ineffectually in the side of the head and uttered “I know he’s a wanker but you don’t hit skins right?”.I had to laugh,but then lambasted Mark Weller and other punks who stood by and didn’t lift a finger.Week later I came back up with mates from my local for a re-run except w/equal odds this time.Funnily enough the bald ones declined our invitation.Not long after that Kenny appeared in Warwick (pub down Portobello) with a very large cross cut into the top of his head. Apparently he’d passed out on tuinol in a Brixton squat and some ‘Jock punks’ (quote) had decided to do some wood-carving on his skull with a machete. Very fetching.I was with Womble and the Hayes punks.We laughed heartily and wished him a swift trip to the knackers’ yard.He spat
‘all you punks are gonna get it now!’ and departed,tail firmly between his legs.
Somewhere I have an old page cut from a Sunday supplement magazine of the time,question:’Why do you dye your hair?’,has many old Portobello faces.I’m pretty sure Wank Stain is in there,saying “I want my hair to look like a clenched fist” or something,also those 2 rockabill kids,one blonde one dark-haired with blue tasselled jacket,don’t recall the names.Will try & find if it interests you.Dino and Mannie of Chaos still around,esp. if you frequent QPR.Paul(Raggity)-singer-stayed at Womble’s mums in Hayes for a while,not seen since.2 Sue’s:last saw them at Tony Melon’s place in Hayes,1980.Thing/Jerry (Thornton Heath):Dave Fergusson met up with him and Womble (the taller one who sung in early Rubella Ballet line-up) in Hackney recently,Dave & Womble’s kids at same school
Nic:I have great memories of 1977,particularly the summer,great records & gigs,nice girls.By comparison 1979 was like trying to regain yer virginity:the innocence was gone.The skinhead violence (not to mention everyday insults and ignorance from straights) is hard to explain to someone who wasn’t there,and had a peculiarly London flavour.Organised bullying on a massive scale,perhaps.It combined with the bleakness of the era I think, and the nihilism you mention was also in tune with the times generally.I graduated from blues to dexys to tuinol and razorblades. Horrible,and embarrassing in hindsight.I used to come back home and people would ask ‘What are you doing to yourself?’.As someone says elsewhere,the indestructibility of youth,or at least the myth of it.Also, problems at home have the ability to manifest themselves in self- destructive behaviour.If someone said to me today:’Do you want to come to a gig tonight? there’s bad drugs,flat beer and a 10:1 chance you’ll get your head kicked in.If you survive we can doss at a squat or sit in that all night burger bar in Paddington for 6 hours before catching the milk train back to Slough’ I would laugh and stay home,but then I’m 48 years old.What’s missing is the music:99% out of 100 times it was worth the risk to hear in the flesh,and the camaraderie that went along with it.I can’t help thinking that when the violence and the nihilism dissipated,the music also got worse,or at least blander.
May 7th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Oh man, I am so sorry to hear that life caught up with Pinki. She managed to cram a whole lot of living in though, didn’t she?
What a sadly ironic death, when she was finally at the top of her game. Life is a fucking cruel joke sometimes.
I thought she was older than me – but it turns out we were the same age. I’m glad she accomplished so much to be remembered by: apart from my daughter having been born I feel most of the time like I’ve done fuck all of any note since 1980.
May 7th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Dave Fergusson: I remember him telling me that he’d had a trip on glue up the Kings’ Road and had seen a lettuce leaf float out of his ear, only to open up and reveal his brain inside! What a nice fella! He used to go out with a punk girl called Sue (from Morden) who was going out with Wank Stain when I met him.
I’d be really interested to see the newspaper page: all my photos/records etc were “stolen” by my ex-partner in the ’90s. I saw the Sues at their place in Fulham, ‘81 I think. One of them was going out with a blond-haired guy called Mick (Oliver I think).
And I recall Kenny’s bad head day with particular pleasure! I don’t believe in the upstairs/downstairs stuff, but I’m as near as dammit sure he’ll have come back as a geeky bullied kid in beautiful downtown Detroit.
May 7th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Hello Mike!
I can say for certainty that me and Si saw Sniper in or after 1987 as I’d moved to Albion Rd from Newington Green and we saw him by Clissold park. As Si says I’ve got a very petty memory for dates and stuff. He was always sunken eyed and looked even more so. Maybe it was the Ghost of Poor Drummers Past that we saw. You never know! I’m quite surprised he got into smack though as he didn’t seem the type. God, the casualties from that period…it’s not funny.
Little Ken was the skinhead’s skinhead. I witnessed many a mugging by him outside of Rough Trade. I remember John fondly too. He saved me from Kenny’s clutches on at least two occasions. The most memorable was one time I was off to the Electric Ballroom and jumped on the 31 bus near my parents’ place, thundered upstairs and was confronted by a whole top deck full of Ladbroke Grove skins all staring spitefully in my direction. One of those times where you’ve got to think really fast. Honour dictated that I couldn’t retreat downstairs. In a split second I saw a seat vacant next to John and sat down next to him and started chatting. Everyone but Kenny settled down and John said “He’s alright…” and the situation was defused.
One of the Rockabillys you may be talking about could have been Sox, from W. Hampstead/Kilburn – always wore a leopard skin flat cap. Great bloke. OD’d early on…about 1981 I think. I remember him as an Ian Dury-like character, marching up to me in Portobello when I’d had my mohican done and going “What the FUCK ‘ave you done te yer BARNET!”.
May 7th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
A couple of other characters I remember from Portobello.
A black kid who was kind of a Rude Boy, who would not stop talking. Everyone liked him but he’d corner you and talk your head off. I think I asked him if he was speeding once and he denied it. I think he was just one of those people.
Taffy Bullshit. Welsh bloke who’d go on about Sid not being dead and living with Ronnie Biggs in Paraguay and other nonsense.
I remember Dino and Lisa. One time she overdid it on something outside of Rough Trade, lay on the pavement and threw up. I remember pissing myself when Dino produced a homemade ‘Antz Hanky’ from his jacket and cleaned her up with it. Nice people.
May 7th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
And of course Sarma and John – purveyors of finest speckled blues.
May 7th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Completely unrelated but a bad habit I aquired during this time was staring people out. Especially on the tube…you had to stake your territory through this method. This stayed with me unfortunately until I came over to the States. I was walking along in Columbus, Ohio shortly after I arrived and stared someone out who was standing in the street. As I walked past he said with a genuine innocence “What?!” I realized the pointlessness of this behaviour but this was at least 15 years after the period we’re all talking about.
May 7th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Hi Sam! I will interrogate Martin further about Sniper (& no doubt drive him mad in the process!) and let you know.That Hackney Hellcrew followed the same path w/equal joi de vivre,particularly at 281 Victoria Pk Rd in Hackney.The name Sox rings a bell,that black kid talking your head off too. There was another black punk girl,Julie I think,from Forest Hill in SE London,lovely girl.Oh,and Janice from Hayes with the megaphone voice, now a University professor I’m told.Also I remember a free daytime gig at that Bay 66 under the flyover,all those punks who’d been kicked out of Derby Lodge or Camden were there w/arms in slings and battered faces.
Maybe July ‘79,later that night there was a free gig in St.Marks Park w/the Passions which I went along to with Ana Claydon.It was very peaceful and serene for some reason,hot but breezy and I was fascinated by the treetops moving under the night sky. Love to say I was on acid,but it was those shitty dexys by then I think.I can remember seeing gangs huddled beneath Slough’s underpasses on the way home,waiting for me,then reaching them and finding nothing there. Also,asking for a ‘half’ on the bus at age 19 and getting away with it, paying 10p on the tube (‘where did you get on?’ ‘last stop’ ‘name it’ ‘oh fuck off!’).More Kenny:wasn’t he one of those who attacked the Swell Maps outside Rough Trade one Saturday? Albion Rd,Stoke Newington:my old band used to play the Golden Lady down there a lot,probably around ‘86-87
Jah:get my email from Tony D (contacts at top of page),he’s got it,if not, from Sam.I’ll scan that photo page and email to you
May 7th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Yeah…’paranoia’ was a word I learnt in ‘79. I remember me and Si spotting groups of bald, crombie clad people in the distance, on cold, winter nights, hiding in people’s front gardens and finding out we were running away from a bunch of old men.
If we’re talking about the same thing, that skinhead squat raid in Camden was in 1980 I think (anal broomstick rape etc…). I talked to someone who was there on Talkpunk forum and apparently it was all true. I was hanging out at Mitch’s in Campbell Buildings one time when there was a knock on the door. Seconds later her empty flat was full of Ladbrooke Grove skins. The gravity of being trapped inside a small squat with them was fucking scary. Of course Kenny started picking on some 15 year old weedy punk who was there. Once again John intervened. He deserves a medal.
May 7th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
I thought Phil was only into stuff that came out of the ground: wouldn’t touch Tuinal or speed, but smoked like a 1973 Cortina. Well surprised that he got on the gear.
I remember that black Rude Boy too: and as you say, can’t remember anything else about him except that he seemed to be speeding his nuts off all the time!
When Lisa threw up outside Rough Trade was the first time that I fell for Mitzi. Lisa Chucked up, Mitzi chucked up in sympathy and I went quite green round the gills with the smell of all the puke about on the floor
From then on to the Electric Ballroom for The Ruts, and fell in love while pogoing to Love Song by The Damned. Corny huh?
Dino once got quite upset with me for clouting Wank Stain outside Rough Trade. Wank was off his nut on Tuinal and I didn’t want to see a mate go down that route (before I developed a coherent philosophy of personal liberty and the attendant personal responsibility
) . Dino “put me right” with quite an angry lecture!
Never liked Sarma and John. That wasn’t a nice business they were in and they were a bit too homely about it for my liking.
I remember Jerry Thing getting mugged by some big punk/skinhead girl (mate of little Ken’s) up the Bello one day. She told him to undo all his zips and when he got to the the wrist zips on his leather he pulled a condom out. “Very considerate”, she said, “not many blokes think to use them things these days. Now where’s your FUCKING MONEY?”. Priceless!
Sam: Whatever happened to Mike Diboll and Ian Pigg? Do you remember finishing off an incomplete “stream of consciousness” poem that Mike Diboll was knocking up on his typewriter?
“The sucking serendipity
of Erasmus’s wrinkly ronkly roo,
Smelly Smegmata,
Jiminy Carter”
…etc
Mike: as above, my contact email is misterwomble@hotmail.com, but if you’ve got any pics, why not send them to Tony D and get him to post them up on here?
May 7th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
Too much time on my hands but I’m thoroughly enjoying this. Where’s Saltiel gone?
I do remember tampering with Mike’s poem. I also remember a hilarious impromptu jam session at 66a with me playing a tuneless noise on ‘11′, and Mike standing there shouting “Ronald! MacDonald! STUPID FUCKING CLOWN!!!
Priceless. I don’t think he approved of me or Wank because we’d laugh when ‘House Meetings’ were announced and we would go on and on in mock Scottish accents about ‘Groots noo’ and other childish, counter-revolutionary things, much to his displeasure. Another time he threatened Leigh Kendall with an empty plastic chocolate milk bottle. I’m glad he’s done well for himself though. Much too intelligent for us. I never had many dealings with Ian. He was voted off the island shortly after Mike I think. Then Tony and Mitch arrived followed by Leigh and Volker (‘The German’). I formed an alliance against Volker following his smoking my dole money and he was voted off too. But not before we introduced him to ‘National Bed Week’ – the traditional English holiday when everyone moves their beds into the kitchen for one night.
I’ve just remembered another classic Sniper moment. It was a very boring, drugless sunday round Jake’s parents house. We were sat twiddling our thumbs in the living room and conversation had died. Suddenly Sniper recited a poem he’d obviously been working on for the last half hour:
[Serious, Leeds accent]
The Pistols split up
The Clash sold out
It was enough to make any punk
Scream and shout
The UK Subs have fallen apart
The Ramones were brilliant from the start
But now they’ve gone
Oh so slow
No more one, two, three four -go!
A short silence followed by the rest of us pissing ourselves laughing. Phil’s feelings were hurt and he stormed out. I commited the work to memory. I hope it will one day see the light of day in print. God bless the man, he was priceless. There’s another rehearsal tape where he gets his foot stuck in the kick drum.
May 7th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Gone a bit quiet on this post then…may have to delete it through lack of interest…oh hang on 146 comments.
Nice going people. The post to beat right now is Rosebery Ave Peace Centre at 167 comments, if it happens then this post will be the KYPP record of comments.
May 7th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
Excellent stuff on this thread.
I feel like answering things and commenting but then the next post comes along and then the next one.
This little anecdote had me laughing, but it does for me capture the way we felt about the rest of the world:
I remember going into a jewellery shop in Oxford Street with Wank. This sweet shop girl emerged from behind the counter and asked:
“Can I help you with anything?”
“Yeah…bury yourself alive”
said Wank, which was unnecessary and unkind but fucking funny.
I know that feeling. I still have it to this day.
Rich Kid, contact me via the ‘contact’ button up the top and let let me read your unpublished book.
Hopefully we can come to some agreement about putting some of the words up on here.
May 7th, 2008 at 11:17 pm
66a was a helluva place, wasn’t it? I get a nice warm feeling every time I go through Finchley Road Station to this day! I remember with a chuckle the eggs filled with paint and distributed over the paintwork of several luxury motors. And the Merc garage which had its sign shot out with an airgun. Well, I say shot out: it was really more the cumulative weight of several hundred .22 shot that made it give up the ghost and fall out, I think. Of course, I should say right away that I’ve no idea who was responsible for such crimes.
Pointing the bone, as Jake mentions above, was another favourite, wasn’t it? Some kind of an Aboriginal curse I seem to remember.
And 66a was the place where I first learned to love wine. 2 litre bottles of Soave to be exact. I think my first completed 2 litre bottle was round a friend of Si’s girlfriend Millie’s (might have been called Sophie). I’m sure I fell briefly in love with her before the urge to vomit kicked in. Strange really, as I’d been drinking cans of Pils topped up with Big Sue’s vodka up the Bello for months. Perhaps it really was love
And Sam, what was the deal with you, Jake and Wank blindfolding me at Finchley Rd Station the first time I came up there and telling me that the guy you lived with was someone heavy in the IRA? And then it turned out to be Mike Diboll. Arf arf!
Jake’s room was nice there: the sheets suspended from the ceiling rose – and didn’t he have one of those little papier mache “retreat cave” things from Alternative London (the Bible at the time for all things low-rent or dodgy)?
Was Volker a drummer? I’m sure there was a full kit set up there at one point, with some nice guitar amps too – we had a jam or two when you had that SG, bit of reggae and stuff.
Let me see if I remember the chords to Lambeth Skyline:
Em D C G Dsus4
Em D C G Dsus4
Am C G Dsus4
Am C G Dsus4
And that natty little lead bit in the middle. Nice!
May 7th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Jake: I’d love to see some of your book mate. And maybe we could also all get some kind of non-fiction, non-linear narrative thing together from all of our recollections?
Certainly there’s a lot of very dark stuff, but also some stuff that has influenced my sense of humour into my 40s in a very beneficial way!
For instance, I can’t help laughing at myself when I slept at Ruth’s place (nothing [terribly] untoward) and Mitzi knocked on the door the next morning in her school uniform (bunking off from sixth form, before anyone has a pop
). She copped the right hump and legged it down to Lambeth North Station before I could say anything. No time to put my trousers on, just grabbed the nearest thing to hand which was Ruth’s kilt. So there I am following her down in to the station and onto a packed rush-hour train full of Ivy-League suited straphangers with my eyeliner from the previous night running down my cheeks with sweat, bare-chested and barefoot, pleading to a Catholic schoolgirl to calm down and be reasonable!
May 8th, 2008 at 2:39 am
Good to hear from you Tony. Hope you’re doing well.
I remember Jake’s room at 66a was very plush but I don’t remember the retreat cave. I’m sure I would have scurried in there if I’d known. As always, we started off with noble ideals. We painted everything, took the receipts down to the housing association, bought healthy food in bulk on a weekly basis etc. Jake put down wall to wall shag carpeting. His room at this stage was like a fully functioning, Jason King babe lair. This was of course the honeymoon period. Let’s flash forward to 6 months later: Me and Tony have had a dirty hit at Danielle’s. Tony is laying seige to the toilet but I can’t come out as my body is trying to remove the harmful toxins explosively at both ends. Showing true love, Mitch suspends a Sainsburys bag over the bath for Tony to relieve his bowels in. This goes on all night until we’re admitted to the Royal Free hospital in the morning. The kitchen by this time is devoid of anything save a lot of unused spices, some PG tips, a bottle of milk and some Smash. There is a large glass jar, originally intended for keeping pasta in which now serves as a container for dog ends. This is raided in times of desperation. It usually takes 4 or 5 ‘knubs’ to roll a very thin cigarette. There has been a steady leak under the sink for some time and, rather than spend precious giro money on a relatively inexpensive section of plastic pipe, we have placed a large, rubber bucket under the damaged area. This takes about a week to fill completely and usually has a greasy covering of scum on it when full. It has been named ‘The Vulture’ and is emptied out of the window onto the courtyard below. The long suffering Scottish woman beneath is by now too scared to complain. A few weeks before she knocked on the door in tears after suffering another day of 2 drumkits and 3 record players all playing at the same time. “It’s against housing association policy!” she wailed before being laughed at and having the door shut in her face. A fuse blew a few days ago and this was eventually mended by using a low E string from my guitar to complete the circuit. When me and Tony are released from hospital 2 weeks later, we go straight back down to Danielle’s. The next day we decide to dismantle the building and sell it for scrap to buy drugs so we climb onto the roof and spend all day removing the lead and hammering it into 6 inch square cubes. After destroying this vital waterproof protection we haul the stuff down the road to a scrap yard. The bloke looks at it and says: “That’s not lead mate…it’s zinc!”. The rent, gas, electricity etc…has not been payed for several months so we eventually decide to start a new life in Amsterdam and just abandon the place.
It was a beautiful flat looking back. Huge rooms, massive wall sized windows. I don’t know when they knocked it down but like I said, there’s a shiny office block there now. A blue plaque for decadance should be put up.
May 8th, 2008 at 9:39 am
I would concur wholeheartedly about collating all of the posts into a loose narrative…
The vast majority (well, almost all) of the books on ‘Punk’ in the late 1970’s focus almost exclusively on the music and little on the daily life which surrounded it (which is where the real action is most of the time)…
May 8th, 2008 at 10:53 am
Just out of interest – as I wasn’t around this scene at all and don’t think I know any of those mentioned above – would i be correct in assuming that during this period smack became very popular amongst the punk /squat scene?
During my time with The Apostles and staying around a number of the squats mentioned on other threads here I never came across it apart from a few old hippy mates of Dave’s on Brougham Road.
I notice Mike’s comment:
“The Hackney Hellcrew followed the same path w/equal joi de vivre,particularly at 281 Victoria Pk Rd in Hackney”
which seems strange as I stayed there over summer 1983 and none of the Hackney Hell Crew folk who stayed there were into drugs at all. In fact Olly, Martin, Alien etc were positively anti-drugs, apart from the odd bit of puff. maybe things changed later on but as I recall it the intoxicant of choice around that scene was pretty much cider and special brew.
One funny incident I remember was when they invited either Disorder or Chaos UK (can’t remember which – some smellies from Britol anyway) to stay. Soon after I heard Andy Martin going absolutely ballistic as he’d discovered they had thrown ‘perfectly good’ bread of his in the bin so they could use the bag to buzz glue from, raising them from their Evo-stick induced stupor and chasing them all out onto the street.
I’ve still got a load of photos from 281 I’ll have to send you to put up Pengy.
May 8th, 2008 at 11:37 am
You would indeed be correct in that assumption. It’s an old chestnut, but (as was first said about [I think] John Cooper Clark’s extended sojourn on the gear)…
They bent more spoons than Uri Geller.
May 8th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Chris:I meant a similar hedonistic path,rather than heroin or any drugs per se
I’m pretty sure that in ‘79 it started w/blues,then tuinol and then a few got onto the harder stuff in London.Certainly when I was squatting S.Acton estate in the late 80s people I knew in W.London had got into heroin even as we headed into our late 20’s.The drugs scene of 1979 definitely had a sinister undercurrent:if I remember,the blues vanished overnight to be replaced by Tuinol (is this in an old KYPP somewhere?) and there were conspiracy theories about the police being involved,if any one knows more to elaborate.Also I remember people banging up tuinol in a squat I stayed in one night summer ‘79,or is that just my memory playing tricks? I recall one place in Fulham possibly,stayed there 2 weekends on the trot and an older woman called Kate introduced me to the delights of banging up Speed,my one and only dabble with needles.Apart from one young hippy kid they were all ‘older’,which probably meant late 20’s (a lifetime ahead when you’re 18-19),and a mixture of zombified smackheads and dessicated speedfreaks w/missing teeth.Kate was possibly had that pernicious desire to corrupt me thro’ hard drugs,whilst I was too busy doing what 18 year-olds did then,i.e.fall hopelessly and fruitlessly in love with girls my own age(she made a big thing about ‘us gypos sticking together’).Anyway,something about the place gave me the creeps and I never went back.Years later I bumped into the hippy kid in the Chelsea Potter and when I asked he waved his hand dismissively and said “Oh, they’re all dead now”.The daft thing is,apart from the violence and some seedy moments,all these people were,on the whole,very sweet and, when you’re young there’s a certain romanticism about it all which comes thro’ all that bad shit.Being on the periphery of it heightens your perceptions of such people.Sad and,as Sam said earlier,when you think of all the casualties,it’s not funny.Dear me,am getting soft in old age
May 8th, 2008 at 11:48 am
I don’t think this lifestyle was exclusively Punk really, come to think of it. On the estate where I come from in south London, there were a group of guys who were into Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and all that, and they were right on the gear in the mid-seventies. I remember as a 12-year old being told to go indoors after standing on the balcony and seeing them performing an unusual slow wafting dance 3 floors below with a couple of sharps hanging out or their arms.
And smack and Special Brew/cider aren’t mutually exclusive either: this crew were pissed up AND taking anything else that came their way too. A useful working definition of nihilism would be “not choosy”, if you think about it.
Sadly, as with our lot, 3 of them didn’t make it. One of the guys lasted until about 6 years ago when his body just gave up on him. Nice bloke too. I’m very glad you guys are still knocking about. This is being a very good week for me!
May 8th, 2008 at 11:55 am
Mike: I don’t think that’s your mind playing tricks about banging up Tuinal in ‘79. People would bang up anything they could get their hands on. Tuinal, Nembutal, Seconal, sulphate, gear etc etc.
On another thread here, I recall Bob Short banging up a barrel of INSTANT COFFEE one morning. Really. And there was a female member of our lot who used to bang up Charlie because she thought that snorting it was wasteful!
May 8th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
btw, just to get back to the music for a bit…
I’ve just d/l’d “(I’m) Stranded” by The Saints, as I remembered that there used to be a copy of it at 66a (Leigh’s or Sam’s?).
Now that’s how an electric guitar is SUPPOSED to sound!
Apparently, according to Wikipedia, they gradually morphed into some sort of “Classic Rock” outfit a few years back. Supertramp with spikes? Shame!
May 8th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Saltiels back…
Aint read it all since I been away so might be repeating stuff.I’ll re read it all in a bit
Still of course we’ll beat the comment count .No contest.
About all the ‘negativity’.Not all Ldn punks were like ‘us’.
EG the KYPP crew.And Phil & Cory etc.They were less self destructive.
Also by 1978/9 when most of these memories are from, ‘punk’ was, inspite of the song, dead.
That creative moment of ‘76 & ‘77 had disapeared.We were not doing anything new & exciting just carrying on what those older 1st gen punks had started.And although we may have pretended otherwise I think we all knew it.Punk bands were already in Smash Hits.
Also Tuinol had alot to do with it.Its a wrecker of the first order.
That rent boy punk ’simon’ brought it to C bdgs and that was that.Overnight it changed.
Good to hear that Pinky had a good albeit short life.
Sarma?It was her who sold me the STP that I took in summer ‘81.I was hallucinating for months.Dunno Sam if you remember me when we hooked for ‘brixton’?
I was constantly fighting the urge to crawl into a hole for ever.That was one reason that I embraced ‘gear’ so wholeheartedly. It stopped those hallucinations.
I’ve recently learned that most people who take STP dont comback.Im a lucky chap.
Sarmas squat in Kings Cross had people fixing acid & doing stuff with their eyeballs.But they also did things like work full time in the city.It was very odd…
May 8th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
Anyway as pork says sex drugs & rock n roll aint only ‘punk’.Theres always gonna be casualties
May 8th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Jah:yes,and ‘The Bitch’ by Slaughter + Dogs,another great guitar sound if you whack up the treble.Will email that page of Portobello punks at weekend.I’m meeting Penguin/Tony about old tapes in June and by then should have dug out 3 old crates of ancient zines/flyers from back then. Sarma & John:still in W.Hampstead apparently.’Russians singer had brief fling w/her and she introduced to the 3-for-a-quid delights of instant dieting and stomach cramps,used to come and see us play at the Chippenham pub and bring along Patrik Fitzgerald.In hindsight,as you say, not a nice business but we were buying.
Sam:definitely Kings Cross in summer ‘79 re:those beaten-up punk squatters.It was on TV news and the attackers were locals,not skins.They said on the TV “We didn’t want those freaks on our estate”,wankers.And yes,John was a true saint,saved many of us in our time.Re:Sniper,I put Martin Badbreath onto this thread so maybe he’ll tell you what he knows direct,will save me money in texting at least!
Nic:I totally agree,nearly all these Punk books say the same thing,i.e.Punk ended in early ‘77 when more than 20 people had heard of it (in a nutshell).My girlfriend’s teen daughter gets very amused at my grumpy old man explosions on this.Most recently,that ‘Babylons Burning’ book by Clint Heylin(sp?) where he jumps from PIL’s 1st LP to fucking Nirvana,writing everything off inbetween,and talks about the ‘Oi/Mohican fraternity’ at a gig in 1979!!When I finished throwing the book at the cat/wall/window there was a smug,offhand line in the friggin’ Guardian about how ‘Punk was always linked to dubious right wing movements’(or words to that effect).Cue shredding/spluttering sounds and imaginary baseball bats wielded at the heads of halfwitted cafe latte-supping journos.This is why you guys should write your side of it before such garbage gets taught to kids in 30 years time!
Jah:Bob Short banging up Instant coffee,that’s the best I’ve heard so far. Those people I spoke of earlier in Fulham (off Kings Rd now I recall) were more old hippies,a Psychedelic Furs gig was the nearest they got to punk, and they were pretty posh.As you say the drugs were in all strands of society,probably not as much as now,but certainly not limited to punks.An old teacher of mine introduced me to Dope aged 14,at start of punk it was an older gay guy shoving amyl nitrate up my nose(he didn’t get to do more).Older people were good for a bit of willing corruption I guess. Nowadays they’d read you a Health’n'Safety manual.
May 8th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
Haven’t read Clint Heylin’s book (and by the sound of it I won’t bother either) but there’s a point here: if you weren’t involved in that scene (and I’m guessing he wasn’t), it was so (intentionally, by us) ghettoised that all you’d hear of it would be newspaper stories when someone died, a gig went pear-shaped (skinhead attack etc) or when the Daily Mail went into hypertension about “this poison in our midst”.
There was so much suspicion about “selling out” at the time, that it would have been frowned upon to write anything for general consumption about “the punk club” (I don’t know if there was any academic sociology done on it – anyone know of anything?). If anyone WAS writing about it from the inside, they weren’t published in any form which allowed the public at large to get much access to it. So you can to some extent forgive Heylin for not noticing it, if he was one of Paul Weller’s “Saturday’s Kids” at the time. What’s sad about it is that someone, 30 years later, can use the passage of time to hide how little he really knew and become a soi-disant expert on the whole phenomenon.
Or perhaps he was just writing about punk as fashion or fad. It certainly was the “youth cult” to end all youth cults, simply because by definition it was so diverse. You didn’t have to look the same as the next punk (unlike mod, rockabilly, Ted, biker etc). Much better if you didn’t, in fact. So you couldn’t tell whether someone identified themself as “punk” without asking them (I do remember Wank Stain, rather haughtily, once saying to me “I’m not a punk, I’m an alternative person”). It’s difficult to pin down something which is in constant flux, and completely heterogenous, long enough to give it a label so that Middle England can safely patronise it in the knowledge that they know all there is to know about it..
I think what really bound us together was the idea that there was something very wrong with late seventies/early eighties Britain, and that there wasn’t, and wouldn’t be, any better “big picture” system to replace it with. Without being too poncy about it, what Lyotard described as “an incredulity towards metanarratives”. And when there’s nothing to believe in, everyone starts trying to find things to know for themselves instead, constructing their own identity. That’s when the trouble starts. And I’m glad!
