After compiling my first CD selection which included hard edge political, rebel and anti war songs I viewed some of the other AGITDISCO contributors selections. I found that the majority of the classic songs had been incorporated into theirs. Therefore instead of making a compilation from their compilations I have scrapped my first selection and decided upon a different direction and selection process. I am adopting a different position which helps address the imbalance of male to female artists and contributors. I have selected a number of songs and their lyrics based on a socio-political narrative that begins with a young girl being born in the then thriving Welsh mining Valleys of South Wales. The story is briefly narrated and delivered from a subjective standpoint regarding both the selection choice and content. I am using the song lyrics and performers to weave the greater part of the stories narrative which sometimes contain factual snippets of information about the artist and the song. The tracks in chronological order narrates the wider story as we read between the lines…

The young girl in the thriving mining valleys of South Wales plays with dolls and prams and all is pink and rosey with her world. At a very early age it is indoctrinated into her that when she is older, much older, she will have many many children of her own as illustrated in my first song section MICHELLE SHOCKED – ‘WHEN I GROW UP’ and the lyrics “…Then I think I’m gonna marry myself that old man… We’re gonna have a hundred and twenty babies… A hundred and five ten fifteen twenty babies…” the lyrics also support the beauty through a childs eyes of the natural aging process untouched by the media and industry-forced ideals of forever trying to hold onto female youth with the song beginning “When I grow up I want to be an old woman, an old, an old, an old, an old, an old, an old, an old, an old woman.”

The town where our female is growing up is an industrious mining valley. It consists of a colourful vibrant community complete with union meeting houses; churches; chapels; shops; bars; snooker halls; cafes and clubs – all spaces for families and friends to interact and socialise. Full of activity the black coal mining valleys shine with the power inherent in the people of the community as within PATTI SMITHS – PEOPLE HAVE THE POWER lyrics “…In the form of the shinning valley…” The Red Flag is the song often sung in union meetings and Welsh male voice choir rehearsals. The nuclear family is a familiar aspect of the valleys demographics running hand in hand with mass employment and and an established industrialised area. It nurtures young and old alike “…people have the power…” the shepherds live in unison with the miners; the towns and villages here establish themselves as a high recruiting area for the armed forces. Within the bubble of a seemingly  smooth running economy everything seemed achievable “…We can turn the earths revolution we have the power, people have the power…’

Growing up and developing into womanhood JANIS IAN – AT SEVENTEEN enforces a strong socio-political comment on adolescent cruelty and teenage angst. It pinpoints how problems cannot be solved by popularity. It further comments on female achievement through looks and the role within the nuclear family set up, suggesting marriage is an easier option for the better looking “… the rich-relation home town queen, marries into what she needs with a guarantee of company and haven for the elderly…” The song was inspired by a newspaper article about a former teenage debutante. The teenager had learned the hard way that being popular did not solve all of her problems.

As Thatcher proceeds to close down the mines and mass unemployment reigns communities become decimated. Options and choices are limited as the nuclear family and social structures begin to fall apart. People begin to move away in order to find gainful employment. As the area falls into a depression both economically and socially our female becomes caught up in it’s tide. Drink and drug abuse starts to infiltrate the now decaying area and employment continues in decline. Along with her peers she knows she has to leave her family and friends in order to make a better life for herself. ALABAMA 3 – PEACE IN THE VALLEYS lyrics illustrate this “…she spends too much time with herself every night just fooling around with her fear. In the morning she mourns the decline of her mind drowning in a bottle of beer. It’s too dangerous just to think about what she might have been if she’d sung for salvation, if she danced upon her dream…” Many of her friends and peers are thrown into confusion and racked with uncertainty as a drug culture pervades. Relationships continue to breakdown due to lack of opportunity and problems incurred by insufficient incomes. The lyricist and frontman of this track is coincidentally a man from the South Wales Valleys.