May 8th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Pork:I wouldn’t say DON’T read it,my opinion is not sacrosanct after all, some parts were a decent read but interspersed with bits that just irritated me.He has something against Eater,likewise Sham 69(which did make me laugh) and insists on lumping Crass in with other ‘N.London punk throwbacks’.Huh??! I’ve no comment on his writing and no doubt he’s written good stuff on other genres.Pretty sure he mentions he was in a band called the Pits in ‘78 tho’,and then goes on to quote their lyrics,for fucks’ sake,suggesting yet another frustrated musician taking up his pen in anger,as they say.I don’t think much was written at the time beyond a nice piece in the Sunday Times by Jill Tweedle,who appeared to reside in NW London and had 2 young punks for sons.She details their dress sense and problems w/skinheads and street muggings.Some of her definitions of other tribes around then are a bit twee,but it was the nearest to anything accurate I read back then,at least a change from Daily Mirror shlock horror stories.My mum read it and gave it me.I found it a few years back and re-typed it out for inclusion in a fanzine me and a few friends did.It was called ‘The Loneliness of the boys who mirror chaos’ but did improve from then on.
Jake is right,it was probably carrying on what had come 2 years before, also those not on the 24-7 trail to oblivion were the ones organizing gigs, bands,labels,zines etc.It took all sorts.As Sam said previous,one of the best things is that no-one can agree quite what it all meant/what is was about/whether it was worth anything
May 8th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
I’ve got to go to work. Pork…Stranded is one of the few albums (IMO) that has lasted from punk. Ed Keuper had the sound, and I agree about The Bitch too. I’d also add Better off Crazy by Skrewdriver [ducks for cover sheilding head].
May 8th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
A while ago I was going to upload the first Skrewdriver LP, which is actually pretty good, but like you Sam, thought that what they became afterwards would not sit comfortably on the KYPP site, and so I did not bother…
May 8th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Brave man Sam.
May 8th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
One more comment and this post gets the record of comments (so far) on a single post, who’s up for it? Come forward…
May 8th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
What the fuck went on there? didn’t mean to post that then, where was I …that’s it.. Brave man Sam, Skrewdriver always divide opinion, a case of their earlier work being of far better quality and about the music, not the far right bullshit of their later work. These comments have been great reading, total punk rock voyerism, love it glad yer all still here to tell the story. It’s history, but not as we know it. Shit whats going on here the mighty ‘guin has nipped in while I’m typing, might as well tell him what a top fucking knotch job he’s doing with all the music, and everything, plus a new born chick. The old birds got stamina. Go on post the Skrewdiver album, dare ya!
May 8th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
Blow your horns…Nuzz get’s us over the line with 168 comments. Cheers for the support btw! Skrewdriver maybe, maybe…
May 8th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
Re: Skrewdriver… They had a good sound, but I can’t separate out the politics from the music. As much as I like the sound of Wagner, I can’t separate out the politics from that either: it’s what it symbolises for me.
Reminds me a bit of that old method of winding up right-on lefties in the mid-late 90s: turn up at a dinner party having first bought a bottle of really good South African wine, and steamed the label off it. Hand it to the host on the way in, then once everyone’s got a good gobful of it you mention that it’s South African. This spurs a good old lefty middle-class back-slapping discussion on how “it’s soooooooo marvellous that the black people of that land can now enjoy the fruits of their wonderful country’s beautiful viticulture, and we don’t have to boycott their goods any more”.
…to which you chime in loudly “Enjoying it? It is a good drop, eh? The ‘82 was a great harvest!”
Splutters into napkins all round! Got ‘em every time. And, of course, the wine was really a ‘93 or something!
@Mike-> “Was Punk worth anything?” Well, on the surface the answer has to be a short “no”. But then that’s exactly what the ‘79 onwards version was meant to be, wasn’t it? Nothing that people in nice suits in big offices could commodify. There were no big bucks to be made in signing bands who weren’t wilfully offensive, like the Pistols had been, but were just wholly unattractive to the vast majority of the population. You couldn’t spin the idea of Crass or The Heretics to kids in discos with shiny suits, could you? The “don’t believe anyone and don’t buy anything” demographic is not a big buck for the marketing boys!
And you couldn’t sell the ‘tramp punk’ image either (though a few charity shops probably made a few quid out of us – has anyone else noticed that charity shops don’t price their clothes for the poor likes of us any more: we’re not the ones they’re trying to help any longer!)
If anything, late punk was broad-brush anti-capitalist – so the less it was worth monetarily, the more it succeeded. If it turned anyone on to the idea of being suspicious of governments and big organisations, or got them to read a few books or go on a few demos, then it was worth quite a lot.
And it promoted the idea of individuality, of making your own identity. How far it’s succeeded in this respect, though, I don’t know: it’s been the basis of niche marketing strategies ever since – try to promote the product as unique, or at least customisable, to the individual punter. Punk also spawned a lot of “entrepreneurs” who were only in it for the money through kudos bit. And in breaking down nationalised industries and deregulating the private sector (I know, we only used to be able to get a telephone in one colour from the GPO and it took 3 months to get installed) we end up with the spectre of poor folk not being able to afford their privatised water bills.
But at least people don’t trust politicians any more: look at the trust ratings for all of the political parties’ leaders these days. And election turnouts. “Don’t vote, you’ll only encourage them” was what we used to say, wasn’t it? I watched something on TV the other day with Winston Churchill actually filling a national tour of football stadiums with people who wanted to hear him speak. Well, we know they’re all lying bastards now, don’t we?
May 8th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Mike – I remember that Jill whats her name article. The essense of it was (going back to The Boys Goyshe) ‘what’s all the fighting about….learn to live with your neighbours…compromise a little’. Reading the Heretics interview the ‘12 minute tape fault’ was probably me slagging off soul boys endlessly. It seemed to mean something at the time but looking back on it…who really cares? London’s changed a lot. Lydon said in his excellent autobiography that it was like a bunch of villages back then. The way kids dressed in Islington was completely different from the way we dressed around our way but it was only a couple of miles up the road. You could spot an outsider immediately.
A few people also say in his book that the heroin came into the scene with The Heartbreakers in ‘77. As the first visible English punk junkie, Sid Vicious was apparently in love with that whole sleazy NY/VU doomed junkie image and bought the whole thing hook, line a sinker. To be honest, I think we fell for it too. It’s very romantic to play Russian Roulette with your life at 18 years old. There was that Irish guy Billy I used to score off who lived in W.Hampstead. One of his regulars was this ex-skinhead, probably in his early 30s at the time who took a shine to me. “‘Allo…it’s me skinhead mate!” he used to say. We were both there one time and he looked at me seriously and said: “Don’t get like me. You can stop now…don’t get like me, I can’t quit”. And he wasn’t being dramatic, he was dead serious. And it stayed with me, although it took another couple of years to stop. Very rare for junkies to do that. He planted a little time bomb in my head. Anyway, this is getting maudlin again. Where’s Si and his hamsters when you need them?
May 8th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Okey dokey read em all now.Its a really good collection.
Pork d’you mean the offy slug and me turned over?
Anyway as said he’s turned up last year.Been in California teaching yoga…
Hate to say it but Rich kids best toon is live version of ‘rebel girl’ by bikini kill.Not even from our era or British. How sad is that??
May 8th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
Ha, ha, ha lets round it up to 170. Nic started these comments with a run down of the tracks on the tape, and between there and here we’ve gone through a journey of drugs, squat punk doom, despair, fun, frolics and positivity to end up at Skrewdriver, ha, ha, ha, I laugh because I remember Andy Martin from the Apostles writing about ‘em somewhere, just been through their EP’s and sure enough crammed on the sleeve of The Giving of Love Costs Nothing EP there it is some writing about Skrewdriver. These comments seem to have travelled a full circle, just thought I’d let ya know. Now back to yer memories please….
May 8th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Jake: never heard ‘rebel girl’ – will have to see if I can BitTorrent it.
Not sure about the offie: don’t want to give too much away… as you so delightfully put it in a post above, “I really cant mention the specifics as its still not ’settled’”. Let’s say that there was a discussion involving the feasibility of redistributing wealth from a well-known purveyor of licensed victualments. I decided that discretion was the better part of valour on that mission, in the end! Did you ever meet Slug’s mate Randy? If so, I think you’ll know what I mean.
That’s a coincidence that Slug’s been teaching yoga, btw. I’ve had me head up me arse for years
May 8th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
If anyone else wants it, I’ve just seen a torrent with “Rebel Girl” in it on IsoHunt, called “The L Word 1-4 Music”. A few gigabytes of stuff, and some of it looks really good.
May 8th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
http://chawedrosin.wordpress.com/2008/01/18/bikini-kill-rebel-girl/
May 8th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
best punk toon that is
So the fun bits
At that age each year is different but
‘78 ;The music.
Was brilliant cos I started to go to gigs, which was in itself superfine, & discovered a scene that i could, as they say, relate to.
‘79 ;The scene
Met sniper started squatting .Met a brilliant crew.
Discovered speed.Sam you’re to blame for that.Thanks to ‘tiny’.Then later found smack.(its fun kids…)
Both me & wank were looking for it .
‘80: The theory
Courtesy of Mr Stain found Malatesta & started reading serious anarchist thought.Discovered ‘rising free’ moved away from ‘punk’ went to loads of anti fascist counter demos , New Cross march etc.even started a ‘riot’at the anarcho picnic that year .Think it was Tony D who was getting nicked for pissing in the flowers and I felt that the anarchos sitting on grass should get off there arses.We destroyed 2 cop bikes that day …
Discovered how much fun chuking stuff at the old bill was.
‘81 :The practice
For me the highlight of the whole thing.It was what I at least, imagined that punk had been on about.
After the second brixton riot [robbo,sam, wank, slug ,rich kid,]slug got nicked immediately (the idiot…), & banged up;sam & wank got quite badly beaten by them nasty boys in blue.Somehow robbo & I didnt.
3 out 2 left in.Later on in dalston I got put through a plate glass windows by some friendly local boneheads.So me out.
By the end of that July, the uprising had been put down, we were all fucked , end of story. Punk/Anarchy/revolution over.
It was all fun (except in my case STP)
May 8th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Apols for the multiple posts, but I just remembered another character from Campbell Buildings: Pip. NZ guy (come to think of it, probably a mate of little Debbie, the other Kiwi there) who was a lab technician during the day.
If Pip ever reads this, I’d just like to say “Cheers for the drink mate!”
I think it was his 21st birthday and he didn’t have any dough for a proper piss-up, so he brought home a massive brown flask of lab alcohol (methanol I suppose).
He went up the market in The Cut and got some specky oranges and apples that were gonna be thrown away, then bought a couple of bottles of that crap Spar orange squash (nice and bright orange, before they banned the tartrazine to prevent the littluns getting all hyper. I fucking hate kids [mine excepted of course
])). He then got a big galvanised bucket and poured the alcohol and squash in, then chopped the fruit up, slung it in and called it ‘punch’.
Now, I presume he’d sold the family collection of Royal Doulton china for a block of red leb or something, because all he had to drink this dodgy mixture out of was a stack of those thin plastic watercooler cups. I got up to his place (top floor, extreme south-east end of the estate I think) early doors. So I got to taste the first mouthful. I dunked the cup into the bucket, and as I was examining it for clarity and bouquet, something strange happened… the bottom fell out of the cup. I mean, it had dissolved it.
Now, as a man of 45, if I came across any food or beverage that had this sort of an effect on its packaging, I’d leave the vicinity with as much haste as if Harry Shipman had winked and offered to give me a flu jab. But no, I was 16. And at 16 the bottom of the cup falling off meant “Hmm, this’ll be good strong stuff then! Have loads.”
I went next door and got a china mug, filled it and downed it. A few more people turned up and I got chatting for a bit. When it was time for another drink, I got as far as about the third gulp, when my world went very strange indeed. I got tunnel vision (literally) and could only just hear what was going on in the room. Then it started spinning violently. Managed to convey to Mitzi that I needed out of there, and she said I could stay at her Dad’s place (I think).
Got down to the platform at Lambeth North and waited. Now, you know the noise the train makes when it’s coming up the tunnel? Sort of ‘roaring’? My poor addled brain associates this with dragons, which does nothing to settle me. As the train comes out of the tunnel and up the platform, the bit on the front that said “Queen’s Park, Bakerloo Line” was replaced by a set of those big red and white teeth exactly as painted on the front of the Airfix P-54 Mustang fighter plane. And then they came out of the front of the train and tried to bite me. 3 inches from my boat race! Doors open, and Mitzi says “come on, we’ve got to get on”. “Noooooooo!” I gibber, “I don’t want to get in the dragon’s stomach, it’s gonna eat me”.
Mitzi, very coldly in my opinion, turned to me and said “your choice love, but this is the last dragon of the night and if you don’t get into this one’s stomach there isn’t another dragon till half past six in the morning”.
Now, as funny as that is, you’ll remember that earlier in this story I said I got up to Pip’s place early-ish. And I couldn’t have been there that long between drinks. So it must have taken me 3 hours at least to get from his flat to the station (200 yards?) What the fuck I did in between I have no idea to this day.
Alcopops? They’ve got no fucking idea today
May 8th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
@Jake-> Just listened to ‘Rebel Girl’. Catchy, but my track of choice is 999’s “Emergency”. Can’t beat “I’m back, in full attack, never give in until they crack” to my mind. 999’s Tuesday night gig in that whole week in 79 that they did at the Marquee is just about the happiest I’ve been in my life apart from my daughter’s birth, I think. The Thursday and Friday were pretty damn good too!
Funny thing, mentioning that one likes 999 is sometimes worse among punks of our vintage than admitting to liking Skrewdriver. “OOOHHH no, they were New Wave!” and that sort of thing. I luvved em!
May 8th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
Jake – I remember that day scoring speed from Tiny. It was just one of those perfect days that all come together perfectly. It was high summer, smell of exhaust fumes and sweat. I think we (Devlin’s little brother was with us) walked to Maida Vale just for the sake of walking. We spotted some girl you knew by the station who you said was a dealer. No luck so we decided to move on to Portobello. You stopped at this Elgin Avenue squatting place on the way, then we got to Portobello. We spotted Tiny in a record shop, who I vaguely knew. I asked him if he knew where we could score some blues. “Yeah, how many do you want?” he said. We took said blues and waited and waited for them to come on. Nothing. We both got a bit glum. We were walking along All Saints Rd when you went “Fucking hell! This is fucking great!” (like a foul-mouthed Tony the Tiger) and started leaping up and down singing the bass line to Death Disco. At the same moment the two Annas walked around the corner. We went back to Anna Claydon’s, arranged to meet them the next day to go to The Electric Ballroom. Went home, listened to The Saints for hours, went to the pub. It was like a whole world opening up. Notting Hill’s spitting distance from where we grew up but it seemed like a different planet. I think that’s the kind of innocence that Mike was talking about that you can’t really reclaim. You’d meet people and feel this instant bond. One thing that annoys me about the coffee table punk histories is that it comes across as so ‘cool’. I think the great thing about it was it was still about this raw excitement at that point. People really weren’t self-conscious.
May 8th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
Nah 999 were great. ‘quite disapointed’ etc EP .
other fun bits.All the places i lived (not punk but including 107, sorry mate..)except Campbell bdgs.If there’d been another punk squat in ldn i wouldve gone there.As I said, was ok b4 the tuinol changed it overnight.
I didnt mind the scousers, pork it was indeed a wild nite that one with the flame thrower you made..Madness but good.Then tuionol & all of a sudden previously ok people turned tosser.(nice with bloos mixed in a , oh never mind.)Didnt even mind the teds though the boneheads were a fucking menace(anyone remember what happened to that lot in camden town,it was fuck cant remember there names, oh joe, rex maybe(?) and his crew,anyway it was a very nasty buisness, orafices/wood very very brutal)
Actually i recall now that that was one of the reasons why everyone made for Campbell Bdgs.
So more fun bits; urm places i lived in;living off our wits outside the law;looking like wanks ‘clenched fist’ hair(he did say it) & knowing that still in that post punk period it stood for something anti establishment; travelling to other punk places’ dam , paris;punkettes;goblins;glue;graffiti;fanzines;wearing make up; being in the best underground band ever;gigs & a damn good pogo;mini riots at gigs;feeling like I was gonna take off the first time i had blues & amphetamines generally.An underated drug.reading tales of beatnic glory by candle light at St Monicas;speeding for days there;Ruth wheeling me about the high road in a wheel chair, me dressed in a leotard, the girls having done me make up.Bob & mitch & others in hysterics.A group of boneheads on the way to the footie spot us.They try to smash their way out of their coach.We’re on the ground in fits of laughter;begging, i loved it always ;did what it said on the packet.later.The monday group getting on the front page of the nationals possibly because wank & me looked tooo ‘abnorm’ to go on a ‘ political intervention’.It was a fun punk moment; the may day 1980 anracho picnic was fun punk moment; charging the NF in Trafalger Sq & getting nicked for it.The rozzers saying ‘we has to nick you, you got orange hair’
Bloody buggers…
May 8th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
It was a very sociable movement looking back. For the most part you’d spend hours sitting around in people’s bedrooms playing singles and chatting. How quaint is that? It’s important to remember music wasn’t transportable then. I used to spend all day at work in the BBC canteen waiting to go home and listen to some new single. You wouldn’t hear it on the radio and there were no walkmans or even ghetto blasters. So it was like this divine secret.
Another thing that amazes me with hindsight, is that there was only 10 years between My Generation and Anarchy in the UK.
Old fart alert.
May 8th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
Sam how can you remember the details? Wild. Devlins little brother Lou, I just cant recall him being there. And that poem about punk Sniper recited? How can you remember that? I remember the incident him getting upset (poor guy he was just out of armley) but not the reason .
(btw its Devlin RIP too..)
That day singing death disco.Fantastic. more to say but I gotta go
May 8th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
I’ve got a photographic memory for details but I get told off by Susan for forgetting my cellphone every day. I remember a book you were writing called ‘The Mammalian Syndrome’.
May 8th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
“So the fun bits
At that age each year is different but
‘78 ;The music.
Was briliant cos I started to go to gigs, which was in itself superfine, & discovered a scene that i could, as they say, relate to.
‘79 ;The scene
Met sniper started squatting .Met a brillaint crew.
Discovered speed.Sam youre to blame for that.thanks to ‘tiny’.Then later found smack.(its fun kids…)
Both me & wank were looking for it .
‘80: The theory
Courtesy of Mr Stain found Malatesta & started reading serious anarchist thought.Discovered ‘rising free’moved away from ‘punk’ went to loads of anti fascist counter demos , New Cross march etc.even started a ‘riot’at the anrcho picnic that year .think it was Tony D who was getting nicked for pissing in the flowers and I felt that the anarchs sitting on grass should get off there arses.We destroyed 2 cop bikes that day …
Discovered how much fun chuking stuff at the old bill was.
‘81 :The practice
For me the highlight of the whole thing .It was what i at least, imagined that punk had been on about.
After the second brixton riot [robbo,sam, wank, slug ,rich kid,]slug got nicked immediatly(the idiot…), & banged up;sam & wank got quite badly beaten by them nasty boys in blue.Somehow robbo & I didnt.
3 out 2 left in.Later on in dalston I got put through a plate glass windows by some freindly local boneheads.”
Then the shopkeeper appeared…..
May 8th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
He did?It was at night, thought it was closed.I was bleeding a lot still up & down from the STP and thus fighting terror. You (You were still limping from your massive bollock courtesy of an old bills trunchionne in Brixton) lot stayed on & eventually found them boneheads in the chinky. You’d met a local crew of blacks by then. A few bricks got thrown & then the old bill were called and it was a bit of a massacre?
It was ‘cos of that STP that I got put through the window.
they saw our lttle posse &
bonehead to me
“what you doin?” I’m thinking ‘i dunno’…
“lookin for a riot?” Whoops..
” I ll give you fuckin riot” and he did .
if I’d been my normal -more grounded- self, STP induced honesty might not have seemed the best course of action…
I mean someone asked why what we did was so negative & not fun.
Yeah it wasnt all ‘nice’ but we had some fuckin adventures. And thats what we wanted.
Pork you remember that lot of hells angels on waterloo stn early hours of the morning. Loads of us like 12. 3 of them. Ok maybe 5.
We ran. Man they were scary. I mean they were ‘men’.I felt about five when that one guy with the horns said ‘okay punky c’mon’
He was smiling as he said it..
I imagined him biting my head off & feeding to his mad old lady in some weird biker sex game…
Anyway Sam that day when we got our first blues. It was a glorious innocence. It was all new. But we wern’t innocent, we knew what we were doing.We knew that from that day we’d go ‘all the way’. I could see it in your eyes…
May 8th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
I remember an epic walk with you Jake back from that squat near Nag’s Head. It was freezing cold and about 3am. I’d had it in my head the whole way that the only thing I wanted in the world was a jam doughnut. I wouldn’t shut up about it despite protests from you. We were walking along the Finchley Rd when this van pulled up in front of us, delivered a large bag onto a doorstep then sped away. Upon closer examination the bag contained about 10 freshly baked jam doughnuts. You can’t make this stuff up you know.
May 8th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
there is a chapter of the mamalian syndrome .As the STP wore off my writing got worse…
I remember just sitting at typewriter on automatic. Typical ‘artist’ story but i felt i was merely a conduit for the words..But i couldnt keep it up.
I’ve got ‘the book’ out but my scanners gone troppo. Im in the midst of changing computers anyway.When its done I’ll get scanning & emailing or we can use some other method.
Maan how can you remember the name of it ? Thats too wild.
Pork if its the one we did it was a ‘pakki shop’ [P C, moi?] but we nicked all the booze n fags.A great night out (Robbos misdermeanor was proper nuff sed) From Lager to Yoga?
May 8th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
Sorry, the ’shopkeeper’ is a Mr Benn reference.
“But we wern’t innocent, we knew what we were doing. We knew that from that day we’d go ‘all the way’. I could see it in your eyes…”.
That gives me the willys I must confess.
Yeah, we got a right hiding after the Chinese Restaurant thing in Dalston. I got a riot stick full in the mouth and Keith got a beating too. But, you know, we had been hurling bricks at them all day so fair’s fair. I think what you said about it being an adventure is right really. I don’t think it was any kind of revolution and the causes for the riots in 81 are still a bit obscure (from a white person’s perspective anyway). Looking back on it, I have to say I find the politics of the time embarrassing. And I am still a bit bemused to see ‘punk’ and ’stonehenge’ used in the same breath. But that’s just me.
May 8th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
Sam I do remember that.
[I think i started my conversion to christianity on that night.]
You need to get this all down .Well it is eh? That might have been the first time I walked across london at night. Epic. And the emotions I recall as I write now are of awakening & loss. And a sense of the infinate. Something deep.
May 8th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
[I think i started my conversion to christianity on that night.]
sos only joking
May 8th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
you mean Mr Bean or Tony Benn?
Im well lost
anyway , yeah i know that you felt/feel that the punk/hippie dichotomy was real.But we didnt even know Mr Rotten had been an acid dealing long haired hawkwind fan before he cut his hair.
Many of those early punks had squatted as ‘hippies’
The main difference between the 2 movements was well, 10 years & also the hippies obsessive love of ‘the countryside’ & its [pagan] manifistations.
But there were many similarites.I spose it’d be truer to say that Goth & hippie were closer.But where does Goth stop & punk begin?
But then I would say that , eh?
May 8th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
I mean Mr Benn:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM0PEgA04AU
“Back in Festive Rd the children were still playing as usual…”
May 8th, 2008 at 11:26 pm
You’ve got me thinking but the wife’s home and I need to make homemade play doh with the boy. However, if you’ve not read Joseph Porter’s account of punk/squatting/anarcho politics you should. The funniest and truest account of punk I’ve ever read:
http://www.blythpower.co.uk/genesis/index.htm
I loved this:
MANIFESTO OF THE ANARCHIST PARTY 1980
As adopted by comrade Porter on his Ascension to anarchist grace.
1. DOMESTIC POLICY
THE GOVERNMENT: Don’t vote, it only encourages them. All politicians are crap, and are oppressing the people. There is no difference between the political parties. They are all mad and want to drop the bomb. Only the police and the army are keeping them in power: e.g. why are their several regiments in central London, if not to keep the people down. All governments are fascists, which is why you shouldn’t vote, because whoever you vote for a government gets in. If we had Anarchy, then things would be much better, as no one would oppress anyone else. We are against the government.
THE POLICE: The police will beat you up and kill people, especially the SPG who are murderers, e.g. Blair Peach. The police are only there to keep the government in power. If we had Anarchy we wouldn’t need police, because crime is caused by the government and advertising, which makes people feel inadequate. We are against the police. They are big brother, and soon it will be 1984. You must always be careful when dealing with the police, as if you wind them up they will plant drugs on you. It’s a well known fact that weights of dope have been found with fingerprint dust on them, which proves that the police are selling on the drugs they confiscate.
THE ARMED FORCES: Like the police, the armed forces are only there to help the state keep control. We don’t really need an army as the Americans have enough for everyone. All soldiers are fascists and really stupid, if they get killed in Ireland it’s their own fault as they shouldn’t have joined the army in the first place. They are only there to keep the people down. We are against them.
THE CHURCH: The church is only there to keep the people in their place, by telling them what they should do. Religion is the opium of the people. If we had Anarchy we wouldn’t have churches, as the people wouldn’t need false hopes. The government and the church work together to keep the people down.. All servants of the church are fascists. We are against them.
THE ROYAL FAMILY: This is just another sop to keep the people down. Every time it looks like things are getting bad for the government, they have a royal wedding, or a baby, and it keeps the people happy. We are against royalty.
WORK: Work is just another way in which the government keeps the people down. Work is crap and wears people out so they don’t have any energy to fight the system. People who work are all blind sheep and wage slaves who are helping to keep the government in power. People shouldn’t do crap jobs for rich bosses. If we had Anarchy, people would only have to do the work for themselves, so they wouldn’t mind it. Not working is an act of revolution against the state. We are against work.
WAR: We are against it.
AGRICULTURE: Everyone should grow things, and you shouldn’t keep hens on battery farms as it is cruel. We are against it.
THE DOLE: “Do they owe us a living? Of course they fucking do!”
2.FOREIGN POLICY
IRELAND: We should get the troops out now, as they have no right to be there. It’s really good that the IRA blow things up as they are oppressed. Being English is really crap. We are against it. We recognise no nationality, which is just a way in which the governments keep control. Like national insurance numbers which are all linked to police computers. England is oppressing Ireland which is wrong. We support the Irish against the British, unmindful of the contradiction inherent in lending our support to nationalists.
THE MIDDLE EAST: It’s all the fault of religion and the CIA, who are probably in control of the American government, and hence the British government, which is just a puppet. We are against Israel, because it oppresses people, but guardedly as we don’t want anyone to suspect that we condone the holocaust. Anyhow, if we had Anarchy, then none of it would have happened in the first place, as there would be no religions and nationalism and stuff. NB. The CIA caused AIDS by having sex with pigs in Africa actually.
SOUTH AFRICA: This is really bad as the blacks are oppressed, and it’s their country. We (the British) invented concentration camps in South Africa in the Boer war, so we should be careful what we say about the Russian labour camps. We have them in Ireland too.
RUSSIA: Of course it’s really bad that there is oppression in the Eastern Bloc, but we’re just as bad (see above) as we oppress the Irish. The cold war isn’t as bad as the government makes out, but it’s a good way of keeping the people down by making them scared. Also, it enables the government to justify the presence on English soil of American troops, who are really here to keep the state in control. While not agreeing with governments and armies, and being against the soviet system, we have a secret fascination with their uniforms and tanks, which look really cool on the News at Ten – in fact we haven’t quite gotten over our childhood love of military hardware, but will endeavour to suppress it as it is not Anarchist: thus, when we see news reports on foreign wars, we resist the temptation to blow our cover by saying things like “Oh look, there’s a Phantom/Harrier/Mirage”, or whatever warplane it may happen to be. This is occasionally frustrating, as we are still very much children in some respects, but we are against war.
AMERICA: “I’m so bored with the USA,” but don’t quote The Clash if Crass are listening. America, of course, wants to rule the world, e.g. Vietnam etc. and we are against it.
IRAN: They have had a revolution and kicked out the Shah, which must be a good thing, also they are against America, which we are too. We don’t know whether to support them or not, as they cut off people’s hands, so we will wait until we hear someone else, maybe Crass, talking about it, and then decide what our policy will be.
TERRORISTS: They are against state control, so we support them. We don’t condone violence, but sometimes it has to be done, and things blown up: e.g. Guy Fawkes who was the only person ever to enter parliament with honest intentions – even though he was a mad religious extremist, which we are against, blowing up the houses of parliament was a good thing.
3. SOCIAL POLICY
FOOD: Crass are vegetarians – so is Steve – we’ve never met one before, and it seems a bit extreme. Apparently there are people called ‘vegans’, who are even worse. We see no reason to stop eating meat, but we are united behind the idea that white bread is crap.
MUSIC: This is an important tool for social change, and our endeavours should reflect this. All songs should be against the state, and everything else is just rubbish used by the government to keep the people down.
CLOTHING: Crass dress only in black, and so shall we.
DRUGS: More people die from Aspirin actually. Besides, they are illegal, so taking them must be against the state.
RACISM: Although we don’t know any black people, and do not understand their culture, we feel guilty because they are oppressed by white people like us, so we will support them.
SEXISM: As above. We feel guilty because we are members of the oppressing gender, so we will support women and hope that this will make them want to sleep with us.
GAY RIGHTS: We support this – but not, you understand, because we are in any way gay ourselves (we are not doing this, we stress, because we want them to sleep with us, but because they are oppressed).
STRIKES: Even though we are against work, and write fanzines about what a bunch of hopeless blind sheep the people who do it are, we support strikes as they are against the government, even when people are on strike to save their jobs, which we can’t see why they would want. If we had Anarchy people wouldn’t want to strike as they would be working for themselves and have everything they want. When the dole office goes on strike it’s really good as they just send you cheques without having to sign on.
NEWSPAPERS: These are all crap as they are all run by the government and tell lies to keep the people in their place – or so we have heard: we’ve not read one for years, as they are boring.
TELEVISION: Telly is the opium of the masses! It keeps the people brainwashed and in their place. While they are watching rubbish on the telly, they are drugged into senselessness and present no threat to the system. Television is also the insidious means by which the state implants its propaganda into the people’s brains. We only watch telly to jeer at how crap it is. We will watch it until closedown, and then we will stay up and play backgammon until the dope runs out, because we don’t have to get up in the morning, unless it is giro day.
THE SYSTEM: We are against it. We will smash it.
That’s about it.
ANARCHY! PEACE! AND FREEDOM!
May 8th, 2008 at 11:32 pm
@Jake-> no , this was a different offie, definitely! And I DO remember those vikings at Waterloo! “GRAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRVVVEEE!!” one of them shouted for some reason. And to this day when I see a biker I think of that word! Terrifying bastards.
The blues were great, weren’t they. That taste of aluminium you got in your mouth about 4 hours later was well worth it for knowing everything and wanting to tell everyone in the world about it, wanting to explore, wanting to make friends with everyone. Right up till the comedown. Then everything went into reverse. I knew nothing, couldn’t tell anyone that I knew I knew nothing, didn’t want to be near anyone.
Then, happily, they tell me 25 years later, after a bucketful of E’s in the 90s, that I’m manic depressive and that stimulants really aren’t the sort of thing I need AT ALL, like ever. If there is a God, he’s got a fucking strange sense of humour, I can tell you! But they really were the ultimate 16-year-old’s drug. “Teenage Blue”, Weller said!
I remember going round your parents house once and speeding me tits off. Went to go upstairs to the toilet and there was a table there. Now the only thing I ever made in woodwork at school was a spatula which fell to bits in the frying pan when I brought it home. I can’t remember who it was (Phil, maybe) who came out of the front room some minutes later, only to be collared by me telling him (over about an hour) in very intricate detail how we could and should turn it into a sofa bed. Everything down to the kind of thread we’d need on the screws, and the angles of the joints. Where it all came from I dunno, but it sounded perfectly convincing at the time!
I think, as I hinted at above, that the difference between punk and any other “cult” (for want of a better word) was that we didn’t see that being anything better to replace the system with, we just wanted autonomy. Not to be bothered (with anything or by anyone). The hippies had “naturalism” and the goths had the supernatural to keep them content that one day all would be better. We didn’t. We lived in that moment. Maybe there’s something slightly akin to Zen (very loosely) in that. There was certainly (in our case drug-induced) Enlightenment as an end to our suffering.
@Sam-> Weren’t the riots mainly about SUS? And didn’t anyone who looked a bit away from the norm suffer from that? I just don’t know what they were intending to achieve (though I guess it did hasten the eventual enactment or the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, which was a good thing).
Tales of Beatnik Glory! I was only telling my girlfriend about the story of the guys with the eye dropper needle and the “direct brain flash” the other week. Ouch!
May 8th, 2008 at 11:47 pm
Remembered a bit of a song I wrote while stoned in the 80s as a paean to Campbell Buildings and that lovely few weeks of spring/summer before it all went very bad. When we used to go skin up on the roof and stare out at nothing much but blue sky for a long time!
(Reggae Beat)
“Think I got the munchies
Gonna buy myself a bun
And a bottle of banana milk
And drink it in the sun (in the sun)
Roll me over in the clover
Twist me, spin me, change yer luck
I been rolling on that rooftop
So I couldn’t give a fuck”
Okay, Wordsworth it ain’t, but I’d defy any of the Last Poets to outdo it after eating a sixteenth of soap bar!
May 8th, 2008 at 11:47 pm
SAM – Josef Porter’s writings ‘Genesis to Revolutions’ are all up on THIS site – all the chapters…Like you say an hilarious account.
May 8th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
Sam:
“Another thing that amazes me with hindsight, is that there was only 10 years between My Generation and Anarchy in the UK.”
…and, looking at the list of UK No 1 singles for 1986, there were only 10 years between Anarchy In The UK and Nick Berry’s “Every Loser Wins”, Wham’s “Edge Of Heaven”, Chris de Burgh’s “The Lady In Red” and A-Ha’s “The Sun Always Shines On TV”.
We were nothing more than a statistical blip, after all!
As Peter Cook’s inimitable Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling said…
Do I feel pride? Oh yes, I feel nothing but pride:
An empty pride,
A hopeless vanity
A dreadful arrogance,
A stupefyingly futile conceit.
But at least it’s something to hang onto!
May 9th, 2008 at 12:11 am
“and, looking at the list of UK No 1 singles for 1986, there were only 10 years between Anarchy In The UK and Nick Berry’s “Every Loser Wins”, Wham’s “Edge Of Heaven”, Chris de Burgh’s “The Lady In Red” and A-Ha’s “The Sun Always Shines On TV”.”
Good point!
May 9th, 2008 at 12:20 am
I’m gonna watch the bluebirds fly
Over my shoulder…
May 9th, 2008 at 12:33 am
Bet no one saw that one coming! Well done Candy…!
Jah Pork fear not…I do not own the material you listed, so those tracks will not end up on this here site of ours.
Although Chris Low would no doubt have the Chris De Burgh single as would Nic probably. They love a bit of mid 80’s pap. So if you are desperate for some Burgh action let me know and I will arrange.
May 9th, 2008 at 12:54 am
Candy says… my very favourite Velvets song. And, of course, they were very much part of the soundtrack for 1980. White Light, White Heat. I’m Waiting For The Man. Venus in Furs. Sister Ray. European Son. Pale Blue Eyes. Sunday Morning. And, of course, the bleedin’ obvious one.
Then there were The Doors. The Crystal Ship, Alabama Song. Hearing Wank waxing lyrical about the Oedipus complex while trying to listen to “The End”. The hairs on the back of my neck still stand up every time I hear that electric piano arpeggio in “Riders on the storm”. Sitting round at 66a with that on the stereo, candles on, spliffed up, trying to work out Robbie Krieger’s jazzy chords. “No-one here gets out alive”. Very fucking prescient, Jimbo son!
And “One Rainy Wish” by Hendrix. Just beautiful. A mate of mine died (natural causes, not drug-related, which was quite a different sensation of loss strangely) 3 years or so ago, and he’d plumped for Castles Made Of Sand at his funeral. Just couldn’t understand him being that selfish when he had the album with One Rainy Wish on it
. His missus had less taste than that though. She slipped a bit of Celine Dion on at the crematorium when she thought no-one would notice. Joyless tasteless bint!
May 9th, 2008 at 1:30 am
hey chris when we first moved into 281 victoria pk rd, it was me olly,andy, hippy ken & nigel,that would of been around april/may 84, dunno where u got summer 83 from?
May 9th, 2008 at 1:37 am
PIP – Jah Pork mentioned him somewhere up above this. Sometime around 1991/2 he went back to New Zealand. Pinki went to his farewell party. She came home a bit sad cos she thought the reason he was going back home was that he had AIDS. I don’t know if this was true.
There is a piece by Pip in KYPP 4, cut and pasted from a mag called Gay Noise about gay punks from 1981 which talks about the Campbell Buildings era. I will scan it and post it here, although all of the KYPPs are readable here in the Photos section. KYPP 4 is very interesting because it marked a shift – which we felt strongly at the time – there was a senses of regeneration in 1981.
Pip’s gay punks piece connected back to Campbell Buildings, back to the 1977/79 rise and fall of the London punk squatting scene – and the ‘Ants/ Tuinol/ Crass’ cover tag on KYPP 1. [Note - sure Tony told me he recycled an old OZ/ sixties counterculture mag article for the Tuinol piece] It is all a bit of jumble mixing in the Covent Garden squat, the Old Street Fire Station and St. Monica’s, Bob Short, the St. James Church/ Pentonville Road ‘Parallel Universe’ gigs, seeing the barracudas play the Hope and Anchor, 51 Huntingdon Street (where Pip lived), the Mob playing in the adventure playground on Parliament Hill Fields – having just moved to Brougham Road – to the first Wapping Autonomy Centre gigs in late 81.
As someone says up above, most books on punk focus on the bands and the music. They miss everything else, but it was the everything else that was ‘punk’. They missed – for example – the way Ripped and Torn and then Kill Your Pet Puppy were about more than just the music. One of the reasons why there is KYPP the Website is to change this – to be a record of our lives, our world. Not as nostalgia, but as a piece of living history.
To argue the Situationist angle, it is an attempt to create and record the histories of our individual lives and thus punk fuck the the Spectacle- as in : Society of the Spectacle 157
The lack of general historical life also means that individual life as yet has no history. The pseudo-events that vie for attention in spectacular dramatizations have not been lived by those who are informed about them; and in any case they are soon forgotten due to their increasingly frenetic replacement at every pulsation of the spectacular machinery. Conversely, what is really lived has no relation to the society’s official version of irreversible time, and conflicts with the pseudocyclical rhythm of that time’s consumable by-products. This individual experience of a disconnected everyday life remains without language, without concepts, and without critical access to its own past, which has nowhere been recorded. Uncommunicated, misunderstood and forgotten, it is smothered by the spectacle’s false memory of the unmemorable.
May 9th, 2008 at 1:48 am
It’s a laugh though, innit?
May 9th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
Did i get the piss taken outta me for liking the doors & velvets? Bloody hippie music.
Velvets still the best
I try to convince me nieces that there was a huge difference between punk & hippie .They dont get it..
Lugie you the little blonde haired guy who i thought my girl friend Caz fancied? Sos if I gave you a hard time mate. But well what to do? Its all very confusing
The riots were about sus but not just sus. Were the poll tax riots just about the poll tax?
I took the sentiments of white riot literally
ooooh gotta goooo..
May 9th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
“I took the sentiments of white riot literally”.
I know and I did too but I think the politics around at that time were probably inevitable, but ultimately blinkered and embarrassing in hindsight.
May 9th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
Sorry…that was me. I’m not cross-dressing now.
May 9th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
On a lighter note…some pieces of the true cross from 66A:
Gretchen in Wank’s room. His ‘God Save the King’ banner in background.
http://img91.imageshack.us/img91/6007/gretchtd8.jpg
Your knees Jake – from a sketchbook I kept at the time. Everything had a fucking caption. I think I’d recognize them anyway.
http://img367.imageshack.us/img367/7053/keef6vw7.jpg
This one is self explanatory. Probably chemically inspired but I don’t remember.
http://img354.imageshack.us/img354/2821/keef5hh4.jpg
Sam
May 10th, 2008 at 12:32 am
This individual experience of a disconnected everyday life remains without language, without concepts, and without critical access to its own past, which has nowhere been recorded. Uncommunicated, misunderstood and forgotten, it is smothered by the spectacle’s false memory of the unmemorable
From AL Puppy’s post recently earlier
Reading all the posts on here then reading that, I am pleased that, despite all the hassle, I’ve set this site up.
The hassle continues, but it’s good for me to know that it’s not just me who has felt like this, and who has had these experiences and felt they were important. And felt cheated when this era was cut out of history.
And felt we had something to say, and found that on this site, people were saying it.
I’m getting problems when the site is down…but
Fucking hell!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I cannot believe we are getting away with it!
May 10th, 2008 at 9:08 am
Glad its been worth it Tony D
Cheers for all your efforts
Candy in hindsight we can dissect it & yeah , its embarrassing.No doubt we’ve all got different angles on stuff now
But at the time it was the best game in town.
Now, we all like the quiet places.
Just talking to someone as ‘candy says ‘ takes me to the first time.
Me & wank persuede simon to take us to Roy Rats squat in Kings Kross.
Classic, that smell of neglect & a one bar heater always on
He did the honours
He said looking at me
‘everythings so heavy.’
He looks quizical.
‘maybe i’m heavy’
He seemed suspended in mid air at those bizarre junky only angles.
Me i gurgled
‘this, its THE drug’.
It aint PC but it was better than anything.
Candy reveal yourself or lead me not into temptation.
May 11th, 2008 at 8:16 am
Blimey, it HAS gone quiet…
All good things come to an end
BTW just noticed not that the really important date at the top reads Heretics rehearsal 1980. Actually it was the year B4.
We’d already disintergrated by the end of the year.
Erm, I think.
Wasnt it Sam?
What a vivid collection this thread has become.
I just read the whole thing from top to bottom, kind of the whole era but at warp speed. Just how it was really.
Brilliant.
May 11th, 2008 at 8:55 am
Hello I’m back. Had a gig in S. Carolina this weekend. Was a bit dull.
I revealed myself as Candy (Darling) a few posts ago. I posted as she by mistake.
I think we were still going in 1980 for a little bit. The Uxbridge gig was ‘79. I remember phoning Anna up after the gig and we split up in November (just call me Rain Man). As a lot of the songs like ‘What did I Do’ were about me sulking about this I expect we did go on into 1980. Me and Crow were discussing it as a going concern when we moved into Campbell Buildings. I think he died in May. ‘No Character may have been recorded around this time. Social politics being what they were, me and Crow were best buddies and weren’t hanging about with you. You had formed an alliance with Dr Wankenstein and weren’t hanging about with us. I remember you’d both served your time at Campbell Buildings and weren’t going near the place. It’s amazing how fast things move when you’re that age. A couple of months later we all moved into 66A after we got back from Amsterdam.
May 11th, 2008 at 8:58 am
My folks,after 25 years away, have recently last year, moved back to their old house in W Hampstead. Im in their front room on the PC my mum valiantly struggles with.
So I, again, after 20 years or more of not coming to London much & the area where I grew up never, find myself in this surreal middle aged space of returning ‘home’.
And what with this bloggs added mayem its an odd headspace indeed.
Went passed St Monicas yesterday.
The plot, if it was the same place, is still derelict. Bizarre in the newly swanky Queens Pk.
Getting re orienatted with the area & London generally is strange as its packed full off memories that going east seemed to draw a line under.
Visually London is all pretty similar.Yeah theres the odd ‘tall’ here & there & it is alot cleaner.Or maybe just cleaner than Brighton?
66A is now gone but guess what, The Merc showroom opposite is a squat.
I know some folks in it .That is weird enough for me, having no connection with the area for so long but being connected via India & mates of mates to the squat opposite.
Camden Lock is now so commercial its untrue.
Portabello seems inoffensive.
Compendium gone, Rising Free, 121 ,
All the front lines disapreared long ago and the city itself has lost its edgeness.There no political graffiti anywhere.The whole town was plastered in it back in the day
Or maybe that memorys’ an age thing?
But it all looks the same.And I guess thts what makes London unique. Its topography remains intact but its culture evolves.
So im off to read the sunday papers, sit in the spring sun & listen to the sound of the suburbs; Black birds & Chaffinches tweeting in the braches & my dad singing ‘boiled beef n carrots’ a music hall song from his east end childhood.
Adios
May 11th, 2008 at 9:15 am
It’s strange for me coming back to London now too. Si’s living in Harrow now and last time I was back I took the tube to W.Hampstead and visited my parent’s old place. My Mum moved to France after my dad died. Like you say…the same but different. What you said about ‘front lines’ is a good point. It all seems to be a housing market these days. The period we’re taking about was really the arse end of the industrial revolution. And I think Britain was still ‘Post War’. The eighties really marked the start of something different – for better or worse.
Jake – how did your folks manage to get their old place back? Me and Si went past your place on the same day we went to Acton. We walked around the school too which was being renovated but no one stopped us and we did a thorough tour of the place, much of which hadn’t changed a bit. We even found some old graffitti. Talk about surreal.
May 11th, 2008 at 9:17 am
Oh and here’s my son JD dancing onstage in Nashville!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvxinGKuf2c
May 11th, 2008 at 9:35 am
Me old dear, walking stick in hand, has emerged..
Sam they got it back because they rented out. A wise move.
Another sound of the suburbs whilst sitting in their tiny patch of Garden.
Well me thinking I was the rebel, travelling was all part of it too.
But the predominant sounds of my childhood were the train, the tracks are just over there, & as i’d forgetten but am reminded of as sit outside, are the planes. Its constsant, on the heathrow circling path.
So there goes the rebel theory.
All I did was get programmed from birth to get on planes later!
Eeeh ooop
Great to see JD enjoying himself.
Its all about them now , eh.
May 11th, 2008 at 9:44 am
Sos to hear about your dad. I know u mentioned it earier. Tranfusion that got him? Terrible for those who didnt bring it on themselves. And your mums in France. I remember, was she French?
Sii’s in Harrow? Wild!
An Indian area now I think. Went to Kenton, god knows why I got no reason to be there but…a couple of years ago & I spoke more Hindi to the locals than English. Bizarre. Thats a change as it goes; its much more ethnically diverse. It was then, but its more so now.
I have been summoned for breky and as is the way now, its the old folks who have to be pandered to. Probably time to kip over your way?
Enjoy.
May 11th, 2008 at 10:05 am
Yeah it’s 5.00am. I still get a bit wired after gigs. My dad got Hep C from a transfusion but, truth be told he was on a litre of Scotch a day since…God knows when. Mid-seventies probably. Plus (this came out after he died) he had a private deal with the local chemist to get pretty much what ever he wanted. Painkillers and Dexys mainly. So…the apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree does it? Probably shouldn’t be airing my family’s dirty washing here but he was out of his head through much of my childhood.
My Mum’s side were Austrian jews. They got out just in time. That’s another thing that’s changed. Swiss Cottage used to be full of them and related consumer products – bakeries and restaurants. My Grandmother used to have a very thick accent and all of you used to giggle when she’d talk. I miss embarrassed giggling.
Your parent’s fridge was always full of strawberry milk. And I remember the nifty seventies pull-down light above the kitchen table.
May 11th, 2008 at 10:56 am
The changing topography does call forth a melancholic mood..
I’ve spent a few times recently walking around old haunts with friends and experienced the same emotions – all the same, yet all different…All the landmarks of our youth have been erased – all the venues, all the record shops and clothes shops, all the off-licences and the vast majority of the pubs – and in a short period of our own lifetimes too…Here in Birmingham, the whole face of the city centre has undergone a radical overhaul so that it almost feels like a new city…
I’m going out tonight to the last night of a pub which is closing for demolition (as the landlords can see the real estate potential)…I had my first ‘date’ with my good lady wife there, and tonight it will be full of people I’ve known for the last 25 years from the ‘Music’ / ‘Punk’ / ‘Hippy’ / ‘Political’ / ‘Drukg’ scenes…
The seeming de-politicisation of culture at the tail-end of the 1980’s put paid to ‘political’ grafitti..There are still a few examples left around Birmingham which seem incredibly anachronistic now (but also strangely uplifting)…
May 11th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Yeah the Thatcherite/New Labour project has been a complete success.The commodity has taken its place at the temple alter.
There currency of political discourse has all but vanished.Its odd.Four us at least who grew up in a political climate.
Anarchism?
Nah, lets go shopping
May 11th, 2008 at 7:45 pm
On the other hand you can view punks as the stormtroopers of what would become the eighties. Including entrepeneurial ideas about business and lifestyle consumerism. The big squatting areas became some of the first to be gentrified too. Squats / political bookshops / vegetarian cafes / healthfood shops / delicatessans / Tibetan clothes shops and wooden kids toys / wine bars…..I saw the evolution again and again. And like it or not we were all part of the process. One of life’s great little ironies…we all destroy what we love.
May 11th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
I need to watch it too. My dad was from Dublin and it’d break his heart every time he went back and some old landmark had gone. The London we grew up in must have been a different world from that of the late-forties or fifties. When did Kilburn become Irish? Probably with my dad’s generation. When did Brixton become black? Notting Hill? The cities we knew were Victorian inventions built to house industrial work forces, which don’t exist in the same way anymore. Our kids’ll be bemoaning the loss of theme pubs and Wal Marts probably. I have to say though, last time I went back I went to the Centrale cafe in Soho. I turned the corner to be met by a pile of bricks with a JCB sitting on top. My mouth literally hung open.
[Grumpy old man voice] “All gone now you know….all gone”.
May 11th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
Beneath the streets the fields. I lived for ten years on Brooke Road in Hackney. I found a book ‘London’s Lost Rivers’ and discovered that there had once been a Hackney brooke which flowed from Highbury down through Clissold Park, across Stoke Newington Common, along part of Brooke Road then around the edge of Hackney Downs, along Amersham (?) Road, crossed Mare Street near Hackney Central Station and wound its way down to the river Lea.
A bit more digging and I found histories of Hackney, Shoreditch and Stoke Newington – going back to the days when Hackney was an Anglo-Saxon village on the edge of Epping Forest.
When I moved back to Scotland, did the same – building up a picture of the landscape and of its history. see http://westlandwhig.blogspot.com for photos of a recent find – patch of once cultivated land now surrounded by a sea of heather and bog.
May 12th, 2008 at 12:16 am
“Yeah the Thatcherite/New Labour project has been a complete success. The commodity has taken its place at the temple alter.
There currency of political discourse has all but vanished.” <- Jake
I remember us at the time thinking that the old divisions of left and right were no longer valid, and that it was turning into a straight fight between authoritarian ideas and ideas of autonomy at the opposite ends of a clock face.
I think that the Thatcher/Blair project has been amazingly successful at instigating a very controlling regime (certainly one of the most rigorous in Europe) while giving off the heady bouquet of “personal freedom”, “deregulation” and “stakeholding”.
The Terrorism Act gives police powers that the Special Branch could only have dreamed of in the 1970s. We have ID cards and biometrics coming. And we have more CCTV cameras than anywhere else on the planet. Students are roped into capitalism through incurring massive student loan and tuition fee debts. Ex-university dope smoker Jacqui Smith is pulling up the ladder on the tokers, while rich dinner parties in the nice part of Islington get through kilos of the Bolivian naughty-chalk per year. Boris bans boozing on public transport (one of the only pleasures of catching a nightbus). Demonstrations have to be approved by the police in advance. Plans may even still be afoot to lock up those designated mentally ill before they have shown any propensity to commit any offence (and that really *does* have some nasty overtones of some of history’s less salubrious regimes, huh?).
The reason people don’t have any political discourse, I think, is that there aren’t any democratic choices to be made between the parties. I think that the thing which has suffered (and whether this is a good thing or a bad thing I’ll leave up to you all) is a sense of legalism: our parent’s generation felt that laws were there for a good reason and whether one agreed with them or not, it was a good thing (for society as a whole) to obey them all. Most of the people I know these days are very much more selective about which laws they choose to obey and which they don’t.
May 12th, 2008 at 12:27 am
“Our kids’ll be bemoaning the loss of theme pubs and Wal Marts probably. ” <- Sam
I think it was Baudrillard who said “The only real place in America today is Disneyland, because it’s the only place that isn’t pretending to be anything else”.
And that goes for Britain too, these days!
Everything refers to something else to get its meaning these days (the theme pub being the perfect example for me, as a recently ex-pisshead). Fashion, art, politics, music, you name it. Everything is a mere re-presentation of something else (hyphen intended). It’s nonsense on stilts. And has anyone else noticed that any trouble that the financial system has had over the last 10 years hasn’t been on direct securities like stocks and bonds, it’s been on derivatives (and the most recent slump is derivatives based on derivatives based on derivatives). What a nice little analogue of life!
May 12th, 2008 at 9:27 am
I like that, JahPork, the comment from Baudrillard ” The only real place in America today is Disneyland…”
I guess times are fluid, and that the things that happen 25 years ago just dont exist anymore, the likes of gigs in Church Halls, fanzines, a real subculture of youth…does youth as a subculture exist anymore…I don’t know.
As a political time, the late 1970’s and early 80’s , Britain was grim ! With the oncoming miner’s strike, the Falklands, …it was just a very different feel to it all…one that if you did not live through it, is possibly difficult to look back on and understand as history has now been rewritten that Thatcher did nothing but good for the country when in fact it was massively divided.
May 12th, 2008 at 9:43 am
Problem with the idea of change is that the past COULD have been slightly better in some respects.
If you heard a conversation that went……:
“Fucking society’s shit now.They’ve brought back Capital Punishment,scrapped taxation completely,now there are no benefits for anyone,and a dentist or doctor is private only.There are no buildings in Britain other than shopping centres and new-build ‘affordable’ housing. All people do now is watch telly and eat….”
“Yeah,but our parents said the same thing”
….what would you think?
Yeah.Thatchers Britain was a fucking tea-party compared to now.
Its not that a kid wouldn’t want to start fanzine,form a band,or maybe rent a church hall for 4 quid and put on a gig him/herself.
Its that they’ve been programmed to not have any interests other than ‘get rich quick’,food,gadget consumerism.
May 12th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
I think that youth as subculture exists virtually, these days. Youth probably communicates more words then we ever did 30 years ago. We communicated by meeting up at Rough Trade on a Saturday, and were very visible doing it! Today, everything is exchanged electronically. There weren’t any newsgroups, any chatrooms, any Facebooks, any text messaging. Just look at the red-faced tizzy that the Daily Mail gets in when someone discovers a website where teenagers are exchanging ideas on how to commit suicide, or how to further one’s anorexia. And the Flashmob and online music studios are great examples of how you can use this medium creatively. Plus, you only need to take a look at how the record labels feel about sharing music via BitTorrent to see a little bit of politics in action!
I think what is missing (as a number of us mention above) is the “romance” of being teenage in 1979: dark rooms in squats, that feeling of “us against the world”, being the first to have a new single when it came out, a surreptitious bit of creative vandalism in the name of anarchy, and the idea that you were upsetting someone when you walked down the street. Of course, if you’d asked us that at the time, we’d have denied it completely!
May 12th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Does anyone else remember being at Campbell Buildings (or anywhere else for that matter) in late ‘79 when, at a time when we were all shit-scared that the world was going to end by nuclear war at any minute, the sirens sounded?
I’d always promised myself that I’d grab the nearest willing female and go out with a bang, quite literally. But when it happened we all just sat there in shock, waiting for The Big One. We must have sat there for half an hour or more, just waiting to be vaporised. And nothing happened. Turned out they were testing the flood alarms and we hadn’t been told in advance. I always wondered if it was just that we were so insular there that everyone else in London knew about this test and we were the only ones who didn’t!
Just a quick reminiscence: does anyone else remember the squat in Archway where Pinki lived? Her ‘room’ was a large cupboard with a sloping ceiling, at its highest point about 4 foot off the floor. I seem to remember she had the walls covered in tinfoil too. There was a tall ’skinhead punk’ called (I think) Gary there as well.
Just thinking about the Music Machine, a couple of things: the massive neanderthal bouncers with their winning catchphrase “Chain or glove?” if you got caught misbehaving. And a Spanish tourist encountering Crow while at a gig there, and being completely convinced that he was Sid Vicious… “Seeeeny? Seeny Reeshos? It is you? You are no dead? This ees the happies’ day of my hooooooaaaal life!!”
May 12th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
One of the things I remember from the early 80’s was those “Government information booklets ” that were issued that in the event of a nuclear war , and you were caught out in the open…lie down !!..
Bloody hell , half the world would have been decimated but you would have been ok cos I found a small hollow in the ground to lie in …
It was not funny stuff, and now, one wonder’s about how close we all were to getting wiped off the planet. I do recall somewhere on this site that a programme was aired recently about the nearest that we got to midnight, I think AL may have written about it.
May 12th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
For all those bemoaning the gradual death of old London,check out this site:
http://www.london-rip.com
You can see which old pub/record shop/greasy spoon/club has been turned into ‘luxury flats’ this week.Pretty depressing.Another great link is
http://www.london-books.co.uk a new publisher set up by John King,author of Football Factory/Human Punk/Skinheads etc and a good Slough boy.He’s republishing some cult long-forgotten London novels of the past.
Sam:when did Brixton become black,Kilburn Irish etc…My mum came down here during WW2.In between the bombing she did the normal teen things of the time,going to dances at the Lyceum,Shepherds Bush Empire, Hammersmith Palais (which finally closed last last year to become an office block),Odeon et al,so I guess there was some kind of continuum there in that 30 years later I was going to the same places.Back then Southall was a village,the tram ran from Uxbridge to S.Bush (same route as the now 207 bus) and Peckham was “very posh” she says.When she talks about it it’s sobering to realise just how little they knew of what was happening in the world outside (compared to us in the 70’s & esp. compared to 2008) and how her girlfriends cared as much about make-up, boys etc as they did about the War.My Uncle Angus was sent down the mines,too young for call-up,he said ‘fuck that,it’ll ruin me suit/hair etc’ and bunked back to London.Police came and brought him back.In 1945 they put him guarding German POWs as they defused unexploded bombs in ctrl London,to teach him a lesson I guess.
I think Brick Lane is a good example,still Jewish in my time,now almost entirely Bengali.Globalisation,as the cliche goes,will quicken this continual flux. In the 80s London still had huge Irish population,now almost entirely gone I reckon.
Tony:re Thatcher et al.Someone younger asked me ‘was punk a reaction to Thatcher?’,but Labour were in power during 1977-79.But,as you say,it was largely irrelevant to us.Difference was that the Tories were pretty libertarian on matters personal,after all they possessed more than a fair share of perpetually-drunken lords and ladies.New Labour have this petit-bourgeois obsession with telling what to think/ingest that is becoming surreal.It brings to mind the Stasi,with the disturbing caveat they always use of it ‘being for your own good’
‘London RIP is nostalgia.It’s local history.It’s a protest against the lick spittle yellow running dogs of capitalism that are determined to turn the entire place into an enormous Starbucks’
May 12th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
‘youre future dream is a shopping scheme.’
Hmm, clever lad, like the Jefferson Airpalne album cover ‘After bathing at Baxters.’
The nulifying quality of consumerism has been a constant theme of rocks rebels.
Who says it now?
Rappers?Goths?
Emos? Are Emos the noughties version of us?
Basically what Im getting from the last few posts is that we’re middleage fuckers bemoaning the loss of our youth.
True enough but..
So not only do we destroy what we love – & shit has that been proved by places in SE Asia for example in the ’80’s, when compared to how they are now – but, rather than being the people our parents warned us about, we have become as them when looking backwards in time.
Can you remember how dingy the ’50’s seemed to us?No TV, no dyed hair, no whatever we had.
Well thats how it looks to the young uns now I guess, what with the net & GM everthing and all
As for punk being part of the process of change .
Absolutely.But as with the riots its always lumped in as an ‘add on’ in retrospectives.
Even in sociological ‘rock’ retros. Its baffling
And this virtual ‘relating’ that the youth do?
Yeah Pork they do without doubt communicate more words.But because they relate through technology its like the derivatives.
One step further removed.
When we met in Rough Trade we had to deal with other.We learned from each other & had to be present.It was ‘real’.The world we created was real where as there’s is virtual.So virtual they dont even create it.They just modify templates.Bit like ‘Monsanto’.
Rah rah rah.
May 12th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
If our kids really do look back & get upset about shopping malls being replaced we’re doomed I tell you.Doomed.
Where the S F future we were promised.Living in Bubbles on other planets?Warp speed space travel?A world with no money & countries?Orgasmatrons?Jane Fonda?
When all’s said & done wheres Captain Kirk?
May 12th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Aaah yes…Starbucks. A place mostly used in the beginning by empty headed ‘liberals’,who like to pick and choose what bits of London/UK/Society should be preserved!! Have a look where the starbucks are.Aint one in Edmonton.The scum cant afford it.Plus the scum dont have laptops.
These ‘Liberal’(TM) prats are the people who tell me how much broader the choice of food is now,for instance. These cunts live in places like ‘Stokey’,'Borough’,'Shoreditch’ with an organic butchers,a belgian-vietnamese fusion restaurant,a portugese deli etc.Where i live it just goes ‘Euro Cafe’-'Dixie Chicken’-Millenium Kebab’-'Lidl’-'Chicken USA’ etc.
They are also partial to ‘Olde Worlde’ ‘Artisan’ etc Toys for the kids made of wood like 1920s style. Yet you are supposed to lap up a plastic mobile phone toy from Toys R Us for your kid! They want a ‘classic’ ‘greasy spoon’ serving veggie beans on artisan toast for 7.99 in thier fucking ‘village’. You are meant to be happy with Oven Chips.
I hate them and thier hypocrisy.They are the WORST little Englanders!
I DO NOT CARE whether Brick Lane was Bengali or Jewish really.I used to go to Petticoat Lane about twice a month on sundays,to buy bootlegs,secondhand records,clothes,army surplus,Last Resort shop etc.I LIKED it.(Probably at that time,was about half and half Bengal/Jewish i reckon.It was cool,it was safe.) I dont care about ‘Foreigners’ or any of that shit. I care about the quality of life. The fact is that since the early 90’s it has gotten worse in a very short space of time. I liked Petticoat Lane. I dont like Shopping Malls. The former is allowed to die. The latter is allowed to multiply. All in the name of progress,whatever they wanna call it to try to make me look like some old reactionary. Yet,at school in the late 60s early 70s,i was promised a fucking HoverScooter to ride around on in the future (about 1997 or something),yet everyones still in fucking shit cars.
Surely its about whats better.Not something based on some agenda that someone has from ‘Re-education’ ‘Liberal’ Gulag style.
Is Tesco better than the greengrocer that was on the corner of your street?
Is ‘Cash In The Attic’ ‘Britains Worst Celebrity Dogs’ ‘Car Boot Crazy’ ‘Location Location’ better than ‘Out Of Town’,'Panarama’ ‘Play For Today’ ‘World In Action’?
Is success measured by records sold better than success measured by intrinsic immeasurable greatness of the music better?
New Labour have done nothing to reverse any of the negative stuff. Obviously we are living the result of ‘liberalising’ economics post Thatch. Getting rid of ‘beaurocracy’ to ‘free up’ people to allow them to expand blah blah blah etc etc. Resulting in planning rushed through for big business etc. Labour did what?
More soulless glass and chrome ego towers for the grey bastards who have got their own way.
The weird thing is that recently ive started thinking exactly the same as one of the posts above:That punk rock was a ridiculous rallying cry for right wing libertarianism.Loads of songs about doing what you want etc..look where alot of the protagonists are now!!
‘Our’ punk rock. The punk rock of 79-82 so-called ‘Anarcho’,was. a reaction to that,rather than a continuation.So maybe it was more in line with hippys.Which means that the 76-78 punk was just ‘Pop Idol’ of its day.
Fucking jeesus,what am i saying!
Hahahahaha
I really did have nothing better to do for the last hour. Sorry.
May 12th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
RichKid: Depends whereabout you place the datum line on “derivative” though, doesn’t it? Because when we listened to a new single that had just come out, it gave us a huge thrill. But it was a virtual representation of a band. It hadn’t even been recorded in one take, but had been overdubbed: it never really represented anything that had previously existed “together” in any form, it was a virtual thing of and in itself. And we did have telephones to communicate: just because they were crackly analogue telephones that were housed in piss-smelling phone boxes, they were still electronic devices.
Part of the fun and folklore of punk were the rumours which spread around the community third, fourth and “N-th” hand… “Have you heard so-and-so band have split up?” “There’s a secret gig at Dingwall’s” (there never fucking was!) etc, etc. I remember starting one up the Bello when Joy Division bought out those badges with the “soundscape” equaliser logo on (looked a bit like a mountain range). I started going round telling everyone we didn’t know that they were for a new North London band called The Pinnacles. I heard it back the next week and it had morphed into “they were the best thing since sliced bread and their new album was gonna change everything”!
Ideas are virtual and abstract. However you represent them, the original idea is (literally) only conceptual: but that’s what separates us from Little Ken and his ilk!
And yes, I do feel a bit cheated about Jane Fonda. But at least Pauline Murray touched my hand for a second (felt like an hour!) at Penetration’s gig at the Rainbow so I had an extra excuse not to wash for a month
May 12th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Hahaha the future stuff…we were both writing at the same time.
Bastards aint they .
haha
May 12th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Nothing wrong with a bit of Dixie Chicken, Tone!
It’s all bleedin’ Ken’s Kebabs and Speedy Pizza down here in Pompey. What I’d do for a nice bit of Dixie Chicken……
Some people don’t know they’re born
May 12th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
I dont mind the Dixie Chicks,but from the discarded boxes of the other stuff laying about all over the street it dont look great!
May 12th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Surely Anarchism is the ultimate conclusion of libertarianism? “I do what I want, when I want, without adversely affecting anyone else”.
But free-market liberal capitalism UK style is not of the same lineage at all. It’s the bastard son of Harold MacMillan and Del Boy, with a little Eastern-Bloc nannyism thrown into its gene puddle for good measure.
Libertarianism good, liberalism (in capitalist sense) bad.
May 12th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
RK:exactly,remember when they said computers would abolish
‘meaningless work’?! Last time I signed on it was still like a paper-mill in there and,because the UK doesn’t make much anymore,most people are engaged in ‘meaningless work’,ie at local govt offices,penning edicts on not smoking or tossing away applecores.That & call centres,surely the 21st Century version of the workhouse:speak to imbeciles all day AND wear a shit-eating grin whilst doing it.I’m amazed that no-one has not yet ‘gone Postal’ in a US call-centre,or don’t they have ‘em
Moaning middle-aged old punks indeed,but good fun.Incidentally,there’s a fairly famous neuroscientist who has recently written book where she conjectures that modern technology will alter people’s brains over time and substanially change the way they interact/react to each other and life around them.I’m no scientist so can’t explain better,think her name is Greenefield..?
Tell me if I’m wrong,but wasn’t the whole infrastructure of clubs/pubs/ studios/record shops/rehearsal spaces we took advantage of in late 70’s actually run by older folk who’d started it all in the late 60’s? We gave ‘em a new lease of life (i.e. they had new records to sell again).Perhaps we should then have taken on the mantle for the next gen?
Jake:my mum’s in her 80s,she told me the 50s were “boring as hell”,think she misses the old Spitfires and me109s overhead
May 12th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
I love it when someone calls me an old fuddy duddy. I normally say “How many computers did you build so far this year?”. Its the assumption that if you somehow dont toe some robot party line of ‘anything that happens now is better than what it replaced’,then you must still have a’wireless’ or dont own a cellphone or summink.
I LOVE technology.
Food is not technology.
Landscape is not technology.
May 12th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Libertarianism good, liberalism (in capitalist sense) bad.
Liberalism in a nanny state boring cunt its for your own good sense?
Hahaha
And thats before you even get to Anarcho-Capitalism!!
May 12th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
I loved small wonder shop. I loved buying X Ray Spex new 45.
But…
I have no desire to release round plastic anymore.
I have no desire to try to sell music in a shop anymore.
Because of progress.
Worthwhile ‘HoverScooter’ style progress.
The internet is the most punk thing to happen to people who make music.
Your own digital studio.
Make your own album.For Virtually Nil!
Your own website.
Your own Digital Web Radio Station.
Final Cut Pro..make your own video.For virtually Nil!
You give away what you want.You sell what you want.
No middleman. No Big-cigar Mr Ten Per Cent.
Not even a totally nice bunch of hippy middlemen ten percenters like Rough Trade.
Just You.
And the World.
Fan-fucking-tastic.
May 12th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Yeah Pork youre right, it was virtual.
But wrong there were secret gigs.
Can u not remember ‘the school bullies’?
Anyhow we can get upset about Osama bin Bush or poo poo the young.
But the rot realy set in when I arrived back in the UK once, went to an offie to get some smokes, asked for rizzla & swans & was given a box of Rizzla matches & some Swan papers.
Its SO SO wrong.
The kids have no chance when up against that.
Doomed I tell yer doomed…
May 12th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
TB thats the arguement, but why does it feel so unpunk then. Is it just me?
May 12th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Tony:I wasn’t making a point on what ethnic group inhabited Brick Lane or not,just answering earlier thread of how quickly areas change.My favourite line from these Little Englanders when you visit the Canary Islands or somewhere similar is when you ask ‘Why did you leave the UK?’ and they grunt ‘Too many foreigners’ without a trace of irony,and then make no effort to learn a word of Spanish to boot.
Your “Anarcho was a reaction against the ‘76-78 mob” has really got me thinking…but don’t apologise for it!
May 12th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
“Liberalism in a nanny state boring cunt its for your own good sense?” <- Tony
Well, liberalism in the “liberal capitalist” sense. Moving assets from a low-value use to a high value use creates wealth, as the economists say. Get someone who is being literally whipped in a sweat shop in China to make a pair of pants and then sell them in The Gap for a tenner after you’ve orchestrated some million-dollar advertising campaign to promote your “brand” rather than the pants themselves. That I don’t like already!
The reason I make the differentiation about types of liberalism is this: I did a teaching course a few years back, and one of the essays we had to write was on “Liberalism v. Utilitarianism in Education”. Well, it was something I hadn’t thought about at all in that context. But when I did think about it, it’s a very good model of how we lived our lives as punks.
Liberalism in education is the idea that everyone has the free right to as much education as they want, for their personal development. It takes the view that education is a good thing in itself. Doesn’t matter if you want to do a course in 15th Century flower arranging in Matabeleland, or a doctorate in particle physics. Education has intangible benefits to people, and we shouldn’t deny them it. That way, you turn out a human race which is wise about what it wants to be wise about.
Utilitarianism is what New Labour would have us embrace. Education is only something which is tolerated when the outcome of that education is the ability of the person educated to participate in maoneymaking or other tangible benefit (and in our society, it’s only moneymaking). Any other education is to be discouraged (by huge tuition fees and student loans). Get ‘em in the sausage machine young and they won’t notice they’ve missed out on anything in life.
You can extrapolate this well beyond education too:
If people want to live lives which don’t contribute to capitalism, but make them happy and increase the human race’s collective experience, then why shouldn’t they? Liberal.
Any way of life which does not make a buck at the end of the day is wasteful, does not benefit the majority and should be banned. Grey Brownian utilitarianism.
So in that limited sense, I’m for liberalism.
May 12th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
“TB thats the argumnet , but why does it feel so unpunk then.Is it just me?” <- RichKid
Separate the message from the medium. They’re just two ways of tackling the same problem. The tribes are just much bigger and much more disparate these days, so we need quicker and more large-scale methods of keeping in touch with each other. The Heretics bedroom tape would have been just as cool if it had been made and distributed by electronic means in the first place.
Can you remind me about “The School Bullies?”
May 12th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
“And thats before you even get to Anarcho-Capitalism!!”
That just sounds like the wet dream of every fat cat in a big office somewhere. They look down on the city below and say “That’s it. All the rules have gone. We can have every penny from them ALL now!”
May 12th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
The 1976 – 1978 period of ‘Punk’ made some great music, but I can’t bear the general feel of the political content: the demands of the early ‘Punks’ (as illformed and directionless as they were) are very much in keeping with the Rand-influenced strand of right-wing thought ushered in by Thatcher which is characterised by a Libertarian stance on personal life…
The ‘Hippies’ (in general) had much more beneficial, open and interesting ideas, perhaps because their culture was more of a ‘lifestyle’ than ‘Punk’ (which never really moved beyond the status of fashion)…
One of my own issues with the ‘present’ is the almost total de-politicisation of everything. I can see the positive benefits that the technology has brought, but I don’t see as much to be positive about in terms of the actual content of the transmissions. When you take a look at myspace (or any other internet medium utilised by large swathes of the teenage population), all you see is kids taking pictures of themselves or posting “This is fierce!”…While I appreciate that these things are very important for most teenagers, there doesn’t seem to be any exchange of information or debate around ideas (in contrast to my own youth)… Perhaps the period from the early 1960’s to the mid 1980’s was a blip and teenagers have gone back to the state they were in in the 1950’s?
May 12th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
“TB thats the arguement, but why does it feel so unpunk then. Is it just me?”
RichKid: have you read The Crying Of Lot 49? I read it a few years back and found it very enlightening on all things cyberspace. One of the subplots in it is about an underground mail system operating in the US (the book was written in the early sixties) away from the prying eyes of “Big Brother”. You can quite easily substitute “The Internet” for the Lot 49 mail system, I think.
[from a review] “[C]ybernetics itself, or rather the signification The Crying of Lot 49 holds for readers of the cyber-generation[:] If looking for strict one to one correspondences, the underground mail service bears a strong resemblance to the early Usenet groups, bulletin boards and chat rooms, all those elements of cyberspace which encourage and foster communities to form and interact.”
It does go on to be a very cautionary tale about information overload and entropy, but it’s a bloody good read!
And, more generally, a brief plot summary I’ve found of the whole book interestingly mirrors a lot of the stuff that we’ve posted in this thread, too:
“The Crying of Lot 49 was written in the 1960s, one of the most politically and socially turbulent decades in U.S. history. The decade saw the rise of the drug culture, the Vietnam War, the rock revolution, as well as the birth of numerous social welfare programs after the Democrats swept Congress in the 1964 elections. This was also the decade of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Martin Luther King’s assassination, Civil Rights, and, to some extent, women’s rights. The novel taps into this explosion of cultural occurrences, depicting a dramatically fragmented society. The Crying of Lot 49 contains a pervasive sense of cultural chaos; indeed, the book draws on all areas of culture and society, including many of those mentioned above. In the end, the novel’s protagonist, Oedipa Maas, finds herself alone and alienated from that society, having lost touch with the life she used to lead before she began her attempt to uncover the mystery of the Tristero. The drug culture plays a big part in this sense of isolation. The world around Oedipa seems to be a world perpetually on drugs, manic and full of conspiracies and illusions. And though that world is exciting and new, it is also dangerous: drugs contribute to the destruction of Oedipa’s marriage, and drugs cause Hilarius to go insane. Oedipa hallucinates so often that she seems to be constantly high, and ultimately, this brings her nothing but a sense of chaotic alienation.”
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
May 12th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
@Nic-> I don’t think the country is as depoliticised as it might first appear. There are huge anti-war and anti-poverty movements. There are pressure groups fighting against governmental excess of all kinds. Many of them represent a single issue and attract followers from across the political spectrum. One that typifies this is “the Countryside Alliance”. Now I don’t happen to agree with their politics, but they do represent a massive cross-party single-issue pressure group.
I saw JEREMY BLOODY CLARKSON on TV the other night speaking to the TV news people about a pressure group of which he is a member (looking after injured soldiers when they come back from war and leave the army). That’s a political issue.
Climate change is a (geo)political issue. The outcry against China in Tibet is a political issue.
Both sides of the argument on cars are indulging in political discourse.
When we were punks, and indulging in our policital discourses and actions, there were far more teenagers who were more interested in Cortinas with go-faster stripes, corduroy trousers and wing-tip shoes, twenty-quid haircuts, burberry raincoats (no, it ain’t a chav invention), Top Of The Pops and Smash Hits, A-line skirts, discos, nail varnish and Max Factor makeup, and having a fight/getting laid on a Friday night. We just didn’t tend to bother with them. But they outnumbered us by the millions. Now their chavvish descendants have got Facebook and MySpace as well as ours. That’s equality for ya. but the politics is there if you look for it.
May 12th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
Re read The Heretics interview. Were we any better?
May 12th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
The interview was not our high point.Was it?
‘The school bullies’;
The Damned olde fruit.Incognito
Interesting about education .
I realised how idealistic we all had been on my first trip to the 3rd world where most folk were/are illiterate.Blew me away how arrogant we’d been.World revolution?A very British solution.
We can ‘choose’ to read tabloids & on a planetary scale thats a huge privilege
May 12th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
Its true there were always more straights than not but there was a tangible cultural underground.
Now although we do have ‘team america’ ,michael moore & ‘tony & me’ and even the theories of direct US involvenment in Mr Bin Ladens plot, I just dont see alternative culture & lifestyles.
At Glasto festi one is actually more controlled on site than off.And there lapping it up
Is it because society is generally more open & diverse?
Or its peoples merely more apathetic?
Or just ‘cos I listen to too much Radio 4??
May 13th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
I noticed the change in ‘de-politicised’ people in the late eighties when I was at art school. Most of my friends there were five or six years younger than myself and they didn’t have political opinions at all. Maybe these were ‘Thatcher’s children’ or perhaps they were less naively utopian. Looking back on it we grew up in a very socialist world. Small things like sharing sweets after school (which was a social law) was a reflection of this. But maybe kids in Britain still do this. Americans don’t share cigarettes automatically for example. I miss it.
I think the idea of a ‘counter-culture’ relies on the notion of outsider-hood, which is a romantic way to think about yourself but we’re all part of the society we grow up in whether we like it or not. My dad annoyed me by telling me ‘no man is an island…’ in about 1979…and here I am.
Nic – ” The 1976 – 1978 period of ‘Punk’ made some great music, but I can’t bear the general feel of the political content: the demands of the early ‘Punks’ (as illformed and directionless as they were) are very much in keeping with the Rand-influenced strand of right-wing thought ushered in by Thatcher which is characterised by a Libertarian stance on personal life…
The ‘Hippies’ (in general) had much more beneficial, open and interesting ideas, perhaps because their culture was more of a ‘lifestyle’ than ‘Punk’ (which never really moved beyond the status of fashion)…”
I think both movements produced consumer revolutions and highlighted gaps in the market. TV shows in the eighties such as The Tube were a breath of fresh air at the time. I remember obsessive hunts for ‘granny glasses’. Si found a pair of little, round shades in Oxfam which I borrowed for a while which were made for a blind person and you couldn’t see through them. We wore them anyway. Personally, I never wanted to live in a farming commune in Epping or wear a black, Maoist uniform. When ‘the shopkeeper appeared’ for me in 1983 I found my re-entry into the ’straight’ world as interesting as my entry into the ‘counter-culture’ a few years before. It does wonders for your self-respect to wear clean clothes for example. Likewise going to work every day and supporting yourself. I consciously didn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater in terms of social political ideas, but feminism, racism etc…were mainstream left-wing concerns at that time too.
I think that punk’s great strength early on was its naivity to left/right wing ideas. The punk girls around at that time didn’t take any shit from anyone but didn’t drone on about feminism or call themselves feminists. And they changed the way I thought about women. Early punk fashion was more of an invitation to get your head kicked in than any kind of fashion statement. Despite punk being in Smash Hits in ‘78, I remember every trip out of the house being marked by encounters with smoothies, lads, blokes outside of pubs, people shouting at you from cars. It pissed people off.
May 13th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Most of the cars were Cortinas I might add.
May 13th, 2008 at 7:35 pm
I heard a good show on Radio 2 (quite upsetting that we’re now their target audience!) recently with Malcolm McLaren talking about the legendary (1976?) Sex Pistols trip to Paris. He described Siouxie, bare breasted as ‘Liberty leading the people’. Interesting analogy I think. I was never a big Siouxie fan but particularly with hindsight I think she’s an extraordinary person. She grew up in Pett’s Wood near Orpington which is where my grandmother lived. A more picture perfect example of straight-laced surburbia you couldn’t hope to find. Privet hedges, semis, the gentle purr of lawnmowers on sundays. Dressing as she did in 75 or 76 was more than just ‘fashion’.
May 13th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
Alistair – “Beneath the streets the fields. I lived for ten years on Brooke Road in Hackney. I found a book ‘London’s Lost Rivers’ and discovered that there had once been a Hackney brooke which flowed from Highbury down through Clissold Park, across Stoke Newington Common, along part of Brooke Road then around the edge of Hackney Downs, along Amersham (?) Road, crossed Mare Street near Hackney Central Station and wound its way down to the river Lea.
A bit more digging and I found histories of Hackney, Shoreditch and Stoke Newington – going back to the days when Hackney was an Anglo-Saxon village on the edge of Epping Forest. ”
Interesting stuff. The only thing I remember from Geography class at school was a photo of a tube train going through fields somewhere, which is now West London – probably Hounslow or somewhere like that. You realize that every generation has this sense of loss. But change is the only constant and all that.
I’m seeing it where we live. It’s incredibly rural, blue collar country. The most beautiful place I’ve ever been but housing developments and sub-divisions are cropping up all over the place. I bemoan the inauthenticity of it all but having lived here for 10 years, as an outsider, I’m probably the spearhead of the problem. It is the same disease as someone mentioned – British ex pats complaining of ‘all the foreigners’ at home. I knew this girl in the early nineties – trendy, well-spoken, vegetarian Camden girl who had been living in Hackney for a couple of years and complaining of all the yuppies moving in. Life/culture is/was much more complicated than we ever imagined.
May 13th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
enjoyed this site showing parts of old london now mostly derelict
http://www.derelictlondon.com/derelict_london_com.htm
May 14th, 2008 at 12:10 am
Nice post Sam, Punk to me was a growing and learning experience, I took the bits that made sense and they stuck with me. The impractical or naive parts I left by the wayside along with my Sham 69 records. I find it funny reading the posts here with people complaining about the youth of today not rebelling enough. Just like the way that when we were kids old people used to say ‘what has happened to our nations youth?’ etc it’s kind of funny that us older rebels are now saying ‘what has happened to our nations young rebels?’. I’m just making an observation as I’ve done it myself too. The thing is we didn’t invent rebellion, and nor did we perfect it. The right to bear arms and the right to be able to form a militia in America came directly from the idea that if your government was corrupt or was taking too many liberties with your rights you could join together and go kill them. This was one of the tenets the US was formed on. Which kind of makes our generation hurling stones and insults at cops look rather tame by comparison. Of course it is a little less passive that shooting them with a pixelated machine gun on Grand Theft Auto 3 which seems to be today’s nearest equivalent.
I remember reading a quote in ‘Vague’ that may have been from ‘the boy looked at Johnny’ where someone said to a young punk rocker “What are you rebelling against?” and the answer was ” well what have you got?” Maybe the youth of today are rebelling against what they grew up looking at…us.
May 14th, 2008 at 12:17 am
Ahhh that quote was stolen from Brando in ‘The Wild One’. Also lampooned brilliantly in a ‘Simpsons’ episode when Lisa wants to be more Bart-like and starts to fail at school, hanging out in the toilets with the smokers etc.
May 14th, 2008 at 5:26 am
I just watched ‘End of the Century’ – Ramones documentary again. What a great band. As funny as their image. Big Heretics influence by the way.
[Interviewer] Why do you play so loud?
[Dee Dee] We used to play loud and our amps were crap and they’d break on us. Now we’ve got amps that…..[long pause, searches for correct word] ………………….work.
I find it genuinely moving that the three main players all died within a year of each other. Quite amazing what they did.
May 14th, 2008 at 5:35 am
I should say they died within 3 years of each other.
May 14th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
Sammy buoy.Spot on about Epping & punk girls.
But too addled from a day supporting meself to be much in love with it…
Not pertaining to much on this thread exactly but an interesting overview on why civilisation happened where it did
(like why it was the Eurasians who invented the wheel for example)
Is ‘blood, germs & steel’ by Jared Diamond, a US academic
Im gonna set up a new computer now.Might be away a while
Eeeh ooop
May 15th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
John Stop Calling Me: good post. I find the kids in London suffer a lot more from peer pressure than we did,at least that’s what they tell me. I guess we were as “tribal and easily-influenced” in our own way, just that we had a bigger variation of styles to choose from. It is funny in one way that we tacitly assumed music could get more extreme after Punk, whereas the opposite has happened and even my mum (in her 80’s) finds Coldplay, Keane – Indie “wet”. In my day it was “what’s that racket: you can’t sing, you can’t play, you look terrible. You’ll go a long way” (name that ad).
May 15th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
@Mike-> I don’t think that you could have got any more extreme punk music. Once you cut it down to one chord and one screamed verse, that’s about as for as you can go. But I think that there has been extreme music since… personally I can’t listen to death metal: I’d rather have my toenails pulled out while being made to eat custard creams and watch the films of Sandra Bullock!
Gangsta Rap was/is more extremely violent than punk ever was, and has a higher ratio of swearing per line than any punk song I heard.
Some of the really hard techno was very extreme, I thought (though in hindsight that may have been the E).
Once a cultural signifier like a particular kind of music has lost its power to shock, the next generation have to backpedal and find some other version of it to make extreme in their own way.
The odd thing for me is that today’s youth really only have the same number of styles to choose from that we had, plus one more: punk. But if they choose to adopt punk as part of their look/feel/philosophy, then they’re getting something 3rd-hand at least, because we appropriated a lot of styles for our thing, didn’t we?
May 16th, 2008 at 1:52 am
Not sure too much punk music was that extreme. Take JR out of the Sex Pistols equation and you’ve got dirty R & B a la New York Dolls. Mr Lydon was a genius of a late-seventies teenager and definitely did something new – image, lyric and attitude wise. I still think he defines punk. The Ramones did something new too. That Ramones documentary is well worth watching. There’s this brilliant interview with Ritchie (?) Ramone – their third drummer who said he came up with a song and played it to Johnny on the guitar.
[Johnny] What’s that chord you’re playing?
[Ritchie] It’s a minor..it adds suspense.
[Johnny] Well fucking get rid of it.
Unfortunately though we all took the Johnny Ramone school of playing and did it badly. The Ramones had a genius for melody.
Joy Division were more extreme than the Pistols I think. I couldn’t take their music at the time – it was just too relentlessly bleak for me.
May 16th, 2008 at 1:56 am
Tommy Ramone now has his own bluegrass band and we’re playing a gig with them in a couple of weeks. I hope I get to meet him.
May 16th, 2008 at 11:26 am
I think I meant that the mainstream would get a little more…well ‘extreme’ is the wrong word,adventurous maybe.I was listening to XFM Radio at the time and the sheer, I dunno,whining vapidity of it all (someone else in the room had turned it on).I think the Pistols were pretty extreme for their time in that they took rock music back to more primal roots,less insistence on musical aptitude (tho’ in hindsight of course they could ‘play’),more on youthful attitude and sheer excitement.A friend of mine’s older brother used to stand in his doorway whilst we played the Clash,Damned.He would shake his head and hold up his Gentle Giant LPs in silent protest.Rap was pretty extreme lyrically but the music was mainly just sampled from old funk/soul stuff. Death Metal,yes,extreme,but never likely to percolate out of the deepest, darkest underground.US Hardcore probably took the old punk 3-chord fast blueprint and drove into oblivion,Napalm Death and co. ditto in the UK.I’m sure there were plenty of musos in 1976 who thought ‘everything has been done before’ in terms of chord-changes, notes and amalgamation of existing styles,but what was in fact revolutionary was the simple taking of music back to basics,to the roots, that happened with punk.The music itself wasn’t particularly revolutionary, the process of stripping it down again was (for the time).I remember plunking away ineptly on a guitar in 1975-6,the idea that I could be up on a stage playing it a year or 2 later was unimaginable.There were few kids of 15-17 playing live music and those that did were technical wizards in comparison to what we could do.Punk suddenly said ‘that doesn’t matter’ and hey presto,the rest is history.In retrospect it’s probably one of the few types of music where musical aptitude is a hinderance,hence the fact that, outside the really name bands,most punk bands were good for just 1 7″ single.Hearing 3 chord punk today by bands that are more than competent just makes them sound a bit contrived.
What I miss about punk is not so much 3 chords,shouting and spikey hair but the sheer fuck-you exuberance and a million other little things that can’t be replicated again because it would be all too contrived.Probably what I was getting at, a combination of suffering an afternoon of the fucking Fratellis/Pete Doherty/Keane et al on the radio and a gig I went to the same night where I saw a decent friend’s band but then endured 4 others who were just a wishy-washy blur of singer-songwriter angst/gimpy electronica/smug indie-rock.Some guy I was talking to outside said “this is what it must have been like pre-punk!” and he wasn’t wrong.I had the dark thought that maybe an invasion by the old Ladbroke Grove skins would have given it a bit of an edge,something anything.
Sam:Joy Division,I agree,loved the more upbeat tracks back then,taken me years to appreciate the more doomier/slower stuff,but so much a product of their location and the grim,dark arse-end of the 70’s.I thought the first 12″ was flawed but still incredible, as is the boot LP of Unknown Pleasures before it was remixed and overdubs/effects added.Can’t beat the basslines! I waffle enough…
May 16th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Hard to know how much of McClaren is/was total bollocks but I remember reading an interview with him in ‘78 or ‘79 where he was going on about trying to kill rock and roll. I think punk did suceed in doing this. It was the final word in a dialogue that had been going on for (only) 20 years. 32 years later, nothing else of that magnitude has happened. I’m not sure that it’s lack of musical imagination but more that the belief that music or musicians could change the world has been recognized as a bit far fetched. It’s entertainment – it always was, although we dressed it up as something more. Going back to ‘we destroy what we love’ – the media and music business learned a lesson from punk and very quickly started scouring every minor scene for the next big thing. The stuff we complained about – really a lack of youth-based entertainment, did change and improve in the eighties, partly because we took over the media. The change was very noticable to me when I got back from Australia in ‘83. Alternative comedy shows all over the place, stuff about drug addiction on tele. I remember seeing Made in Britain with Tim Roth. It really hit the nail on the head at the time. Also, there was an emphasis on broadening regionality in the eighties. You started to get other accents than the BBC accent on tv and in the media. The idea of the media being stupid enough to let The Grundy Show happen again is unthinkable. And who’d really care? Someone said ‘fuck’ during primetime. Big deal really. I remember seeing JR on The Word in the early nineties and he made a complete idiot out of himself by doing his usual ‘I will NOT be misrepresented by the media’ bit and that female Canadian presenter just took the piss…”Hey look everyone! It’s anarchy in the studio!”, she said. There’s an interesting clip on Youtube of PIL being interviewed on TV in the northeast around ‘78 I think. Of course Rotten walks off set in a huff and the amused presenters say…”seems like we’ve seen this before somewhere”. John really had his moment and the clips of him early on, speeding, angry and using the media for his own ends still give me goosebumps. It was so raw…it still is but the moment was very brief. It was a cultural revolution of sorts. The cultural revolution of the last 15 years has been a bunch of computer geeks changing the way we all relate to one another. As someone else said – the world of fanzines, independant record labels etc..has been neatly solved by one machine. And here we all are in the future, spread out all over the world and having a nostalgic conversation. Brilliant really. I remember sitting around late at night at Jake’s parents’ house watching Indian musicians on BBC2, taking the piss just for lack of anything else to do. I’m not sure that I’d learn an instrument these days. It seemed so exciting playing loud through an amp. It still seemed very dangerous.
May 16th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Hi Sam,yep in hindsight Punk was the last word as you say.Working at R/Trade warehouse in the late 80’s it did amuse me all the record/ journo types running frantically around after the next big thing,which had by then become sub-genres of what were already sub-genres of original genres themselves.That’s how you end up with record shops where everything is categorized by,again,sub-genres.The gig flyers I see around London now are equally culpable:they often describe everything about the bands playing short of an MP3! We used to be taken by the particular design of a flier or the sound of a band’s name,that’s how I ended up seeing Crass for the first time.There was word-of-mouth about them but it was the graffitti and the imagery that intrigued me to discover more.Once everything exploded in summer ‘77 then the music often became irrelevant:teen fashion was again marketable and this huge network of labels/mags/shops and venues sprung up and eventually such structures feed on themselves and endlessly recycle.In the late 80’s I remember some drunk NME clown telling me that,as he needed the job,he had to find something new to write about and would,if need be,invent it.About McClaren,he had big ideas after didn’t he,but never managed as big a splash again.I have the feeling that Bernie Rhodes was pretty important in all that too.I’ve not seen Lydon on the TV for a while,last time I thought he was parodying himself,at least his old self.I agree,learning guitar probably doesn’t mean the same thing anymore:last week one of the newspapers here had a free ‘Learn the guitar’ colour supplement.I flicked thro’ it and it contained every cliche and studied pose we’ve been familiar with from the last 30 years.How to play ‘Rawk!’,how to be the sensitive singer-songwriter,the rhythmic pulse, the guitar-hero etc etc.Which just goes to prove that every last inch of any ‘counter-culture’ has been co-opted,drained of genuine meaning, assimilated and thoroughly corporatised.Again,back to punk,the joy was how untutored,naive and simple it was.Everyone was agonising over how many chords when 3 would do! I remember buying a cheap piece of shit guitar from an old junk shop called Bits’n'Pieces,the guy was spitting image of the singer from Mungo Jerry,down to the sheepskin & sideburns.I was over the moon with it,yet the strings were like cuts of wire from a fence.When plugged into a mate’s stereo it sounded like a wet fart.We put the bass in the other channel w/a quality street tin for a snare and stuck the tape recorder on the window-sill at strategic moments to catch the planes landing at Heathrow.It was laughable,but even then I was sure it contained the germ of something better than the latest Rick Wakeman concept LP!
May 16th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
STOP PRESS: PUNK ROCK IN ‘IS DEAD’ SHOCKER…
I’ve just got back from a trip up to Portsmouth’s City Centre, and in the shopping mall there someone had a stall on which he was selling a 3 foot x 2 foot Pistols’ God Save The Queen Poster in a posh wooden frame for forty-four quid.
@Sam-> You’re right, on reflection, not too much punk was that extreme: I’ve just listened to 999’s first album and had the strangest feeling that I’d heard it somewhere before. Then I remembered where: Dr Feelgood! Perhaps it all started in Canvey Island, and not with the Bromley Contingent after all!
May 16th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
@Mike-> Dunno, I think that people like the Tom Robinson Band and The Ruts were pretty exciting lyrically, but they were very good musicians (on the ‘Rising Free EP’ Tom Robinson shouts to Dolphin Taylor [hippy name!] “Take It Away Dolphin” and he goes into some proper Keith Moon stuff). The Ruts were musically adept and quite heavy-rockish at times but they were saved from mediocrity by Malcolm Owen’s lyrics and delivery.
Was listening to The Adverts last night: their stuff had a whole a lot of energy I think.
May 16th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
@Sam-> With the advent of reality TV, the idea of someone NOT saying “fuck” on prime-tie TV is shocking. The punk attitude has been so thoroughly assimilated into the media (and mass-marketing generally) that people assume anything that isn’t (faux) raw has something wrong with it. The watch-word for the marketig brigade in these times isn’t “you can’t polish a turd” so much as “how can we make this sterile pap smell a bit more shitty?”.
May 16th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
@Sam-> “the world of fanzines, independant record labels etc..has been neatly solved by one machine.”
I don’t think it’s the machine as much as the people who create the ideas to use it and the people who then take those ideas and turn them into software. Then of course you’ve got the other creative people who use that software to get their ideas into the pubic domain.
But then as someone with a Computing degree, I probably would say that
And a tip of the hat is deserved by the uber-geeks who design the hardware and make it quicker and able to store more stuff each year: without them sitting in their sterile labs in their paper “Kennington Police Station chic” suits, we’d still be playing Space Invaders.
And on the punk ‘do it yourself’ ethic, things like open source software (like Linux and OpenOffice) and cheap software components for developers mean that anyone can get into making their own stuff, as long as they have the ideas.
May 16th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Pork:yep & to think that wearing that image was a dead cert way to get a kicking 30 yrs back.Didn’t Beckham sport a Crass t-shirt a few years back as well?
999:the frontman had been in Kilburn & High Road w/Ian Dury,so he was from the Pub Rock era.I thought 999 were great live until the skinhead bassist left,downhill after that.
Yep,Ruts were class,but what I meant was that the really ‘inept’ bands only sustained an EP,after which they either split up or improved musically and became something else altogether.For inspired amateurishness,can’t beat the TV Personalities,and they were 2 years after the fact
May 16th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
@Mike-> 999 were my favourite band by a long way. Didn’t realise that Nick Cash had been in The Kilburns! Jon Watson was class: The pink and black tiger print t-shirt from ‘Boy’ he wore was the only bit of clothing I went out and bought after seeing someone else wear it. He had so much energy on stage that he looked like a mental chimp on Durophet! [ just had to look that up for the spelling and came across this rather good looking site... http://www.thegooddrugsguide.com/articles/a_dexys.htm ]
David Beckham wearing a Crass t-shirt is just plain ironic, innit? Wonder if Posh bought it for him as a birthday joke, then bought him a dictionary the next Christmas?
May 16th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Weren’t they just so good live.Jon Watson,that’s the name! Years since I’ve heard their singles (is there a CD of ‘em I wonder?).What happened to Mr.Watson.Saw them at the Sundown on Charing X Rd,now the Astoria I think,and there were all these metal barriers which,as Sounds reported, were ‘destroyed by the frantically pogoing masses’.I’d just got that ‘I’m Alive’ 7″,the energy level they gave off was unreal,even thro’ the next 2 years.Vinyl never captured a fraction of it.Then saw ‘em in late 80’s and no Jon Watson,just a guy w/a beard.Terrible!
May 16th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Think the guy with the beard would have been Arturo Bassick, ex-Lurker. Being of the South London persuasion myself, I’m quite keen on “Tulse Hill Night”, but any of their singles or album tracks from the first 2 albums stands up against anything I’ve heard before or since.
Nick Cash had the FIERCEST voice when he went for it on stage, particularly on stuff like “I’m Alive” and “Let’s Face It”. He made Rotten sound like Whispering Bob Harris!
Don’t know if there are any ’singles’ CDs out there, but you may well find a torrent or two on IsoHunt.com if you search for “999″ with most of their stuff on.
May 16th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
There is ONE copy (vinyl only) of “The 999 Singles Album” now available on http://www.discogs.com/release/832043 if anyone’s feeling proper die-hard about it!
May 16th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Soz for multiple posts, but there is a CD called “Homicide: The Best of 999″ available on amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Homicide-Best-999/dp/B000001JM6
Track listing is:
A1 Nasty Nasty (2:02)
A2 No Pity (2:00)
A3 Me And My Desire (3:00)
A4 Crazy (3:35)
A5 Emergency (2:51)
A6 My Street Stinks (1:42)
A7 Feelin’ Alright With The Crew (3:30)
B1 Titanic (My Over) Reaction (3:23)
B2 You Can’t Buy Me (2:45)
B3 Homicide (4:25)
B4 Soldier (2:15)
B5 I’m Alive (2:30)
B6 Quite Disappointing (2:15)
B7 Waiting (3:01)
B8 Action (3:00)
May 16th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
While having a look for 999 stuff, I came across their MySpace site, which plays 5 tracks of theirs: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=250117867
Also, I came across a site which mentioned that Jon Moss (ex-Culture Club and partner of Boy George) auditioned for 999 and got a knockback (so did Chrissie Hynde – that would have been a fucking strange band!)
Remembered that Moss used to be in a band that recorded a favourite Punk EP of mine: London (the Summer Of Love EP). Couple of tracks from that are available as a free download at http://eetusmakelijk.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html
(though unfortunately not “Siouxsie Sue” which contained the immortal line “Siouxsie Sue would do it in the park, or in the street, but only if it’s dark. Betjeman eat yer heart out!). Don’t know if it’s about Banshees’ Siouxsie, but I do hope so.
May 16th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Ta for that Pork,I actually just checked online and Captain Oi do a load of old 999 stuff repackaged,inc. a singles CD.I’m tempted since my old 7″s are in mothballs.Funnily enough ‘Homicide’ sounds distinctly like some old early 70’s hard rock doesn’t it? I was in Borders on Fulham Broadway yesterday and they were playing Members’ Solitary Confinement and then Nick Lowe ‘Heart Of The City’:1st Stiff 7″,who would have thought it.In 5 years’ time it’ll be ‘Aint No Feeble Bastard’ by Discharge,in 10 a Heretics box set (there ya go Sam,another Google hit).Which reminds me,we’ve strayed somewhat from drugs’n'debauchery
May 16th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
“STOP PRESS: PUNK ROCK IN ‘IS DEAD’ SHOCKER…”
My mum, bless her, sent me a shocking yellow and pink ‘God Save the Queen/Sex Pistols’ zip up pencil case for Christmas which I use to keep my toothbrush etc…in when travelling.
Good point Mike.
I remember Scarecrow fixing up whiskey once. It hurt and didn’t provide the early morning pickmeup of Nescafe up the mainline. One of my most unpleasant drug experiences was Benalyn – a whole bottle of it. No real buzz, just this sense of being completely disconnected from myself.
I saw a photo of 999 recently. Nick Cash is a blimp but it was Guy Days that got me. Back in the day he was like a street walking panther with a heart full o’ napalm. In the photo he looked like a grumpy old fucker who shout ‘Hoppit….you little bastards!’ at kids on his allotment. Time is a strange one. Didn’t all this stuff happen yesterday?
May 16th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Oh, man, The Members… what a band! I think “Offshore Banking Business” is still the best bit of white boy reggae I’ve ever heard. Solitary Confinement deserved to be a much bigger hit than Sound Of The Suburbs, but that’s the great British record-buying public for ya!
Nick Lowe was and still is a proper British institution. I had a Stiff Records album in 79 (can’t remember which one) on which he did Marie Provost (the one about the silent movie star who didn’t have the voice for the talkies and locked herself away to die, only to be eaten by her pet dachsund). “She was a winner, that became a doggy’s dinner, she never meant that much to be, but now I see, poor, poor Marie”. Just perfect.
Not really back onto drugs/debauchery but just a reminiscence about the 1980s before this depoliticising that we’ve been talking about…
I was at the Big County Hall RAR gig (last time I ever saw Ruthless, btw, but never got a chance to talk to her) and the Redskins came on stage to a big crowd. Couple of songs into the set, and a bunch of Nazi skins storm the stage and start sieg-heiling and trashing the equipment. There was a few seconds of stunned silence, then one little voice in the crowd started chanting “The Workers, United, Will Never Be Defeated”. With that, the whole crowd starts chanting and within seconds the stage is invaded by huge amounts of ANL folks and the boneheads get the hiding of a lifetime. Lovely!
Also, I dunno if it’s just that I’m getting too old to spot it, but what was the essential difference between the Poll Tax riot and the riot in Manchester the other night when the Rangers fans didn’t get to watch their football on a big screen in a park? I mean, pragmatically, a few cars and shops got trashed and a few Old Bill ended up with a nasty headache, but nobody was really expecting the major organs of state to collapse the next day in either case, were they? Were they both nothing more than a bit of a jape? Or is one more valid than the other because of the motivation behind it?
May 16th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Heretics box set…now you’re talking!
May 16th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
“what was the essential difference between the Poll Tax riot and the riot in Manchester the other night when the Rangers fans didn’t get to watch their football on a big screen in a park?”
The foul stench of petuli oil I should think.
May 17th, 2008 at 1:13 am
difference:- large groups of some kind of human beings chanting ‘we are u.d.a. we are u.d.a.’ everywhere i went near the centre of manchester,seeing masses of union jack flags everywhere, like i did that day, i always find disturbing.
May 17th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
@Sam-> Don’t tell my partner that… she’s very keen on the patchouli! Funny enough, the smell of that always reminds me of Allen the junkie’s place. Maybe there was a bit of that mixed in with some of that dodgy hash he used to knock out. A whiff of patchouli still suggests a certain moral laxity on the part of the female wearer to me, too. Which is nice.
@johng-> Ironic really that the biggest supposed supporters of the UDA don’t come from Northern Ireland any more. While Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness were jointly commenting on the sad death of Robert Dunlop (the Northern Irish motorcyclist) the other day and expressing their condolences to his family (and at least one of them must have been sending condolences across the religious divide), a gang of Scotsmen were waving Union Jacks and chanting solidarity with a Northern Irish organisation while attacking the police who represent the state of the flag that they were waving. I suspect alcohol abuse may have played with their ability to reason rigorously
I always thought the NF should have been more confused than they were about waving Union Jacks and what it represented, too.
May 17th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
On the subject of drugs, wasn’t there a bit of a craze at Campbell Buildings for Kaolin and Morphine stomach upset mixture by the bottle?
I don’t know why but I’ve always thought that someone told me that Crow had had some of that and a rake of barbs before he went up on the roof that last time. Also remember being told he’d had to give up fixing because his doctor had told him he had so much chalk from non-filtered Tuinal in his arm that his circulation had suffered to the point that they would have to take his arm off if he did any more of it, and that this was the reason he was swallowing enormous amounts of the stuff: he couldn’t work out the appropriate oral dose to cover the amount he’d been banging up.
What was it that had to be mixed with Tuinal before being dragged up through the cigarette filter into the barrel? Was it lemon juice because the barbs were alkaline? My memory ain’t what it was.
May 17th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Yes,Benalyn was a good one.I remember a local band to me singing about ‘huffing Zoff’,which was I think a carpet cleaner,either that or something you put down the sink.Ouch,whiskey! I remember thinking that crushing up downers to inject was a step too far.Last time I had speed it was that Base stuff, the crusty scrapings from the top of the barrel.Never again,I was still ranting on 2 days later.After about 8 hours of it my girlfriend pointed to her door and just said ‘Go!’.Back in ‘78-’79 I would come home at 3am chewing my mouth off and my little sister was invariably sleepwalking.I would have bizarre disembodied
‘conversations’ with her for hours in the kitchen then steer her back to her bedroom and shut the door.She could never remember a thing the next morning,perhaps just as well.
Heretics Box set:complete with sociological 25 page analysis by a Mojo writer on the Situationist/Dadaist/Maoist ramifications of kids picking up guitars in the late 70’s,plus added thoughts on the ‘Post War Consensus’, Post War decay,post-industrial revolution and the postmodern irony of learning instruments in a patriarchal/misogynist/post-feminist/racist/ homophobic society.That and sniffing glue.Considering those old Blues ‘Field Recordings’ saw the light of day 40-50 years after the fact, you never know!
May 17th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Plus a detailed diagram on how to saw your own head off.
May 17th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
I think Zoff was (apart from being Italy’s World Cup goalkeeper at the time) a product for getting rid of sticking plasters – they weren’t the nice thin plastic ones then, they were the big claggy cloth-soaked-in-glue ones.
That base speed as a complete animal of a drug. I remember running what must have been nearly a marathon (ran for about 5 hours just to get myself tired), pissed out of me brain, round a park in Bristol in the early hours of the morning after a party where I’d had a bit of that: it was in a capsule that had once contained a cold remedy and I was a bit dubious, but my dealer reassured me. Boy, was he right!
I think the pharmaceutical Dexedrine were about the smoothest speed I had, nice easy comedown. The speckled blues, I dunno what they had in them but they gave you a rush like a wounded buffalo and a comedown like Dante’s Inferno.
I helped to build and run a pirate radio station in the 80s, and the guy who built the transmitter’s mum grew grapes and made her own wine. While setting it all up for a test one night, he spilt some of this home-made wine on his jumper sleeve. “Shame to waste it, it’s the good stuff”, he said, and proceeded to sniff (in the same way that you would glue) the rest of it out of his jumper. A couple of minutes later he looked in a pretty advanced state of refreshment, so I poured a glass on my sleeve, he did too and we finished the bottle like that, cuff-full by cuff-full. Pissed as rats.
May 17th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Glad we’re back onto more solid ground with cheap ways to destroy your mind and body. Always a fascinating topic.
“Kaolin and Morphine “.
I’d forgotten about that. Yes, I remember there’d be a chalky layer from the bottom of the bottle to about 2/3 of the way up. The good stuff’d be the syrupy goo at the top. I don’t remember if this was filtered through anything or just injected like treacle straight into the arm. Crow was the only person I remember doing it. I also remember his chalk lumps. We were sitting there (on the floor) one night when he turned even whiter than his usual pasty palour and announced he’s found a lump moving slowly up his arm. He tied a tourniquet around his bicep as it had moved past his elbow and sat up all night keeping the alien thing under observation. He was convinced (probably correctly) that it would eventually get to his heart and kill him. As Bob said eloquently in his book, there’s no answer as to why he went up on the roof. My theory is that it was quite romantic up there. We used to take cups of tea up there sometimes and look over the City – St Paul’s and the Southbank. It kind of felt like our city. We had no idea we were just borrowing it for a bit. I remember a conversation we had once. I foolishly mentioned I wondered how I’d explain our life to my children. “How long DO you want to live Sam?” he asked accusingly. “Until I’m an old man” I replied. He looked disgusted. Hence – ‘You didn’t have long you even said it yourself’. I’m pleased I lamped one of those policemen who were standing around laughing when they put him in the ambulance. It was the right thing to do. They both tried to grab me and I dodged them and ran off, jumped on a bus but got it in my head that they both needed bludgeoning and jumped off at Waterloo bridge, found a length of 2 by 4 and headed back, weeping like a grandmother. When I rounded the corner of Campbell Buildings, Mitch grabbed me and hustled me up to Ruth’s place. They’d radio’d in and were sending a van full of Lambeth’s finest to find me. Ruth hatched a cunning plan. I hid under her bed and when the police knocked on her door with a search warrant she was lying on top of the bed, topless (if you remember Ruth you’ll understand the shock of this [see 'Kilburn High Road-Um-be-rellas'] ) reading a magazine. The police were too embarrassed to hang around and off they went.
Another time they were looking for Robbo and he hid in one of the huge water tanks on the roof. He was suspended in there, at night for an hour or so. He described it as being like that movie out at the time ‘Altered States’.
“I would come home at 3am chewing my mouth off and my little sister was invariably sleepwalking.I would have bizarre disembodied
‘conversations’ with her for hours in the kitchen then steer her back to her bedroom and shut the door.She could never remember a thing the next morning,perhaps just as well.”
That’s hysterical Mike. The perfect target for a speedhead. I bet she can mysteriously still quote the correct track listing for It’s Alive and knows which label the Snivelling Shits were on.
I accosted Lemmy at the Electric Ballroom one night just after Bomber had been released. I managed to describe this 2 minute long single to him in ecstatic terms for about 40 minutes. Eventually he made an excuse and hurried off before I had time to get onto the B side. I managed to bore the pants off someone who admits that he’s taken so much speed he no longer has human blood anymore.
Another time I cornered Captain Sensible, also at the Electric Ballroom and tried to persuade him to use The Heretics as a support act. After some time his girlfriend gave me their phone number and told me to call the next day. When I tried the number I seem to remember I spoke to some old lady in Chislehurst who had no idea what I was on about.
May 17th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Sam: Always been proud of you for lamping those bastards, man.
May 17th, 2008 at 11:18 pm
There were two local lads from Campbell Buildings who used to hang around with us. One was called ‘Olive’ for some reason. I can’t remember his mate’s name but they were always getting at each other. I was at college in 1990 and we had temporary painting studios in this old school in Waterloo. I decided to take a nostalgic visit back to Campbell Buildings. The whole estate had been replaced by an office block but the brick wall facing the road remained, which still bore the legend ‘OLIVE IS BENT’.
That should be the title for the Campbell Buildings book I think.
May 17th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
Cheers Pork!
May 17th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Talking of pasty people I remember tripping with Wank Stain at 66a and both of us being fascinated by the similarity his bicep had to a Sainsbury’s frozen chicken.
May 17th, 2008 at 11:52 pm
Was that before the septicaemia or after?
Bernard Matthews would have put a bid in for some of those arms, they looked proper corn-fed. Bootiful!
I remember you guys being over at Wank’s mum’s place in Plaistow and me ringing up to see what you were up to. There was a little bit of drug rhyming slang going on, and the Winter Olympics were on at the time as well. Wank’s mum answered the phone. “Hello Mrs Darrington, is Mark about?”. “Oh, no dear, Sam and Jake came over earlier and they all went out. They said they wouldn’t be long, they were just off to Lake Placid”.
Geography not her strong point, or perhaps a very prescient comment on the time/space displacement effect of hallucinogens?
Another couple of observations about acid: I was in The Schooner in Norbury with Jerry Thing in 81 and a punk girl called Sussie was there. Me and Thing used to call tripping “dripping” (my name had by then transmogrified from Jah Pork to “Pork Dripping”). Sussie walks into the pub with a strange look on her face, so I said to her (quite innocently) “hello mate, you dripping?”. At which point she legged it to the ladies toilet holding her hands under her chin thinking her head was melting!
Another time, same pub, Sue (Phil’s sister, I seem to remember) was a hairdresser and she offered to bleach my hair for me for free. Nice. Except I didn’t realise she was tripping her tits off and when I got back to the pub everyone in there was kind enough not to mention that she’d missed nearly the entire back of my head with the bleach (just the bit I couldn’t see!). Took about 3 days before someone pissed themself laughing then told me. Twats!
Same: Just looking at your book title. It’s an anagram of…
“I live? No bets!”
That’s about right.
May 18th, 2008 at 12:41 am
I think ‘dripping’ came from talking endlessly in mock Sniper accents. There was a lot of that at the time. Me and Wank spent a whole 2 weeks in Amsterdam pretending to be from Yorkshire. I think we must have been embarrassed to be ourselves. Very English that
.
I think I snogged with Sue once. That’s all I remember of her.
One of the symptoms of acid comedowns was the realization someone would have to clean up. You were over at 66a once Pork (not tripping) whilst myself and Wank were under the influence. You decided to turn the lights off in the kitchen and amused us for hours by becoming ‘The Magician’. You’d take handfuls of our unused spices and throw them into the gas rings on the stove, producing multi-coloured effects and small explosions. The next day dawned and the kitchen was uniformly covered in a quarter inch deep layer of curry powder.
Another time I managed to pinch a whole day’s stock of Wimpy hamburger buns from an early morning forage along the Finchley Road. After a day of eating these we finally used the last 5 boxes in a food fight, this time covering the kitchen in 2 inches of wet dough.
But we made our own entertainment in those days.
May 18th, 2008 at 1:16 am
Oh, fuck, that’s funny! That’s the sycophantic side of me: always trying to curry favour
I remember that so well now, and had forgotten it completely. Pork The Magician! And that ugly no-talent twatpiece Copperfield got to marry Schiffer. Life eh? Yeah, fire in all its manifestations used to fascinate me. Maybe that’s why St Monica’s was so magnetic: the campfire in the middle of the carpet in the first floor room with us all sitting round it (to make a bit of warmth as there was very little by way of windows). It even made the speed comedowns feel a bit nicer. Spent a whole evening sitting in the background behind everyone on a vicious comedown, and became totally convinced that everyone was ignoring me and plotting something (which naturally made my voice much quieter anyway – course, I was convinced I was shouting myself hoarse). In the end, I managed to grab Lou’s attention, and she spent an hour or so reassuring me that nobody was ignoring me, and that I just had to get a bit nearer the fire. Like I said earlier, a really lovely woman, Lou. I seem to remember her parents (mainly her Dad, I think) tried to get her sectioned for bunking a tube fare while looking a bit unusual and liking loud music! Really.
I do remember spending a day or two where all any of us said (in a really cod Yorkshire accent) was “Eee, reet gradely!”. Maybe that was something to do with Captain H? And the mock Scots stuff too: “Hootsny McGrootsny McGritchly Gorbals”.
On the snogging front, I think most of us snogged most everyone else, didn’t we? Beautifully innocent times.
May 18th, 2008 at 1:20 am
Just thought… Lisa was known as Witchypoo, wasn’t she? And though she claimed vehemently to be completely asexual, Ruth claimed with equal vigour to have had her very own Night Of The Flying whassname with her.
The point of this is that we were all SO innocent, that none of us could really figure out what it was that they would have been getting up to if indeed they’d got up to it!
May 18th, 2008 at 2:19 am
I remember Lisa at Campbell buildings being very individual and bravely being obsessed with Kate Bush. Now you mention it ‘a-sexual’ was a big fad for awhile – a state of grace I never aspired to as I knew only too well I was ‘a-bigtart’. The gorgeous Liz was, I was dismayed to find out, asexual too. Or maybe it was just a ploy to keep us off. I also remember rescuing her dog ‘Benson’ from the clutches of Scarecrow (he wasn’t a saint) and some cunt called Dirk. They’d trap her dog in a metal dustbin while she was at work and put the lid on top. One would sit on it while the other one banged as loudly as they could on the side with a large stick. The dog would naturally go apeshit and they’d let it out and it’d go beserk around the flat, which they found hilarious. It had been rescued from Battersea dog’s home and had probably been abused before. Sorry to sully Crow’s name but he could be an arsehole.
I remember speeding one time at St Monica’s and talking at length (again) about Bomber by Motorhead. After explaining the rockin’ orgasm trapped within blue vinyl for a good while, I realised I was desperate for a piss. I managed to get up on my hands and knees before another important torrent of verbage held me in this state for a good half hour. ‘I seem to be stuck in the Scott of the Antarctic position’ I said. Scott had been found, frozen solid in a similar pose but I still couldn’t bring myself to stop yakking despite the aching in all limbs and bladder. I seem to remember a room of poo at St Monicas. Is this just my imagination?
May 18th, 2008 at 2:28 am
“I do remember spending a day or two where all any of us said (in a really cod Yorkshire accent) was “Eee, reet gradely!”. Maybe that was something to do with Captain H? And the mock Scots stuff too: “Hootsny McGrootsny McGritchly Gorbals”. ”
This was the counter-revolutionary anti-regionalistic discourse that Officer Dibbol objected to so strongly in one of the early house meetings.
May 18th, 2008 at 2:31 am
It was a laugh stencil spraying situationist stuff around the area but Mike couldn’t spell. Thus West Hampstead was covered in neatly stencilled:
Back Britian
Fuck Britian
May 18th, 2008 at 4:46 am
I’ve just remembered another Heretics legend. Slug went around Kilburn and Queen’s Park spray painting ‘The Heretics’ everywhere. We’d come up with this ‘Circle H’ abbreviation (like the anarchy sign but an ‘H’). A year or two later the anti-H Block movement started using it and it became their symbol. They must have mistook our circle H’s for that or just stolen it. You’d think they’d have used an H within a square though.
May 18th, 2008 at 11:38 am
mike-’Yes,Benalyn was a good one.’
someone recommended i drink a bottle of benelyn,’it’ll get you off yer face’ he said,so,my mates mum gave me a huge bottle that i drank over a period of a few hours washed down with olde english cos the taste made me wretch,a few hours later i felt a whitey coming on so went to the bog to throw up,i then blackout and woke up to find myself having some sort of epileptic fit,scared the shit out of me and i never touched it again,its something to do with a colourant that they add to it that can cause fits if taken in large amounts.
fuckin punk rock……………………..
May 18th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
One of the thing about 79 punk was for me the sense of humour involved in the whole thing. I loved Captain Sensible’s painted guitar strap at the time that Greenpeace was just coming to the fore: “SOD THE WHALE”. There really was that sense that although we knew that political issues were important, being right-on wasn’t the way to bring attention to them. What was important was a good sense of theatre and a healthy dose of sarcasm. I think it mutated a bit as hippies weedled their way in insidiously (I don’t know Mike Diboll’s background, but a tenner gets you a one-r that there’s an ethically-sourced afghan coat and some beads in there somewhere). When I found myself being forcibly re-educated by the punk maoists, I thought it was time to get the fuck out of Dodge.
Perhaps “Back Brit-Ian, Fuck Brit-Ian” was a Freudian slip on the Commandante’s part? Young Pigg could be quite alluring in the right light, I’m told.
@johng-> Over-the-counter drugs were shite, weren’t they? Me, Wank and Thing purchased 72 Pro-Plus once, when unable to acquire amphetamines of any kind. It said “don’t take more than 4 in any 24-hour period. So we had about 20 each (leave a few for the comedown, as it were). After running round the Barbican for an hour or so stopping only to yammer at the goldfish in the ponds there, then talking crap to each other for another hour, we got the most monumental doubling-up stomach cramps and headaches that had us running back home to various parts of London. In a strange display of synchronicity, when we all spoke on the phone the next morning, we’d all had the violent and lasting shits come upon us (and wouldn’t that have been a great name for a single?) at exactly 3.20 in the morning. Interconnectedness of all bowels? Stupidity on the quantum level! I don’t think even Starbucks would serve that much caffeine to an individual punter.
Benylin: Food colourings were rock’ ‘n’ roll in the 70s too! I still defend to the death our right to enjoy proper 70’s style orangeade with the luminous orange colour of high-concentrate Tartrazine. Now that WAS a drug!
Dirk was a mate of Ruth’s wasn’t he? Big Ants fan (obviously). There was just something a bit disquieting about him, wasn’t there? Wouldn’t wish to impugn the bloke’s reputation in any way but just personally I wouldn’t have left him alone with the grandkids
@Sam-> Yeah, the circle-H was everywhere, wasn’t it? I bet, these days, if you asked a bunch of people who weren’t into the punk thing but lived up there at the time, they’d still remember The Heretics!
Anyone else remember graffiti they didn’t understand from that time? There was a bit of graffiti in Tibbets’ Corner roundabout in Putney that I never got (it’s still there, faded but glorious): “Joo-Bee-Lee, Set ‘Em Free 77″. I still haven’t got a clue!
May 18th, 2008 at 10:08 pm
“When I found myself being forcibly re-educated by the punk maoists, I thought it was time to get the fuck out of Dodge.”
You were very wise. I hope I wasn’t one of them as I did fall for this for a while. Looking back on it I think it was mainly a case of strong peer pressure (accompanied by merciless piss-taking) and wanting to keep my mates who were suddenly full of rules and regulations. The whole Anarchist philosophy was a complete head fuck and I now view it as no different from other one-sided philosophies such as fundamentalist Christianity. I was an adult (of sorts) at the time so it’s my own fault for falling for something I was suspicious of to begin with. The end result was feeling that I was completely disconnected with my true feelings, instincts and opinions and I had to rethink the most simple things to return to the real world. It was akin to some weird religious sect. My turning point came in Australia when a bunch of Anarchos were debating, quite seriously, whether the children of ‘Pigs’ should be shot along with the grown up ‘Pigs’. I’m sure Pol Pot and the Nazis had similar intellectual discussions. There’s that scene in The Killing Fields of these children, raised on just such philosophies going around on witch hunts and singling out people to be shot or suffocated. At least democracy, flawed as it is, admits, allows and encompasses difference. Truth, in my opinion, is usually found in paradox, not absolutism. Another simple realization that occured to me at the time was that a bunch of (mainly middle class) squatters with green dreadlocks who were incapable of washing their own dishes weren’t ever going to convert anyone to a system which involved absolute personal and social responsibility.
Ah well…rant over. The late seventies/early eighties were politically extreme and I think all this was inevitable.
May 19th, 2008 at 12:23 am
@Sam-> Yeah, I quite agree about the similarities between religious fundamentalism and capital-A Anarchism.
Additionally, in the case of the Anarchos, these are people who are supposedly instinctively against communism with its ideas of an intellectual elite and a proletariat. However, once they’ve read a book, the temptation to impose their new-found ideas, through ridicule, ostracism and re-education, rather than to share them, becomes overwhelming. It’s just swapping one metanarrative for another where they’re more equal than the rest of us (us my dad used to say).
You’re right about having to re-think the very basic things in life, but I’m sure the way I’ve re-thought them is more tolerant and egalitarian than anything that the Anarcho thought police would have had me believe. In essence, anarchism doesn’t work in any modern industrial system – it’s an agrarian and co-operative lifestyle which doesn’t have any answers to living in today’s world (probably why the “A”-word is so universally equated in political circles with Islamic fundamentalism). the one question I’ve never found an Anarcho able to give a very good answer to is: “How far do you tolerate intolerance?”
All I’ve taken from that period is a deep mistrust of anyone who attempts to tell me that they know better how I should live my life than I do, or who tells me that I should know better how anyone else should live their life than they do. That’s left me quite well-equipped. I’m no better and no worse than anyone else, and I like to hear what other people think about the world because it enriches my own experience of it, whether I agree with them or not. In fact, re-reading this paragraph: it sounds like a reasonable definition of “growing up”!
I think that going to college when I was 29 did me the world of good too: it astonished me that there were a bunch of clever people there (the lecturers) who were not only there to talk to me (so I learned some stuff), but were actually there to LISTEN to me as well and seemed to anjoy it!
The doctrine of reciprocity is about where I pitch up these days: do unto others as you’d have done unto you. and whether there’s a lot of difference between Karma and “ragged-trousered philanthropy” I don’t know but I try to bridge the gap in reciprocity between acting and walking by when I could act with some of those thoughts too.
May 19th, 2008 at 2:30 am
I don’t think the concept of ‘denial’ was in usage at the time but it does explain a lot of our behaviour. The simple unhealhiness of indoctrinating yourself with a worldview that basicly says ‘EVERYTHING is shit’ is never going to lead to anything very good. But the Crass philosophy was on the cards. Punk was supposed to be political but The Clash posing about in RAF t shirts was always open to scrutiny and someone had to pull them up about it. Andy Palmer (out of Crass) was in the year above me at St Martin’s when I went there. You couldn’t hope to meet a nicer bloke, and I chatted to him about the band and Anarchism a couple of times. He said he started to get worried when kids’d phone up and say “OK….I’ve disowned my parents, I’m living in a squat in Hackney and I don’t eat meat or wear leather……..now what?”. Human beings are human beings and you tend to get leaders and followers. I spent years and years beating myself up for having un-politically correct thoughts, such as getting turned on by pornography or thinking racist thoughts if some Indian woman wasn’t walking fast enough and blocking the pavement. We’re all human with all those nasty little traits. Nothing wrong with idealism but it’s important to recognize the dark side too. I blame Plato.
May 19th, 2008 at 3:00 am
I think that Bush/Blair/Brown and their ilk have gone a long way to furthering the cause of human beings not wanting to follow the kind of thing that’s been on offer (but then I can be a terrible optimist sometimes). I’d rather live on and by my wits, and take a position on individual issues. Of course, that doesn’t sit perfectly with a democratic system that includes a manifesto which has to be voted on every 5 years, in the meantime giving the elected government carte blanche to walk all over the electorate, but it’s the best we’ve got. I do start to get animated when elected leaders either don’t fulfil a manifesto commitment or perform verbal gymnastics by claiming that something fundamental which they’re going to do WAS in their mandate when it plainly wasn’t.
What else can be done though? Electronic voting on individual issues? I’d like to think that it’s possible, but in the kind of economy we have, there does need to be some kind of medium-term planning. Going to war would be something that I’d have liked to see a referendum on, though. We didn’t even need a vote in Parliament for it… the Prime Minister had absolute power to take us to war without any kind of consultation.
I wouldn’t say that a worldview which says “everything is shit” wouldn’t lead to anything very good, but it WOULD take a hell of a lot of work to dismantle a whole political, social, industrial, religious, military, health and education system and replace it with something better. Not impossible, but persuading people to give up what they’ve got already would be a job which only the major TV networks could take on
I think you should only worry if you watch too much porn AND start fancying a hot on-camera session with the little old Indian woman on the pavement
The thoughts you’re talking about are only racist thoughts if all Indian people walk slowly, or sexist if all women walk slowly, I think! As for porn, I’m with Bill Hicks on that one when he said that the US Supreme Court’s definition of pornography is something with no artistic merit which seeks to tittilate. “Sounds like every TV commercial I ever heard. When I see that Wrigley’s advert with the twins on it, you can bet I ain’t thinking about gum!”
Being bipolar means that at times I can be very bleak and misanthropic, and at other times I can see no wrong with the world. As soon as one realises that it’s just brain chemistry playing tricks though, normal service is resumed. It’s a big place with a lot of competing views which just have to be respected wherever possible. It’s just there to be enjoyed as much as possible, without hurting anyone else. We’re no more in Earthly terms than a virus with shoes. One thought that I do like though is Einstein saying “There are only 2 infinite things in life: the Universe and human stupidity. And I’m not sure about the Universe”.
May 19th, 2008 at 3:29 am
I should say I find pornography boring and I had more racist thoughts when I went around calling other people racists. It wasn’t all slow Indian women but “Come on you dawdling paki bitch!” could pop involuntarily into my head so there you go. It’s human unfortunately. As I never burned any crosses it doesn’t really make much difference. It was the whole ideal of your mind being born again that caused the personal angst and the witch hunts that went on if the words ‘cunt’ or ‘girl’ slipped out in the wrong company.
May 19th, 2008 at 3:41 am
“I wouldn’t say that a worldview which says “everything is shit” wouldn’t lead to anything very good, but it WOULD take a hell of a lot of work to dismantle a whole political, social, industrial, religious, military, health and education system and replace it with something better.”
Absolutely. As Josef Porter said in his excellent manifesto, sitting around in little church groups deconstructing Carry On films on the tele isn’t going to change much in the big bad world outside.
I remember one of our number declaring one day that he would never go the the cinema again as it was the ultimate spectacular experience. Beats digging for turnips in Epping though if you ask me.
May 19th, 2008 at 3:45 am
I think in the 90s the admen and film-makers gave it their best effort to shock us into buying stuff and failed. Everyone got immune to shock-horror, and everyone seemed to be getting a bit more tolerant of alternative lifestyles etc. As a bit of an exercise in the pub one night, a mate and me decided to come up with something that would shock everyone in Britain.
What we decided on was a baby in a crib, dressed in full Nazi uniform, tourniquet’d up with a full syringe of gear in one hand and a bunch of fivers and a pair of crusty knickers in the other. Didn’t work though: everyone was just immune to it and shrugged it off. We had to add in one more facet to make it shock the average British drinker: said baby, as well as all the other stuff, was shagging a burning dog. that brought the animal lover in them out and they were really offended!
Coincidentally, my hearing isn’t what it used to be (should have listened to my mum when she told me to put cotton wool in my ears when I was gigging/rehearsing) and I went out on a works do to a posh restaurant in London a few years ago. Unfortunately the trip on the London Eye was overbooked and as I was the last one to join the company, they asked me if I’d mind spending the afternoon in the pub with the company credit card instead. At the time, I was no stranger to the odd small sweet sherry (alcohol really was always my drug, wasn’t it?) so I tried to look diffident as I snatched at the opportunity. A right skinful was had, and when they all got back they bought me a few more. We got to the restaurant, which was quite noisy anyway, got some wine in and started chatting. One of the guys I worked with, Simon, I’d chatted about punk to (he was a nice fella). We all got taking about music and one of them said something I didn’t agree with, so I told him so quite politely. Simon then (I thought) said “That’s cos you’re a cunt”. I took grave exception to this and said, at the top of my voice, “I may be a cunt, but at least I’m a fucking OLD cunt”. The boss’s secretary was sitting next to me and got the right hump “Don’t EVER use that word in my company again”. “Fuck you too” I said. Simon then pointed out to me that he’d said “That’s because you’re a PUNK”.
Funny enough, I didn’t stay long with that firm after that!
May 19th, 2008 at 3:48 am
“I remember one of our number declaring one day that he would never go the the cinema again as it was the ultimate spectacular experience. Beats digging for turnips in Epping though if you ask me.”
I make you right there mate: they’re joyless bastards. It’s a sad and meaningless world without art.
May 19th, 2008 at 4:27 am
Whatever happened to Mad Dog? He was another one who was ostracised for being too laddish. I last saw him around 1984. Me and Tony met him in this pub. He seemed much the same, in a very good way. I think he was lighting technician for U2. A very witty character.
May 19th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
Just read this snippet from an unpublished chapter from The Story of Crass. Very interesting:
“Unpublished Chapter:
EPILOGUE – REFLECTIONS
A couple of years ago, Pomona Books released a book of all the Crass lyrics entitled ‘Love Songs’. Bassist Pete Wright wrote to publisher Mark Hodgkinson with his thoughts on Crass:
“Things were fine when we started gigging, before we had any status or
influence. The main discomfort I felt and still feel about what the band promoted,
started when I realised that Thatcher’s sordid right-wing laissez-faire was little different
from what we were pushing. It was an unpleasant shock. Neither Thatcher nor we
considered the damage done. We concentrated on the ‘plus’ side always. To say that
everyone can ‘do it’, and counting it a justification when the talented, the motivated, or
the plain privileged responded, while ignoring the majority who couldn’t ‘do it’, and
those who got damaged trying, is a poor measure of success.”
“Just as Putin has become the new Tzar of Russia, Crass used the well worn
paths to success and influence. We had friends, people with whom we worked and
cooperated. We were educated, socially connected. We networked, lied, cheated,
intimidated, tricked, bought, bribed, mocked, flattered, self-deluded, and
accommodated all manner of contradictions to maintain our ‘rightness’. And we worked
hard.”
“The early ad hoc nature of the band led to some weird rationales. The Anarchy
banner at gigs was there purely to stop us being co-opted by the far left or right who
were circling at the time. That’s all it was, an inspired move, suggested by Penny, I
think, because who the hell knew about the academic aspect? It was what we said it
was. This was England. Anarchy is as bollocks in this country, as it is bourgeois on
the continent.”
“The barrage of querulous questions that ensued crammed us into defining a
cod ideology, a chimera of individualistic libertarianism. Blue-black.”
“The parallels between Crass and the opposition penetrated everywhere. The ‘
apocalyptic’ nature of our outlook, our ‘all or nothing’ message, reflected the State
pacifying its population through fear of total destruction. It’s not easy to put forward a
reasoned analysis of the use of bogeymen to justify State oppression, if the supposed
radicals are plying the same trade to bolster an identical ‘us and them’, ‘all or nothing’
mentality.”
“I think it was about 1982 when I came across an article by an Australian
scientist/scientific journalist who suggested that if all the nuclear weapons in the world
were launched, arrived and exploded at the same time – an unlikely worst case, but go
with it – then the net result, excluding the highly improbable occurrence of a
catastrophic crust split or some such, would be that most of northern Europe and parts
of north America would be a wasteland. Since most people in the world live south of
the equator, and the weather systems north and south hardly mix, the result for this
majority would probably be a move to the right in their governments and a marginally
increased radiation count. Our big bombs just weren’t that big. The Apocalypse which
we projected on the rest of the world was our local apocalypse, limited to ourselves. “
We are the world.” Oh yeah? It’s the same today. Me is everything.”
“The writer’s coda to the Crass world view was that it made fighting for
substantial reforms virtually impossible. The view we promoted was the view the State
promoted. The grooves run deep.”
“The early quality of Crass was a much more hopeful, anarchic, irresponsible ‘
f**k off to the system’, inchoate, intelligent and insidious.”
“The central premise of your book: Crass lyrics as love songs troubles me.
What can I say. It seems almost churlish to carp, although I get a mischievous image,
as Crass members wax lyrical about love, of maudlin alkies crying into their Special
Brew. The Crass people were personable, affectionate, hospitable, but the Crass
engine was something altogether darker.”
“Those poignant claims – yes I’m as guilty – of a bedrock of love and sensitivity
driving all that bilious doggerel and poetry was the lure of mystification that flooded
through the last thirty years, like the uncritical taste for alternative medicine and
self-centred views of the beast, ‘human spirit’. Hand in hand: State, media, and us
proles alike. We were all at it. Still are.”
“I wonder when we’ll be able to face up to the essential nature of evangelism, of
proselytising. Forceful persuasion requires a platform plus charisma plus bigotry (plus
the promotion of the same message in a different package if possible). That works well.”
“Crass was bigoted. A singleness of message, a polar view shorn of checks and
balances and considerations. The nature of the people who are good at this is by
nature skewed. Balanced people don’t cut it.”
“Bigotry is widespread. Rarer, is that extremist edge to society which allows the
centre to adjust as it sees the need. The raw material for this edge is always the
fuckup people, and they usually get more f***ed up in the process. That’s the cost. I
feel we failed. We were the raw material, but somehow we fluffed it.”
“The pacifism that ran through the Crass output is something else that has
pretty much escaped examination. If you can get what you want by your class,
education, charm, money, contacts, location – where is the need to fight? In the far off
places where the s**t that this country generates is manifest, the difference between
the pacifist and non-pacifist, is that the first chooses to suffer to change things, while
the second chooses to inflict suffering on the opposition. In this country pacifism is a
convenience, a safe, assured parking bay.”
“And part of the Crass pacifist ‘message’ was the recognition of the exposed
and public nature of our lives, and the danger of kids screwing up theirs with serious
but naive, ‘on message’ bravura. It was also a sharp cut-off point to what we were
prepared to do. We could shout as loud and as violently as we wanted, while holding
tight the lid.”
May 19th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
“We were educated, socially connected. We networked, lied, cheated, intimidated, tricked, bought, bribed, mocked, flattered, self-deluded, and accommodated all manner of contradictions to maintain our ‘rightness’. And we worked hard.”
“The early ad hoc nature of the band led to some weird rationales. The Anarchy banner at gigs was there purely to stop us being co-opted by the far left or right who were circling at the time. That’s all it was, an inspired move, suggested by Penny, I think, because who the hell knew about the academic aspect? It was what we said it was. This was England. Anarchy is as bollocks in this country, as it is bourgeois on the continent.”
“The barrage of querulous questions that ensued crammed us into defining a cod ideology, a chimera of individualistic libertarianism.”
WELL… Just forces me to ask: “Why were they doing it then?”
Was it for the groupies?
It’s a bit revisionist to say that Thatcher was pushing anything “laissez-faire” unless you’re talking deregulating financial markets. Look at her positions on immigration, public order and militarism. Nothing laid-back there.
” “The early quality of Crass was a much more hopeful, anarchic, irresponsible ‘f**k off to the system’, inchoate, intelligent and insidious.” ”
That might be intuitive, but there ain’t anything all that intelligent about it.
” “I wonder when we’ll be able to face up to the essential nature of evangelism, of proselytising. Forceful persuasion requires a platform plus charisma plus bigotry (plus the promotion of the same message in a different package if possible). That works well.” ”
That’s exactly what we were saying yesterday about leaders. Are you sure this guy isn’t Officer Diboll under a nom-de-guerre?
I don’t agree with him about pacifism in this country. The suffering undergone is different, but it’s there.
May 19th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Pete Wright may be just over-analysing his past,which,as for many of us,is done and therefore pointless to wring your hands over (beyond trying not to repeat your mistakes).Sometimes I look at the bland homogenous and vacuous present and fondly remember people agonising over the contents of chocolate bars,but as we’ve said before it did all get v.silly even if it was a product of the times.The end was that Conflict riot at Brixton in ‘87,I heard that people were setting their dogs on punks with leather on when exiting the tube station.Knew a couple of folk who did time for animal rights stuff and their rhetoric had a disturbing capacity to gather a life of it’s own and become action way beyond their original intention.I’ll say no more.
Sam:quite a coup to talk Lemmy off the planet! I was v.over-protective of my little sis at times,she followed me down the punk route and I tried to dissuade her,knowing the abuse she was gonna suffer outside the front door. Pretty sure I loomed over the shoulders of most of her prospective suitors (and there were many) too.She got her own back on me by going out w/Jim Kerr of Simple Minds,but that’s another story.I then became (in his words) the “passe punk brother”.This in 1979 too,but not quite as passe as copying old Kraftwerk records and invoking the frigging Weimar Republic methinks.Should have given it up after Johnny & the Self Abusers,ha!
Pork:I remember Dexys having a worse comedown,I’m sure,at least the paranoia-quiotient was far worse.Speckled blues cut w/strychnine..or urban myth? agonising stomach cramps at the least.Me & Womble were reminiscing about all this stuff Saturday night over a beer or 2,he remembers going up to Campbell Bldgs to visit Del from Harrow & recalls pills jammed in holes in the rafters.Think Paul/Raggity from Chaos was there for a bit too.Skinhead Kenny was Kenny Brighton,apparently.It all comes back after a while…(well,hopefully he won’t!)
May 19th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Pork:I think Crass’ problem was they were put on a pedestal by sheer dint of their effort and therefore easy to throw mud at.I was ambivalent,any of the class of ‘77-’79 have that tendency to take nothing seriously,especially if that something takes itself seriously (if you see what I mean).In ‘79 they were fresh, exciting,the bleakness morbidly fascinating.As a band they caught the mood of London that year better than any other.By the following year and 1981,with increasing camp-followers on board,I was less interested.The merest hint of dogma put me off (again,not the fault of Crass but those who followed them).Pete Wright may well be blaming others for their own interpretation of his efforts and thus blaming himself for having started the ball rolling.
But…”chimera of individualistic libertarianism”? by definition hardly ‘a chimera’ and surely the easiest form to practice because it involves merely oneself.Thatcher’s Libertarianism depended on pursuit of a loosely-common goal,ostensibly practised individually (with vague promises of ‘a greater good’ at the end of the rainbow as a sop to the more socially-minded),in reality given guidance and credence by her policies.Surely the difference between the ideals of Crass and Thatcher,or between DIY recording and music biz-hype signified more than each using similar methods to attain their goals?
May 19th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
I couldn’t find the exact quote but Steve Ignorant is on record somewhere saying as soon as he left Crass it was at last safe to to have a shufty at the barmaid’s arse. I always felt that, much as Anarchists were against any kind of mental repression they really pulled out all the stops in this regard. “Arggh! I just stared at someone’s tits. Black, horsehair shirt and 30 minutes flagellation with Society of the Spectacle!”
May 19th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Penny Rimbuad has said much the same thing (about being OK to look at arses once he was no longer part of Crass), certainly in private if not in public.
We ran a course at Dial House a while back, a few months later I was trying to describe one of the course participants to him, saying “You know the one, the woman with the dark skin, slightly Spanish looking one”, he replied, “Oh, you mean the woman with absolutely amazing tits…” “Um yeah but I didnt want to say that…”
May 19th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
It occurs to me that all of this was still within the Modernist era with the blinkered mindset this entailed. It seems obvious now but we were still bound by very Victorian ideas of linear progression and cultural evolution. Someone mentioned hover cars – this was the vision of the Jetsons future we all expected. I watched a fascinating documentary last time I was back in England about post war city planning. The grey tower blocks we grew up with were designed by utopianists who believed they were building new communities in the sky. I teach art history and I can’t help but go on a rant every time I reach Le Courbusier and his ‘machines for living’. A contemporary city planner of our generation said on the documentary that when he meets planners of the post-war generation he treats them as he would Nazi war criminals. Their utopianism destroyed people’s lives. Post Modernism to my mind is a much more humanitarian way of thinking in that it admits nostalgia, irony and historical reference. It also sees culture as cyclical and imperfect and celebrates this. I think original punk was very in tune with these ideas. The Crass outlook was very Modernist with all the dry theory and dialogue this reflects. The idea was that once you’d realized the truth of the idea, there’d be no going back and you could throw your previous (sinful) ways of thinking away. Unfortunately we’re not fully in control of these processes. Human nature and the subconcious have a way of busting through. Jurrassic Park and Frankenstein are good metaphors for this. Thus, we get 70 years of the Communist experiment in the USSR and the human spirit still aspires towards competition and materialism. I think what Pork said about us rejecting traditional left and right wing thought is the only way forward. Both are mental straitjackets and individuals rarely fit neatly into those definitions. Both philosophies were reactions to the industrial revolution. As we live in a post-industrial information age it’s time for something new.
I suggest the politicians get out of their poxy offices and wander about………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
May 19th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
“Penny Rimbuad has said much the same thing (about being OK to look at arses once he was no longer part of Crass), certainly in private if not in public.”
So public arse gazing is still counter revolutionary?
May 20th, 2008 at 12:13 am
ATTN – Ex Heretics et al, sticking a new post up with colour photos of Heretics and Portabello punks c/o Mike Clarke. Please go on that post and tell folk who the faces are if you know. Here is a shortcut http://www.killyourpetpuppy.co.uk/news/?p=800
May 20th, 2008 at 11:50 am
Sam,quite right. Original punk was far more exhilirating to participate in, but necessarily brief, and dogmatic restrictions became inevitable. Post-war inner city planning:as Alexei Sayle said “You won’t catch them living in any of the shit they’ve been building for the last 40 years!”. Left & Right have become irrelevant, but the danger is of,coupled w/post-modernist fashionable disdain, you end up with the bland Blair-world the UK is increasingly becoming. It’s like crime,and the current “the kids are out of control” media-scare,the comment is less on working out why these kids are (allegedly) stabbing each other en masse and more of the “why can’t they just aspire to shopping,mortgages,Sky TV and a call-centre job like the rest of us?!”
May 20th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
@Mike-> “Strychnine has indeed rarely been discovered mixed with LSD and other drugs in a few samples recovered by law enforcement agencies, but these were all found in murder or attempted murder investigations where someone was being specifically targeted for poisoning, and not associated with recreational LSD use.” [From Wikipedia].
…Though I’m sure I remember reading an interview with Lemmy years ago where he had a mate who died in his arms after banging up some speed cut with strychnine.
Re: Crass… I think the whole point of punk was that people should be able to throw mud. I mean by this that everyone was a potential punk musician and punk ideologist, so we could all deliver a critique of whomever we wanted. Looking back at Crass, I’m embarrassed by some of the lyrics:
“Fuck the politically-minded, there’s something I want to say”… Well, who was more politically-minded than Crass, then? Mind you, anyone who had the manifesto “man will never be truly free until the last politician is hanged with the guts of the last priest” WOULD want to be a bit careful about aligning themselves with anything political, wouldn’t they?
And… “Do they owe us a living?” … well, whoever ‘they’ are, the answer has got to be “Course they fuckin’ DON’T!” if you’re an anarchist mate!
The one I did like, though, was “The Sound Of Free Speech” when the Irish pressing plant wouldn’t press the album with the song about abortion on it, so they put 3 minutes of silence on it instead. That’s classy!
At the beginning with Crass, there was a pleasing lack of authority: in the postmodernist sense, they were the original authors of the work but instead of being passive consumers of “art” being held up on high before us, we could add our own meaning to it from our thoughts and experiences and become authors of some equally valid (and to us more relevant) idea or thing which we could pass on to be digested and modified (and added to/subtracted from) to fit their own lives by others, ad infinitum. We could build our own identities as we wanted and be respected for it by all of the others who were doing the same thing.
As it went on though, it became clear that the generally accepted view was that Crass had all the answers and were immune from criticism or interpretation. There was no room for personal eclecticism, one had to take all of one’s political thought from “The Base” or one was ostracised as being counter-revolutionary, as Sam says. And there was certainly no room for pluralism: Steve Ignorant and Penny Rimbaud were the Way, The Truth and The Light. No-one came to Anarcho-land except through Them. As for moral relativism, something on which we’d all relied as punks before then, look back to the Crass/Anarcho years and think when you were allowed to say in any given situation with which the party line didn’t agree: “well, it is their choice after all, not my thing but I don’t judge”. It just never happened. I always thought it was a really killing irony that the Conway Hall was founded to allow people who couldn’t get a place to speak anywhere else because of their views (be they left, right, anarchist or anything else: their web page says “Today, and in the future, we will continue to provide a forum for all manner of social controversies and support to those causes which advocates of ‘the open society’ have at heart”), and then Crass would go in there and take absolutely no lessons from that whatsoever!
The problem with it for me was that it was just as teleological as the government which we had: there was a goal for society, just a different one. And the means for getting to that goal were just as restrictive and time-critical. A popular word at the time was “alternative” and it was just that. Only 2 paths, not an infinite number of paths for each of us.
I find these days, as I did then, that sarcasm and irony are very much the best ways of dealing with those who think they know better for me than I do. It doesn’t mean that I take them any less seriously than people who come up with a totally different path for the whole of mankind as a rebuttal of a political system. It just means that I’m not that arrogant! We’re all beautiful sovereign human beings (and if you choose, all made in your choice of deity’s image) imbued with the ability to make our own decisions. I’d say that we’ve not only got the ability to do that, we’ve got the right as well.
@Sam-> Hover cars are a way of getting your body somewhere quickly in a large space. The Internet is a way of getting your thoughts somewhere quickly in a large space. So we haven’t done bad!
Postmodernism eschews totally the absolutist notion of perfection, so “imperfect” has no meaning, thankfully.
“A contemporary city planner of our generation said on the documentary that when he meets planners of the post-war generation he treats them as he would Nazi war criminals.”
That’s a bit ironic in itself though, isn’t it? I mean, it’s a perfect example of a paradigm shift, as in: “The idea was that once you’d realized the truth of the idea, there’d be no going back and you could throw your previous (sinful) ways of thinking away.” It’s PLANNERS themselves that are the problem. They’re the politicians of architecture, subjecting themselves to the electoral process of architecture critics.
I think there’s still a lot to do with the architecture of mass housing (and we DO still need mass housing for those of us who haven’t got the dough for a manor house in the Shires or a loft apartment in EC1). Although the postmodernist ideas of referencing the local environment and local history (here in Portsmouth we’ve got a lot of playful architecture referencing naval topics) and of the eclectic use of materials (steel, glass, wood etc), one still cannot polish a turd! The new estates (be they council ones or Barratt Homes ones) still look bland and homogenous, and under the skin they still carry the modernist dream forward. But where do we go if we can’t build in the Green Belt (NIMBYs at work) and experience has told us that tower blocks don’t work most of the time?
But then, who am I to buck the market? Do you remember Trellick Towers just up from the Bello? The Modernist-Brutalist tower blocks designed by Erno Goldfinger? Wikipedia says: Private properties inside the tower now (Sept 2007) sell for between £250,000 for a one-bedroom flat to £465,000 for three-bedrooms, whilst the tower itself has become something of a local cult landmark and was awarded a Grade II* listing in 1998. Fuck knows why!
I’d say my spirit longs for co-operation and difference.
May 20th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
@Mike-> “the danger is of,coupled w/post-modernist fashionable disdain,you end up with the bland Blair-world the UK is increasingly becoming.It’s like crime,and the current “the kids are out of control” media-scare,the comment is less on working out why these kids are (allegedly) stabbing each other en masse and more of the “why can’t they just aspire to shopping,mortgages,Sky TV and a call-centre job like the rest of us?!” ”
I wouldn’t lump Blair and Brown in the same septic tank: they’re turds of quite different reek and consistency. Have you seen these stories…
“Stop and search powers increased
[14th May 2008]
Police will be using more stop and search powers in London in a bid to tackle knife crime, after the two fatal stabbings within 48 hours this week.
Officers will be operating under section 60 of the Public Order Act, which allows police to search people without reasonable suspicion. The first team of 15 officers are being deployed in an unnamed London borough.” [http://www.crimestoppers-uk.org/media-centre/crime-in-the-news/may-2008--crime-in-the-news/stop-and-search-powers-increased]
and…
On raising the school-leaving age to 18…
“Brown, who has often spoken with pride about the fact that he is doing something equivalent to raising the school leaving age to 18, often attacks the Conservatives for not supporting the plan.
Under the bill, which is still going through parliament, young people aged 16 to 18 without the equivalent of two A-levels would have a duty to participate in education or training.
If they did not comply, local authorities would issue an “attendance notice” telling them that they had to. Refusing to obey an “attendance notice” would be a criminal offence.”
Porridge for not being in the sixth-form? Hardly postmodernist laissez-faire, is it? We’d all have been doing hard labour now, wouldn’t we?
Blair’s legacy in all its horror won’t be fully felt for another few years yet, I think, but Brown is setting out his Stalinist stall right now.
May 20th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
In my post above, the bit that read: “Although the postmodernist ideas of referencing the local environment and local history (here in Portsmouth we’ve got a lot of playful architecture referencing naval topics) and of the eclectic use of materials (steel, glass, wood etc), one still cannot polish a turd!”
… SHOULD have read “Although the postmodernist ideas of referencing the local environment and local history (here in Portsmouth we’ve got a lot of playful architecture referencing naval topics) and of the eclectic use of materials (steel, glass, wood etc), ARE A GOOD WAY OF TELLING STORIES AND OF PLACING BUILDINGS INTO SOME KIND OF LOCAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT, one still cannot polish a turd!”
May 20th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
@Sam-> Loaded magazine once did a whole edition dedicated to arses.
I am a very proud owner of that edition, and furthermore I subscribe to the idea (as dear Keith had tattooed of Paul Weller) that “Martin Deeson is God”
May 20th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
“That’s a bit ironic in itself though, isn’t it? I mean, it’s a perfect example of a paradigm shift, as in: “The idea was that once you’d realized the truth of the idea, there’d be no going back and you could throw your previous (sinful) ways of thinking away.” It’s PLANNERS themselves that are the problem. They’re the politicians of architecture, subjecting themselves to the electoral process of architecture critics.”
Not necessarily. You do need city planners and the guy I mentioned did seem to give a shit about the people he was designing for. I think whoever razed what was left of the East End, Birmingham, Coventry etc…in the early sixties were probably addressing their own egos and hoping to put their names in the history books. The theory of a Modernist avant garde is that appreciation for pure function will eventually trickle down to the average person. I think the twentieth century was marked aesthetically, politically and socially by misguided utopianism and an attempt at the reinvention of mankind.
But, to quote the ‘godlike’ P. Weller:
“The world’s insane
and we’re all to blame in a way”.
Penquin – Thanks for putting those colour pictures up. The only person I recognize is Wank Stain. He was a good looking boy! I can’t believe what babies we all were.
May 20th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
You lot is punktastic.
Sams coming down off the adrenalin after the gig Sam is dixieland, porks biploar kicking in nicely, mike well dunno you so i aint gonna comment. But its obvious you all no longer need any blues.
Sam; sullying St Petes name very very naughty him being the
s(c)acredc(r)ow. You are, for ever a heretic…
Yeah good that you lamped that copper, some fucking dickheads around.
All this punk history. I dunno, aint read the books or really thought about it in so much detail.
But we gotta remember that Mclaren, Jamie Reid, shit forgot the other 2 names, were all mates of king mob,(think Nick Brandt) pro -situ group in London in the 60’s based around the LSE.
All that Pistols stuff is sitiationissm for the the kids.
The end of rock n roll indeed.
But someone mentioned the footy riot the other day & is it any different to the poll tax version?
Well is putting Neson Mandela in prison the same as putting you or me in there? Course it is. Rioting is not just the action, its who’s doing it & how they got there (not on the bus..)
Poll tax was punk/crass/brixton/london autonomists(& obviously ME being the important part there)/classwar / poll tax. Im not talking about whether its good or even fruitful.
It is though, not the same as hoolies getting upset ‘cos the screens are broken.
Pork> Ian is still a looker…No hair, brown as a berrie. He found this thread highly entertaining & moving.He lived in Asia for 12/13 years completely fluent in manderin & cantonese, and thus puts me to shame. Said there was a pic of St Keith fully beareded up. I as usual, cant find it…
Erm I went to a burma support group meeting the other day, in an anarchist bookshop. Aint set foot in one for 20 years? Well wierd.
Found Ian Bones book. I aint mentioned, so a load of bollocks.
Nick Brandt & his mates gets a right slagging though. Seems all rather daft.
Still funny how it reminded me that Class war was based in some small way at least on the inputs that Wank & me had in Monday Group meetings, and around Rising Free generally.
Even one of the phrases that Mr Bone used to describe the group was Wanks I think.
Sure those who built class war deserve the credit (or not) but its odd to remember.
The Monday Groups publication was ‘authority’ written by Fabian (& Dave Couch.)We argued for something that would be more like CW. And basically got laughed out the room.
I think the time Monday Group got on to the front page of the nationals was when wank & me were with them on an intervention, pushing the rhetoric into action.
Green hair + political violence was then, front page news. And of course Ian Bone was still in Cardiff when we were all jigging about in the summer of ‘81.
Also found some history of british anarchism, that mentions The Monday Group and Mr Wright alot.
But not, me so another load of bollocks.
All this talk about Crass. Well the music is completlely unlistenable.
And did Crass’ ideas have a big influence like Mclarens? No, though possibly indirectly in the free party scene. Though it took acid house to get it all on the road.
All respect to them but for most of us the fact that they lived in a pissin commune in the country made them almost irrelevent.
May 20th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
I think that planners, by definition, are working in a utilitiarian way to deliver to us what THEY tell us is is good for us. They enforce planning rules according to political strategy handed down to them by politicians, local or national. The “planning consultation” process is an oxymoron. It’s simply there to add a false legitimacy to policy, and whether an individual planner gives a shit about the people he’s designing for or not, his hands are tied by accountants and politicians before he can begin to consider form-alongside-function, let alone form-over-function. “The public wants what the public gets” to continue in a fun Weller way!
In the cost-benefit analysis which elected officials go through for every penny to be spent, it comes down, once more, to tangible versus intangible benefits: high-density housing v. lebensraum (and I choose that word carefully); job lot savings on design and materials v. individuality, humour and a nod to history; municipal architects with municipal experience v. architects with vision and the lack of hubris to perform a meaningful consultation process and therefore discover the cultural references which the future residents find important.
However, I think that the post-WW2 environment in Britain was a special case: there had been so much bombing and neglect of housing stock (and the rest of the stock was so crumbling anyhow) that the small amount of money which was available had to be spent in a utilitarian and not-very-stimulating way. Norman Foster and Richard Rogers were not what was needed (and it WAS “needed”, rather than “wanted”, in a time of genuine national emergency rather than the manufactured sense of peril that the War On Terror has lavished on us). the first generation of people who lived in those estates DID appreciate them: my mum is one of them and has lived in her flat for 54 years. She doesn’t pine for outside toilets and tin baths, for sure.
You’re right about the 20th century: it was the logical conclusion of the process started by the Enlightenment. I do have a pet theory about social science which I was reminded of when the possibility of a Heretics Box Set was mentioned above…
In Physics (“proper” science!) the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that some things are so small that you can either know where they are OR where they’re going (and how fast) but NEVER both. My guess is that the same applies to small-scale social phenomena too: the guys that went out chasing the old Blues singers with their recording equipment (to find out where they were) actually changed the state of the social systems they investigated: the Blues singers became (albeit minor) celebrities and earned (albeit tiny) amounts of money from their work which changed their status in their communities. Observing them changed their course (where they were going and/or how fast).
Would that observation process have changed The Heretics at the time? And on the grander scale, did the media attention that Punk got change its velocity?
May 20th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Those colour pics are soopah.
We all look so young & harmless.
Modernism & brutalism (trellick) works very well in other locations. NY/HK etc
Here we see it as a destruction of a glorious history and thus tend to feel nostalgic towards that which was razed.
In Asia they see it as a destruction of being colonised. Thus they put more effort into getting it right & thus it works.
Hating the modernist aesthetic is a disctinctly European obsession.
Unfortuanatly although its hard to argue the point with an art teacher, taste & therfore art is almost always ‘political’.
Dont get me wrong, I agree that the fuckers who impossed their psudo socialist planning ideals on us all were egocentric arseholes.
But then I am also English, have a my own chunk of the collective unconcious’ zietgiest, and hark back to the empire, even if I dont, the days when we all lived in little houses with gardens, shopped at the local grocers & as a nation didnt really have to worry too much ‘cos we were at the top of the pile.
Sometimes it seems that the post modernist concept is just another way to say that we’ve run out of new ideas.
May 20th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
@RichKid-> “porks biploar kicking in nicely”
Yep, and the beauty of this kinda high is that it doesn’t fuck my lovely teeth up like those blues used to
May 20th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
That Heisenberg relates to the heretics is a wonderful thing…..
If the media had observed us we would have been famous .
Wicked!!
May 20th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Yeah it’s interesting about McLaren and Reid and Granny Vivenne. If you haven’t read ‘England’s Dreaming’ Jake I think you’d like it. They were so old (in our terms) and were really very much from the hippy generation. I think the Pistols camp did design ’situationism for the kids’ but they weren’t the whole story. It’s interesting that McLaren was in Paris in ‘68. But maybe it’s bullshit. I think McLaren likes to put it across that he masterminded everything but I get the feeling it was mostly very instinctive. Lydon says they all designed the Bollocks album cover and just came up with the most disgusting design they could think of. I remember the impact of it – that sickly yellow and pink but it’s no big deal these days.
The Ramones doc I mentioned also showed how old these people were. Apparently Johnny Ramone and his mates went to see The Beatles at Shea Stadium (1965-6?). His mates asked why he was carrying a big rucksack but he didn’t explain. They got there, The Beatles came on and he opened the rucksack which was filled with stones and he proceeded to throw them at the band for the next hour. Fucking great.
May 20th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
@RichKid-> “Sometimes it seems that the post modernist concept is just another way to say that we’ve run out of new ideas.”
Not to me. It just means that I’ve run out of trust for the kind of fuckers who claim to have something new and better for me. Whether it’s a new toothpaste, a new way of earning money or a new political system. If it was that fucking good they’d keep it for themselves!
May 20th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
“My guess is that the same applies to small-scale social phenomena too: the guys that went out chasing the old Blues singers with their recording equipment (to find out where they were) actually changed the state of the social systems they investigated: the Blues singers became (albeit minor) celebrities and earned (albeit tiny) amounts of money from their work which changed their status in their communities. Observing them changed their course (where they were going and/or how fast). ”
Very true. Is this the same principle as ‘you can’t seperate the observer from the observed’?
In musical/social terms the same process is true of Appalachian folk music and Bluegrass. It had a fairly short life of its own, was replaced by other styles and revived when New Yorkers started coming down this way with tape recorders to document authentic people on their front porch. Doc Watson was ‘discovered’ at this time and convinced that he should give up playing rockabilly electric guitar in favour of the acoustic folk he became famous for. They persuaded him by bringing him to New York where he catered for the coffee house scene that was going on and made a good living from it.
I’m no more qualified Jake to have an opinion on Modernist housing etc…than anyone else. I agree that Manhattan is a wonder, though it is a one off. Americans are blessed (or cursed) by not growing up being surrounded by ghosts. Contemporary American architecture is marked by this sense of nowhere-ness. Strip malls, breeze block Wal Marts. It is completely disposable and IS pure function. Tony Wilson (as played by Steve Coogan) in 24 Hour Party People says of The Hacienda that ‘great architecture outlives its original purpose’. I think that’s absolutely right. The Roundhouse in Camden was always this fantastic playground despite being something utilitarian originally. I see franchises going bust over here and they just raze them to the ground and put up another block house. I’m not being nostalgic regarding old architecture but designers did used to think in terms of the future. I think that the 20s/30s tube stations are beautiful, especially after living away for so long. The Broadwater Farm Estate is, and always will look like a prison though. Another misguided thing in Britain was that concrete minimalism may look great in the South of France, Manhattan or Italy but combine it with a climate where it fucking rains all the time and it’s depressing as hell.
May 20th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Another thought is that the Manhattan everyone loves is the rich people’s bit lower Manhattan-mid town. If you go to the projects in the Bronx or Brooklyn or Queens they have have the same eastern block mood as similar places in Britain with all the same alienating qualities.
May 20th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Yep all good points
Just lost a post. Still on old machine. Computer man didnt show.
This really is quite hard.
Pork is not the gerkin phallic mockery post modernist? And Zahida was her names mentel 3d topography?
May 20th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
The Heretics
Popularity: 100%
May 20th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
345 Responses to: The Heretics – Yiddisher Kings of North London
May 20th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Just looking at the photo of you guys on the other thread and I thought that although you said you’d look better in Black and White, I’d go one further and pop the old Circle-H on there too.
Also photoshopped the photo of Sam scoring at Allan’s place so the colours are a bit brighter (though I’m not sure that really fitted the mood of the old place
)
http://s299.photobucket.com/albums/mm312/JahPork/
May 20th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
@Sam-> I like your thought on Manhattan. Maybe that’s the point with Trellick Towers now too. Concrete minimalism is all very well if you can afford to use it as a little pied-a-terre, furnish it with some nice modern art and treat the whole thing ironically, but if you’ve got 3 kids, big bills and no money there really isn’t much of a joke or much of a future to be seen. They’re the people who wouldn’t say no to a Barratt Home, I guess.
May 20th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
Nice one Pork.
Here’s another classic Heretics shot:
http://img385.imageshack.us/img385/8580/keef7nu9.jpg
May 21st, 2008 at 12:48 am
@Sam-> Dunno, I think the separating the observer from the observed bit is more about there being no way of differentiating subject and object, the observer and observed being related by context and also related by the process of observation or something like that.
I’m gonna have to admit defeat on this one… even manics get knackered sometimes.
The classic Heretics shot is a blinder, btw!
@RichKid-> I may be a fan of the Gherkin but I can honestly say I’ve never mocked a phallus in me life
May 21st, 2008 at 4:02 am
Something to do with the way atoms behave depending on your method of recording them. Thus, lady with camera in Archway produces primal scream response in Heretics bass player.
May 21st, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Cos we cant edit these after posting this is taster to see if i can post at all.
May 21st, 2008 at 6:27 pm
Ok sort of can via some weired blah blah.
Broadwater Farm,and all those wrecks of communities: It seems to me the main missing ingrediant after having seen how they do it in Asia is shops
There, they’d have built 2 floors of shops, and maybe a food court, all acting as a central location where the communities connect with each other.
The reason they didnt do it in the UK was because
1) culture
2) planning laws disallowed mixed use development
Of course its easy to argue that if they did that here all the shops would get robbed or vandalised & the food court would become a centre of drug dealing & other anti social stuff.
Possibly true. But if so that would not be the fault of the planners.
Also an obvious comment given my line of work; Greenary.
Singapore is a modernist city.
Its tall, wide car infested streets & all that.
But it’s a garden city. In 1967 they embarked on an ambitious plan to green the town. And they did. Its dripping with greenery & flowers from every wall & overhead walkway. Its very pleasent in that respect.
Theres a park however small in every locality. Most residential developments are built around a ‘wet market’ (fresh food) and a school, that acts as a youth centre at night.
Now Singapore aint a paradise and it has its own racial tensions. But it works.
From an urban planning point of view its brilliant.
Now it could be argued that it only works because its been a (soft) dictatorship for most of its life.
Well now its opening up so we’ll see.
May 21st, 2008 at 6:43 pm
The Heretics;underground yiddish legend.
Its great. Was at a festi the other day .
Young punky type girl was buying some stuff off me mates stall.
So I got talking, Stiff Little Fingers? Yeah saw them blah.
And Boom.
Mention K Y P P & your in.Then say you knew T D and quickly add that the band you were in has the most popular thread on his site .
Boomtastic.
Another pink haired convert to the cause of heresy.
Middle age git version is that she was so impressed that she swooned off to check her mates lap top.
Her version may be a little different..
She looked so young. But now i’ve seen those colour pics, no different to that.
You all may mock the box set concept but you wait.
Soon there’s gonna be demand from all those little punkies out there who want the authenticity & rarity of our underground cult tape. And no drummer left, its sooo culty
I vote Pork to be Mclaren.Can you morph our images to music & call it an newly discovered tape of our one & only gig.Yes I say yes.
Sam you may be qualified or not to comment about whatever it was.I didnt really mean that.
I just meant that to try to convince an art teacher that taste & art were political was going to be a tall order.
Hard to argue anyway as we all know that art is beyond that.
Hava, Hava na gilla, Havanagilla hava hava oi oi oi.
oi
oi
oi oi oi
May 21st, 2008 at 6:55 pm
The other 2 were Tony Wilson & Julian Temple. With Mc & Reid they were the 4 pro-situs who presented us all with the Pistols.
All the content was as said J R.
Witness what happened after he left. Public Image were exciting. Ronnie Biggs wasnt. Funny yes. But very daft.
Mclaren, he loves to be the man but he knows without little John it was merely spectacle. And thats what he misunderstood at the time.
BTW rains a fucking lot in Singapore. But I know what you mean. Somehow the UK is grim.
So Mr P, whats you’re take on Spiniker then? And how does that relate to Heisenberg ?!!
What d’you reckon about the ‘connected electron’ theory. I mean how do they know that the two electrons light years apart are infact spinning at the same time & will for time immamorial?
Beats me..
May 21st, 2008 at 6:59 pm
I know we is popular but i cant help noticing that its only 4 different posters in the last 20 million posts .
Just a thought ..
May 21st, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Interesting about Singapore.
I’m interested in what you mean by taste being political. Please explain!
I’m all for a boxed set. Funnily enough me and Si did come up with an idea to write us into the history books by photoshopping our heads into famous punk rock moments. For example, me doing a Les Dawson ‘Pwoooaaar!’ face behind Siouxie ‘tits oot’ at Screen on the Green.
The trouble with a boxed set is they generally have lots of songs in there and we’ve got 2 and a bit ropey tapes, one of which features Sniper’s drumming. I wonder if Scarecrow’s mum still has……………….no we couldn’t.
I don’t remember doing ‘Victim’ in rehearsal. Was it that good?
I remember one Plague Dogs song and that had something to do with ‘Going down to subway number 9′. Was it called ‘3 for a quid?’. Did you see your legs drawing Jake and the other Heretics photo?
May 21st, 2008 at 7:10 pm
That’s true…no one here but us chickens but we have gone from Thixofix to connected electrons. Better watch it….we have a cretinous image to uphold here. I get the feeling Situationism was what was happening in the art schools in the late sixties. I was taught by similar people. It’s kind of hard Pop Art really. A few of the participants have said that Malcolm was shitting himself during the Bill Grundy thing. The Pistols were a lucky accident I think.
May 21st, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Oh lordy..
I hate to admit it. But I did phone her up & ask. Talk about myopic. I never told anyone, as I was too shamed up. It wasnt the best move. It still ranks as one of the worst things I’ve done. The logic was that all parents were cunts.
But boy do I feel lighter now!
We CAN make ‘new’ songs. Yeah that plague dogs song is great
It can be in the set called Streets ‘79 or whatever.
I really gotta go and do stuff.
May 21st, 2008 at 7:17 pm
359 Responses to: The Heretics. Boyz in the Grubby Schmutta.
May 21st, 2008 at 7:18 pm
Re: other thread. which two books? thats mad.
May 21st, 2008 at 7:21 pm
We’ve all done wicked things Jake. What was her response? (I’m asking this to give you some chance of catharsis).
May 21st, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Shit you’re there live. Maaan I really gotta goooo.
But I AM an addict. I admit it .
Help this is internet future imperfect. Its all gone terribly wrong. My thoughts at the speed of light.
Ok got it. We’ll call the song ‘Battery Humans’ about people thinking there alive but all they do is this.
You & Pork work out the chords.I’ll do the grubby lineage .
Here come my chinese rug.
May 21st, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Dunno which books. It was early nineties when they were published and I kept having people I knew coming up to me and saying “Did you used to have a mohican?” Si told me they were selling the photos as postcards in the eighties up west. The shame of it.
May 21st, 2008 at 7:25 pm
Oooh Catharsis.
She quite rightly put the pissing phone down in disgust.
But its like surviving the gas chambers. Only another yid kid can understand the guilt.
Grubby Smutta might be a name for the youtoob vid?
BTW any confessions to air??
I gotta gooooooo………….
May 21st, 2008 at 7:33 pm
I have several worst moments which still make me wince. One of them was at Campbell Buildings. There was this little local girl – she must have been about 8 or 9 years old and she took a shine to me and started following me around. It got a bit annoying after awhile but she was just being little. She made the mistake of coming into the squat once when I’d just shot up Tuinol and I shouted “Fuck off!” and squirted a syringe full of water at her. The needle was still on…it could have come off. Arrrghhhh! She ran out crying and never came back. There I’ve said it. You next.
May 21st, 2008 at 7:38 pm
A general ongoing guilty thing that chipped away at the moral fibre instilled so lovingly in us by our parents, was getting a crisp fiver for your birthday inside a lovingly written card from your gran. Are you with me?
May 21st, 2008 at 7:42 pm
“Buy yourself something nice!” she’d write. I took her at her word.
May 21st, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Was Tony Wilson a situationist? Or just a local news reporter who liked weird music.
I think Bernie Rhodes may have been part of this group. He was definitely a Marxist.
May 22nd, 2008 at 12:02 am
For a very lengthy discussion by the Wise brothers – ex-members of King Mob (briefly UK branch of Situationist International) about punk and stuff see
this http://www.revoltagainstplenty.com/archive/local/kingmob.html
May 22nd, 2008 at 1:49 am
“Sitting in a squat with Scarecrow,
Can’t think of nothing to say,
Sniffing on a dried-up glue bag,
Waiting for the break of day,
3 for a quid keeps you up on your feet
But there’s nothing to do
But try to sleep”
(repeat ad nauseam)
Can’t remember the other verses.
Jerry Thing or Wank might though.
May 22nd, 2008 at 1:54 am
Chords were:
(VERSE) E, A, E, A, E, A, C, B
(CHORUS) A, B, C, D
A bridge or lead break, there was none.
May 22nd, 2008 at 2:00 am
@Sam-> Not the Heisenberg thing, that’s about subatomic particles (electrons and downwards) being changed by the act of observation. The thing I was talking about was your comment about not being able to separate observer from observed: I think that’s more of a literary analysis theory.
It’s the quarks which are connected: spin one in a particular direction, and you can measure another one spinning a long distance away in “sympathy”. I guess, by definition, they can’t tell why though!
May 22nd, 2008 at 2:06 am
@RichKid->The Spinnaker is a huge waste of money in a town which can’t afford it. But if it had been built properly (it wasn’t) and funded properly (it wasn’t), I’d have said it was a landmark piece of architecture. It DOES look beautiful lit up of a night when you’re coming back into Pompey on the ferry though, and it does reference the local history and culture very well.
Down there in Brighton you’re gonna be getting the Brighton Tower soon, eh? Looks like a 600-foot syringe to me! Is that culturally referential to the Brighton area?
May 22nd, 2008 at 4:46 am
Shameless self-promotion I know but some classy shots of my band here:
http://shutterfalls.com/gallery/4955935_fhikK#296009521_YbKgz
Pork – There’s someone with a cat theory that I used to know but I can’t for the life of me remember the point of it. Could be something to do with parallel universes. Or maybe that’s just the Benylin talking.
May 22nd, 2008 at 11:15 am
@Sam-> 2 cat theories I know of:
1. Schrodinger’s Cat: Put a cat in a box with a radioisotope attached to it. There’s a trigger which goes off if it’s hit by radiation. The trigger activates poison gas which kills the cat. The poison gas also goes off if the box is opened. At any given time, if you don’t open the box, the cat is in an indeterminate state- there’s no way of knowing if it’s alive or dead. The point being: When does a quantum system stop existing as a mixture of states and become one or the other?
2. Cats always fall on their feet if dropped from a high place, and if you’re unlucky enough to drop your breakfast toast it will always fall butter side down. The experiment is to strap toast, butter side up, to the back of your cat and chuck it off a tower block. It aims to prove which is the more powerful superstition
May 22nd, 2008 at 11:18 am
@Sam-> Nice pics. You’re looking damn distinguished with age, mate. theyears have been kind!
Your guitarist looks unhealthily like Jonathan Ross to me though.
May 22nd, 2008 at 11:40 am
The Plague Dogs were originall called “No Publicity” (that was Jerry Thing’s thing).
He had the idea that he didn’t want anybody to know anything about him – not too handy for a singer really.
“No publicity,
Not for me,
Why don’t you leave,
Leave me be?
No Publicity!”
There then followed some drivel about “We’re on an anti-press campaign”.
FYI, “publicity” was pronounced “paaaarrrrrblic-uh-taaaaaaaaaayyyy”.
No publicity? Bollocks! I can’t speak for Thing, but I’m sure me and Wank would’ve sold quite close family members for the gift of being recognised by gurlz at gigz
With his reputation as a laydeez man, I’m sure Thing would’ve done that too. Just another example of how we were behaving as we were “supposed” to behave, and going against our instincts.
May 22nd, 2008 at 4:25 pm
You played yourself, my friend, you played yourself…
May 22nd, 2008 at 4:48 pm
…and as a result of getting No Publicity, I played WITH myself
May 22nd, 2008 at 4:52 pm
@Sam-> Did the photographer give you guys copies of the band photos? I noticed that you can’t save the pics from his website, but I’ve screen-dumped them so if you want, I can tart them up with Photoshop and pass them on if you like.
May 22nd, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Cheers Pork.
It’s true what you say about doing what we were supposed to but it seemed to make sense at the time. Anyone who wants to get on a stage and make a spectacle (witch!) of themselves has to have some kind of giant ego though. I think it was the golden age of the contrarian – possibly the dawning of the age of contrarious. More about being difficult than having any definite principles. The whole of New York wants to see The Pistols – let’s play Texas. I don’t remember Jerry being a ladies man. It was cool that he lived in Thornton Heath though. This was, from early childhood, a mythical place to me as it was on the other end of the (epic) 159 bus route, our end being West End Green. Oh to ride it again from end to end. Top deck, back seat, ten Bensons, an impatient driver at the helm and a nice paper ticket. Such things make life worthwhile.
May 22nd, 2008 at 5:03 pm
The photographer is sending us some copies. Thanks for the thought though. Buddy does look a bit like Wossi in some of those.
May 22nd, 2008 at 6:16 pm
so are the dixie bee-liners more of a tuinal or an evo band then?
May 22nd, 2008 at 7:58 pm
Stella Artois all the way mate.
May 22nd, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Poor girl she thought you were gonna save her from something worse.
I reckon both those are about as twatty as each other.
Funny how the little things are somtimes important. All the crime & general badness just seems par for the course, eh?
Your gran? She knew mate.
Other high points? though not confessional.
Here’s one for Andy from the Apostles who still knows her.
Trying to get Caroline W to give me a blow job, or some sort of sex’ting whilst completely off me trolley, still peaking on STP.
Not a pretty site I can assure you.
To her credit she, I was gonna write, handled it well, but, she did deal with it well, poor love.
I never got to apologise. So pass that on Andy! If you are still out there in heretic land?
Erm, nickin’ Tommy Doyles missus off him while he was inside. Nice! That took years to get over.
Writing him (or anyone I imagine) a dear John was not fun. Still he’s spent loads more time inside & I’m still with his ex missus so I guess its all been right
But both of those are somehow kind of different to the our first to pangs of shame.
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Cos my comps daft i only get to read posts after I post.
You lot are bloody hilarious.
Who would believe a man who took money for brown from his gran, more than once it seems, when he says his band dont do evo ?
Pork
whats the one that went
‘when we all go down kings rd
they wont leave us alone’?
Boys in blue ?
hook line was
‘there just a bunch of cunts’
Classic.
C’mon you middle agers lets have some more confessions.
Or else Sam & me will get reported to the fat, sorry spaceally challenged, controller.
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:14 pm
And how bout subway 4 or has that that already had an airing?
Dixie, I just noticed the post cardpost. D’you mean that all over the world there were people with post cards of The Heretics on their walls.
ha ha ha
And you had ‘mohican’ fans. No shame there bouyo
I’m gonna send all this to me nieces mohican mate. She also shares the same birthday as me, so must be cool. Shes gonna tell all her bacefook mates & wehey there we go.
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:17 pm
Not sure if my gran knew. My mum and her side of the family were pretty innocent of such things and my mum, despite the odds, still has a wonderful quality of seeing the best in people. Another grandmother related incident was when we were in Amsterdam in 81. I’d ran out of money and knew my grandmother was coming over to visit museums with an elderly Jewish friend. I met them both in a restaurant, out of my head on smack and could hardly keep my head up. She insisted on buying me something to eat (‘you look SO thin darling!’) which just made me throw up. I think she must have twigged as no one normally needs to go to the bog every five minutes. The shame we endure for fifty quid.
There is some crime I feel really bad about. There was that little supermarket run by this Greek or Turkish bloke around the corner from 66a. We used to call him ‘Greasy Arnold’ and we’d nick from him every day. He was shit scared of us and eventually we gave up all pretence of hiding what we were doing. I remember him following me around the shop and I’d just face him and pocket two packets of cheese. Meanwhile Tony would be openly nicking fags. Who knows what his situation was? Recent immigrant trying to earn a living. Speaking as someone who got burgled 5 times in one place in Stoke Newington – it’s a horrible fucking feeling. It was probably junkies too. But karma’s something I do believe in. Maybe I’ve paid it all off by now.
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:24 pm
Its alright.Greasy Arnold is now one of the heads of the kurdish girl running mafias in London.
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:27 pm
Thinking about it I feel terrible about what I put my family through. Your mum found out about the smack and told mine. There was nothing they could do though. We were out of control and beyond all reasoning. My sister told me years after that my mum’d just sit in the kitchen and cry all day. I remember Wank admitting that his dad’s hair turned completely white within a year from worry. His dad did an intervention at Campbell Buildings too didn’t he? Drove up, grabbed him and bundled him into a van. There was zero knowledge about hard drugs at that time too. It was still a taboo subject.
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:33 pm
I had a one night stand with this girl in Australia. Went into her bedroom and there were the Heretics pictures on her wall. Funny old world isn’t it?
May 23rd, 2008 at 1:41 am
@RichKid-> “Cos my comps daft i only get to read posts after I post.”
If you tick the box that says “Notify me of follow-up comments by email” at the bottom of the page, you’ll get an email every time anyone posts anything, within a few minutes.
If you’re still having trouble, press the “Refresh” button on your browser as soon as you load the page.
If that doesn’t work, then clear the Internet Cache in your browser.
Can’t remember the Plague Dogs’ tune about the boys in blue, so not much help there. But pick any 3 chords and stick the words “oppression” “hairspray” “gang” “unfair” “pills” “truncheon” “alienation” “running” “brutality” “miniskirts” “instigators” and “glue” in there somewhere and you wouldn’t be far wrong, I suspect!
I would think it’d be quite easy to produce a punk lyric generator using an online dictionary and a couple of yoghurt pots and string.
May 23rd, 2008 at 1:47 am
@Sam-> Wank’s parents were very nice people. I used to go stay over there in late ‘78 – early ‘79 and they’d make me really welcome. Genuine salt of the Earth. I think his dad was a shop steward at the Dagenham Ford plant, wasn’t he? Called Les (I remember that because his sister was called Lesley/Leslie too).
I had a look on Friends Reunited a couple of years ago for Wank, and found a Leslie Darrington living in Essex who was about the right age for his sister. She’s a judo champion, this one! Wrote to her but never got a reply so don’t know if it was his sister or not. Any thoughts on getting in touch with Wank at all, after his sojourn at his Moroccan Majesty’s pleasure?
May 23rd, 2008 at 3:22 am
If she’s a judo champion that’d be her. I remember her being PE teacher material. I think I remember her doing judo too as it was quite unusual for a girl at that time and her parents really encouraged it. Yeah, Wank’s parents were great. Very kind folks. I’d like to hear from Wank again and hear his thoughts on all of this.
May 24th, 2008 at 8:45 am
new machine
Nice..
His name was Ralph same as my dad. My memory is saying i’ve made this up but i dont think so..They also shared the same working class east end socialist roots.(though as we know my old man father of rich kid had gone a different way by the time we all came along). Lovely couple. He was a shop steward at Fords, Stalinist hence Wanks later incarnation as Wank Stalin.
Spent many a day there hearing the shouting matches between the generations. Wanks was particularly proud of his mums preference for The Carpenters. They all live in Spain now so Gretch said.
Spose they did the Dagenham to Costas route like a lot of folk
If his sister is on facebook someone could contact Stain that way?
May 24th, 2008 at 9:11 am
I’m getting http 408 errors & losing comments.
Ain’t got the patience to write it out again.
Still its about how my folks ‘found out’ & all. I’ll do it later.
Suffice to say we really did fuck them around.
May 24th, 2008 at 9:30 am
Well, you guys have been busy little bees, filling up the cyberspace since I last came by. Thanks for sharing in the public domain.
Here’s a link to a website documenting Dino’s Chaos UK days, amongst other stuff – yet another cross-over strand of the punk of the time.
http://www.mf-enterprizes.com/index.htm
also to jahpork – is that you in the background behind Lou in this photo?
http://i208.photobucket.com/albums/bb227/killyourpetpuppy/Westbere%20Rd%20-%20Puppy%20Mansions%202/Louinbackbedroom.jpg
May 24th, 2008 at 9:38 am
Ok I try again
My folks found out ‘cos my bleedin GF Caz told ‘em. She was anti all drugs so probably a good move.
So my dad concocted a couple of days work at some building site. Turned up & beat the bajesus outta me. I could do nothing, him an ex amateur boxer me having had some gear the day before, a bit shaky, not sick but just weak.
Dragged me back to their place, my mum in tears. I was outa there as soon as he left.
Next thing I hear from Evelyn that first the cops, then me folks have been looking for me. They somehow found her & Phils place, & she, lawd bless her, told them to fuck off. Still they made me ward of court. Still 17. Stayed Campbell Buildings about a week after that & realised that I could quite easily carry on my new found interest in gear whilst officially staying at that place. Campbell Buildings / tuinol / on the run / V gear & a few days a week at theirs? No contest. Had my dad in tears at one point, seemed like a victory at the time.
Poor bastards, What could they do?
Still I can sit around the table with them now & have a laugh, though not about those times.
Hopefully my ‘E’ gobbling nieces wont be as bigger twat as I was.
May 24th, 2008 at 9:54 am
My overiding memory of Campbell Buildings was after I’d left; getting a phone call from Robbo (?) telling me that Crow was dead, you Sam, were on the run ‘cos you’d twatted that copper, gone to ground in Brum I think.
Then going down to the place where they lay out bodies.
Man, Tess in complete bits, till this day i’ve never seen anyone cry like that, maybe the memory is still raw for me so exagerated, me just hugging her to hold her up. I’d never met her before.
Me & Bob & some others getting grouchy with the staff.
Tess freakin out at them that they’ed changed his appearance beyond recognition. Them trying to get stroppy with us & me having to be restrained from punchimg one of them out.
Seeing his body like that & us sorry lot, lost kids fighting a losing battle against an invisible enemy, is Campbell Buildings for me. It summed up ‘the horror’
For what its worth, it galvinised me towards ‘revolutionary’ politics.
I still reckon that his death pushed us lot further down the road. Dunno.
May 24th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
Jake – Highlight your text, right click, copy and if you have to – paste it again. Shame to lose a whole post.
Scarecrow was a live fast – die young rock n’ roller. It was nobody else’s fault that he took a bunch of barbs and went to sleep on a roof in S. London. I remember some people using his death as an excuse for self pity (no one here btw) , which, in retrospect was the overriding emotion of Campbell Buildings. A couple of days grace, then a stampede to aquire the best of his enviable singles collection. There followed dramatic candlelit seances and weegee board sessions. Can’t see the connection to revolution here – it was Lord of the Flies. Being immortals at that age, it was still something that had happened to someone else and there was no downturn in the level of self abuse. It took another three years, hep b and c, 2 weeks on critical in hospital, one time turning blue in Amsterdam and a thousand dirty hits for me to realize – next time it’ll be you, idiot. You’ll be DEAD.
May 24th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Sure.The connection was in my head.Another thing real or imaginary to be angry about.
Wank summed it up ‘he commited slow suicide’. Wise words from one so young.Thats what we were all doing.
Yeah forgot about all that weegee boared shit.
And absolutely, we were all self pitying.
BTW was up in the smoke today, went to see Banksy thing at Waterloo.So went to Lambeth North. Is that 20 storey office block on the Campbell Buildings site?Couldnt relay get me bearings
Cheers for comp advice gents.
Tried all these methods, somtimes it helped.
But the good news is it seems to have righted itself.
May 24th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
But hey,distant ‘raw’ memories only exist when you remember them.
Probably havent thought about or remembered any of this stuff for years. But when I do its interesting to watch it all flood out. The emotion is so distant that its only ever raw or real for an instant.
Still its a good instant.
Gonna read some other posts & go off at another tangent.
Erm, Banksy.How odd that an overtly ‘political’ graffiti artist is now an established part of the art world.
Chaos. Blimey another real band!
Good stuff though. Very humourous.
May 24th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
The twenty story office block sounds right.
Off with the band to Missouri and Texas tomorrow for the next two weeks. I’ll try and check in on someone’s laptop if I can. Toodles.
May 24th, 2008 at 10:18 pm
Enjoy the trip.
May 24th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
Christ, that King Mob thing is wordy.
Apparantly they’ lauded riot’
Erm yeah whatever.
May 25th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
So Pork, or anyone the current little conundrum.
Global warming. Fact or fiction?
May 26th, 2008 at 11:04 am
“Banksy.How odd that an overtly ‘political’ graffiti artist is now an established part of the art world.”
apparently,he is now a millionaire,his canvas’s auctioned off for tens of thousands of quids…………if he does have all that sort of money,wonder if he uses it for good.
global warming…..fact i reckon,whatever it is theres something not right,but i’m no scientist so what do i know?
May 26th, 2008 at 11:08 am
i found this page on flickr that seems to be from the period youz guys were hanging around,maybe you recognise some of the squatters in the pics?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/21882620@N00/
May 26th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Lots of old Puppy friends in there including Pip, Phil, Cory & Sue.
May 26th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Bob Short is in one of the images…
May 26th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
@RichKid-> If you get the HTTP408 error after you’ve tried to post, hit the BACK button in your browser (takes you back to the page as it was before you posted, with your text in the window bit at the bottom). You can copy your text into the clipboard if you want to (highlight it all, then right-click and choose “copy”.
Next, hit the REFRESH button in your browser. Your post should appear, as if by magic, without you needing to post it again. I was getting the same problem – it’s something on the server side, not to do with your box.
Won’t have a chance to comment on any of the above till later (Bank Hol, pissing with rain, stuff to do).
May 26th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
@JohnG-> “Banksy.How odd that an overtly ‘political’ graffiti artist is now an established part of the art world.”
For this, read: “The Clash”.
…and how appropriate that Paul Simenon is now selling his paintings for top dollar too. [see http://www.thomaswilliamsfineart.com/exhibitions/future/simonon/paintings/simonon_1.html
And according to some blurb that I’ve read, one of the Thames paintings he’s done was painted form the penthouse flat of his mate Jeffrey Archer. Oh dear me.
May 26th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
… That should have been:
http://www.thomaswilliamsfineart.com/exhibitions/future/simonon/paintings/simonon_1.html
May 26th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Jez from Blood and Roses in a few of the photos. Has anyone got a flickr account? If so can that person get in touch with this person and get him to get in touch with us here at KYPP. I would like to use some of these photos if he is keen.
May 26th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
i will drop them an email and ask em to get intouch for yeez
May 26th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
ok they love the idea so am sending you their contact email penguin cos they couldnt get the contact link on your site to work
this is the reply with email deleted (spammers etc)
Fuck me! Kill your pet puppy! Brougham Road! Bayston Road! Yes, same time, part of the same Hackney lot of punx! However, I tried clicking on the contact link as suggested and it won’t work – probably because I’ve managed to disable Microsoft Outlook on my own computer and have no idea how to reinstall it again (Doh!). So, if they would like to contact me at I shall tell them they are more than welcome to use whatever photos they like – but it would be nice to hear from the first!
May 26th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
heres another reply i got………
Yes, that IS Bob from Blood and Roses! So, bloody hell, who
Stewart (if you ever
are you and where do you know him from? I never knew Bob
that well – I was a friend of Jez (bass player before he
died!) and Lisa (singer) though!
knew me, I was at a number of addresses – erm Huntingdon
Street, Cazenove Road, Morley House, Farleigh Road,
Kingsmead Estate, a road in Stoke Newington whose name
temporarily escapes me, an estate in Upper Clapton whose
name temporarily escapes me, Balls Pond Road, and some
others). By the way, I’ve uploaded a video to YouTube with
myself and some others on it from 1979 Huntingdon Street -
search for jellyfishinthebath or London Punk 1979 or here:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=IABnsIDer-0
May 27th, 2008 at 4:36 am
@Val-> “also to jahpork – is that you in the background behind Lou in this photo?”
Nope, don’t think that was me, my hair was much more of an afro thang going on, at those sporadic times that I had much of it! Cool pic of Lou though – I remember her having her hair like that after she had the little fluffy short blonde spike cut.
She’s really cheekboney there too – she lost a lot of weight at Campbell Buildings, didn’t she? I guess we all did. The diet there wasn’t brilliant – I used to splurge me dole check on apple pies and After Eight mints (always had a taste for the very best in life, me
), and then have sod all left for the week.
May 27th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Couple of things: does anyone remember anything much about that estate in Vauxhall that a few of us went to during/after Campbell Buildings? The nice new(ish) one that they were moving all of the residents out of because it was subsiding? Maisonettes (I think) with all the central heating and leccy left on. The floor I was on had a couple of Scots guys who used to go and work up the Dilly of a night because of their political convictions (“och, no, ah couldnae humiliate ma self by claiming the dole, ah’d rather go an’ sell ma dish up the Dilly”), plus Marilyn (mentioned above here) the transvestite Monroe clone. Other than that I can’t remember much about it other than the noise of the trains which I got used to after about a week and still miss of a night! Any more thoughts?
And, thinking of us all losing weight while squatting (as above), I remembered that there were a bunch of people who ended up at Campbell Buildings one night (think they were mates of Bob’s) when we were all very skint and very hungry. An American fella (I think) then asked if we all fancied going out for a bite to eat. We looked at him as though he was off his trolley (why would he think that we wouldn’t already have eaten if we’d have had the money?) “No”, he says, “it’s on me”. To which we replied the punk equivalent of “Does Judith Chalmers have a passport mate?”.
He then dragged us off to Soho and we all went upstairs in a Chinese place into what was one of the poshest restaurants I’d ever seen in my tender years. Plateful upon plateful of the finest food came up, which we devoured eagerly. Round upon round of lager was dealt out and put down with extreme prejudice (and it was the first time I ever drank sake too). When the time to pay the bill came, I was thinking that we were going to have to run the gauntlet of some cleaver-wielding chefs on the way out the bog window or something, but the American calmly produced his Dad’s gold Amex card (and this was in the days in the days when having a “gold card” meant “seriously rich) and gave the waiter a healthy tip as well as covering the lager and food bills. Ah, the stuff of which dreams are made! If he ever reads this, I’d just like to say a very big “GOOD WORK RICH OVERSEAS FELLA!” to him.
May 27th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
Funny you should mention this place, as ive just seen sue my sis for the first time in two years and she started to talk about those three trannys.
She said they really looked after her but one was a cleptomaniac, but only
for toothbrushes.
She said her toothbrushs were always going missing and when she looked in one of their handbags it was just full of toothbrushes.
I remember the reason why those flats were empty cos they were all sinking. You could put something on the floor and it would roll across the room.
May 27th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
Yeah, that subsidence was pretty alarming, even when sober! I don’t know what was worse, the fear of impending nuclear war or flooding, or the thought that you might wake up under 3 floors of masonry.
But the fact that the heating and leccy were left on more than made up for it after Campbell Buildings! Only thing was, the tenants had thoughtlessly taken their cooker with them when they left
I remember trying to heat up a tin of soup in a saucepan on the top of the immersion heater when I first moved in. I took the lagging off the top of the tank (it was REALLY hot!) and put the saucepan on it expecting a pot of hot nourishing pea and ham soup when I got back. Nah… after about ten hours it had warmed up to about the temperature of the average swimming pool. Downer!
Oh, and to get from Campbell Buildings down to the Vauxhall place you had to walk past “The Ministry Of Information”. The real proper government thing. Very worrying to a young chap full of anarchist paranoia!
May 28th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
@ pork, Yeah i remember that killer punch from Pip too.
It was used in his lab to bond animal tissue together and think it had the same effect on my head and guts.
You were lucky to get away that night cos we had this huge illegal eviction
where the pigs and council workers turned up about 4 in the morning started to arrest people on trumped up charges and proceeded to board up our flats!
May 28th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
We had a tip off it was gonna happen and had a soliciter in one of the flats but he left about two.
The great thing was that on the court date these two female pigs came up to us and whispered in our ears that the police force was bullshit and they were gonna tell the truth in the dock!
May 28th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Yeah, so everyone got off and the other pigs got in big trouble. I missed the whole thing cos I was passed out in mine and Lisa’s flat with an old door wedged against the front door so it was impossible for them to get in.
They must of really wanted us out of campbell buildings to pull a stunt like that!
May 28th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
@Phil-> The old bill from Kennington were always trying that stuff on, weren’t they? I remember one time me, Sam, Wank and Jake tried to open up a new place and we’d just got the cage off the door with the big “scouse key” jemmy when we saw and heard old bill coming up the stairs. We legged it up onto the roof but they’d sent a crew of them up the next stairwell.
They took us down to Kennington nick, and kept us in the cells for a few hours (usual insults and suspiciously gobbed-on looking food etc). Then after a few hours, the attitude suddenly changed. the sergeant opened up the cells and said “If you wouldn’t mind coming this way, please?” and marched us down the corridor. I thought that this was his way of snidily preparing us for a good hiding or something, but when we got to the Inspector’s office he ushered us in whereupon the inspector told us that there’d been an awful mistake, that the new Labour group on the council had a new policy on using unoccupied properties and that we were more than welcome to a nice cup of tea and some biscuits! They even offered us a lift back to the Buildings in a squad car! Nice!
One thing we DID notice one the way down the corridor to his office was that one of the cells was open and it was full up (I mean NO floor showing) with lovely tall dope plants. Now I leave it up to you to decide whether these were the result of a raid or whether Inspector Knacker was having a bit of DIY cultivation!
Does anyone remember the story about opening up a flat at CB and the walls being covered in blood? I’m never sure to this day whether it was urban myth or truth! there were loads of stories going round about the Richardson gang having used flats on the estate for torture and stuff – anyone ever found out if they were true?
May 28th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
@Phil-> … and do you remember Leslie’s voracious sexual appetites? I seem to remember that you were very nearly a victim of her desires one evening (I think it was the weekend that the London Calling album was released!) and you had to insist long and vehemently that you were very happy as you were!
She then turned her gaze to me, and showed me her new vibrator!
Terrifying woman!
May 28th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Did anyone ever get to the bottom of the story of Crap getting life for that murder after falling/being thrown 4 storeys out of the window and onto the concrete? Seems from the comments above that people think he did it, but I’m sure he was denying it (not only to the old bill but to everyone else who went to see him) at the time. He reckoned he’d brought some guy back to the estate and as they got into the flat 2 blokes were waiting for him with a hammer. They smashed the other fella’s head into 2,000-odd fragments (according to the local paper) and then threw Crap out the window.
The reason I remember this quite so vividly was that I’d thrown a whitey bigstyle after eating about an eighth of blow and drinking 2 bottles of Mateus Rose (Ruth was very keen on it at the time). I thought my world was caving in and staggered round to St Thomas’s casualty. After I’d been there a few minutes, having explained to the nurse that I’d eaten some gear and thrown a whitey (she very kindly put me on a bed and took my blood pressure), old bill turned up and said “**** ******, I’m arresting you on suspicion of…”, to which I replied “It’s a fair cop, I’ve had a bit of gear”. He then continued … “Murder”. OUCH!
They dragged me off to Kennington, and took all my clothes for analysis. When they wanted the ‘personal’ samples, they called a police doctor. After the fluid samples, they wanted hair samples too. Except he didn’t have any of the regulation police-issue tweezers, so he improvised with a pair of electrician’s pliers they found in the back room. Having a bunch of your pubes yanked out by a bloke with his knee against your thigh saying “this is going to hurt you more than it hurts me” is not a good way to spend an evening!
The one thing that narks me more than anything else about the old bill, to this day, is that I’d asked them for a solicitor and to get my parents up there. Nothing happened. So I pushed the buzzer in the cell after 4 or 5 hours and asked the copper who opened the door what was going on. He replied to a shit-scared 16-year-old who’d been arrested for murder while out of his face “Let’s just say that if we still had hanging, your feet would be 3 foot off the ground by now.” What an arsehole. And he’s probably a deputy assistant commissioner by now.
May 28th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Pork. Hee, Yeah do remember that day. I remember Les having a queue of men going down the stairwell to the next landing ,and they would service her in return for tuinol.
I also remember her being covered in really bad scabies and the police burning all her clothes in the courtyard.
May 28th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Does anyone know on this site that Sniper O.D.ed and died?
Must of been around 82.
Him and Andy Martin were good mates.
May 28th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Fuck.. That whole Crap Murder thing sent a shudder down my spine just then.
May 28th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Yeah, the flat sprayed with blood.. There was always creepy shit like that around campbell buildings. I remember Bob me and a few others doing Ouija Board in my sisters squat which had no gas or leccy and the next morning the flat burned down.
The fire brigade said it started in the cupboard where the glass was kept…Away from any flame or heat source!
May 28th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Hey Phil ,which Phil is that?
Not fat Phil I guess. Hello mate .
Anyway Pork. U asked on the other thread about the free Tibet discussions I was in.
It was on http://www.skyscrapercity.com.
An urban enviroment based site, i’ve been posting there for years. Mostly in the Uk & Indian sub forums. Sometimes very interesting but less so as the mods take out more of the political & social based threads. Still worth a look if your interested in the built enviroment. The discussions I was in was on the Chinese sub forum & I ended up doing some research of my own about the whole Tibet issue.
Ok back to this here thread.
Yeah I remember getting gripped that day, prelude to a lot more.
Phil can u confirm that about Sniper. As as been said here its odd to hear that he O’d'd, as he was so anti gear.
Also Sam & Sii say they saw him in the late 80’s. Its all very curious.
But if Andy Martin is out there maybe he can confirm it?
Crap? He got HMP for his trouble.Heard that at the time, probably from one of the Brummies or Mitch. Got a vague memory of folk visiting him inside.
May 28th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Yeah the flat sprayed with blood, nice.
Probably something rather more mundane that the Richardsons, like some poor women getting the shite beaten out of her by her mister.
May 28th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
Did the sun ever come out there. As I said i was there the other day & it was scorchio & bright. And Lower Marsh St has like 7 thai / vietnamese snack bars…
All my memories of it are dark. Maybe cos it was the winter?
May 28th, 2008 at 7:17 pm
Hey Baron, its Quick Phil / Queer Phil here.
May 28th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Fuck i didnt really stop squatting till about 1994.
May 28th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
Yeah, sorry mate he is deff dead but I really cant remember the circumstances. I will ask a mate German Andrea maybe she can remember more.
I remember me and Sniper doing loads of DF118’s together and we were living in Batley or Basedon Rd a co-op in Stoke Newington.
He was really anti gear. Its quiet often those people become the biggest users.
Sorry to bring bad news.
May 28th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Shit! I am getting paranoid that I got Snipers death wrong
I’ve just took it as common knowledge that everyone knew, as I had heard years ago but can’t remember where from…
May 28th, 2008 at 8:40 pm
@Phil-> “they would service her in return for tuinol.”
Yes, it really was a terrible drug
Seriously, though, I can’t figure out to this day why anyone was doing barbs: the punk scene was about getting out there and getting in the middle of it all, being seen and getting across whatever message you had. Speed was the perfect drug for it. And maybe a bit of a smoke for the comedown. Then Tuinal came along and all anyone did was stagger about like a zombie, then goof off with a slick of vomit running down the side of their mouth. No threat of impending social meltdown there really.
As for the fire I remember that one too. Bob always seemed to be around that weird shit going on. I remember being at Old Street one day when Bob