Her childhood sweetheart is referenced in NANCY SINATRA – BANG, BANG as he leaves her as in the track, maybe unrequited love or untimely death. More sinister implications than simply childhood games can be interpreted in ”Bang bang he shot me down…Bang bang I hit the ground” whether emotional or physical. Needing to leave an unproductive, socially decimated environment the next track places the narrative into a broader world-wide context on current affairs that are affecting the whole of the U.K. with the song lyrics being narrated as if from a TV and about a TV channel  THE B-52s – CHANNEL Z – an anti media song which brings attention to world politics and the spin-offs world wide from the Regan regime in the USA “…Space junk – laser bombs – ozone holes…” secret arms deals to Iran and the like. “… I am livin’ on Channel Z, Getting nothing but static, getting nothing but static. Static in my attic from Channel Z…” Deciding upon a move to a more prosperous town or city the lyric line “…where’s my umbrella…” indicates the transition from one part of the country with high rainfall to another THE JUSTIFIED ANCIENTS OF MU MU (THE JAMs) – IT”S GRIM UP NORTH intimates our female’s move to a Northern city. The song consists of a list of towns and cities in the North England which segues into an orchestral instrumental version of William Blake’s JERUSALEM, in which Blake depicts the coal and cotton mill industries of the Industrial Revolution as a mechanism for the enslavement of millions, possibly a metaphor for what she may have in store. “…Leeds, Northwich, Nantwich, Knutsford, Hull, Sale … Ikley Moor, Sheffield, Manchester, Castleford, Skem, Doncaster, Dewsbury, Hali-fax, Bingley, Bramall, Are all in the North. It’s Grim Up North…”

Finding her feet in a new city our female expresses much of X – RAY SPECS – OH BONDAGE UP YOURS! Is not an exclusively feminist track, Poly Styrene has said that the song also adopts both an anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist stance. The song opens “…Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard – well I think bondage, up yours!…” and settling into life in the bigger city In polarised contrast, seemingly  confident and very self assured DIMITRI FROM PARIS – I AM A VERY STYLISH GIRL portrays how the woman needs constant confirmation from the male  on her appearance. With samples taken from Breakfast at Tiffany’s starring the iconic female Audrey Hepburn and based on a book by Truman Capote. The heroine has moved from a small town to a large city and works in prostitution as a society girl. She frequently asks in the lyrics “…How do I look, How do I look…” to which the male replies “ Very good, I must say I’m amazed…” Now caught up in a controlling and unhealthy relationship SUZANNE VEGA – LUKA deals with domestic violence as the musical genre heightens a metaphorical denial, throwing the listener into a falsehood thinking they are listening to something serene and beautifully mastered. “…If you hear something late at night, Some kind of trouble, some kind of fight, Just don’t ask me what it was…” It is in fact dealing with the dark and devastating aspects of domestic violence. The structure of the song itself a metaphor for victims embarrassed and in denial to family and the public about their domestic abuse “…They only hit you until they cry, After that you don’t ask why, You just don’t argue anymore, You just don’t argue anymore, You just don’t argue anymore…” BILLIE HOLIDAY – AIN’T NOBODIES BUSINESS further endorses the taboo surrounding domestic violence “…But I’d rather my man would hit me, Than follow him to jump up and quit me, Ain’t nobody’s business if I do, I swear I won’t call no copper, If I’m beat up by my papa, Ain’t nobody’s business if I do, Nobody’s business… Ain’t nobodies business…”

Having started a family and living within a domestically abusive relationship our female’s feelings begin to wane considerably towards her partner. Unprotected by her nuclear family she begins to compare the abusive outbursts in her partner to that of inadequacy and weakness, loosing any sense of emotion and feelings she held for him. Having started a family she wants to complete it “… All that she wants is another baby, She’s gone tomorrow boy…” ACE OF BASE – ALL THAT SHE WANTS or maybe she decides that through the loneliness suffered from within her abusive relationship she wants a child and takes a turn as the female predator away from the traditional values of the male within this role “…She leads a lonely life,  She leads a lonely life – When she woke up late in the morning, Light and the day had just begun, She opened up her eyes and thought, O’ what a morning … She’s going to get you…” Now bringing up her family away from the community where she grew up with shared principles and morals she begins to reflect on her life and her situation THE MANIC STREET PREACHERS – A DESIGN FOR LIFE opens with the line “…Libraries gave us power…” was inspired by the words above the entrance to the former Pillgwenlly Library in South Wales followed by “…then work came and made us free…” referencing the slogan ‘Arbeit macht Frei’ that featured above the gates of most of the Nazi concentration camps. It explores themes of class conflict and working class identity and solidarity. “I wish I had a bottle, Right here in my pretty face to wear the scars, to show from where I came, we don’t talk about love, we only want to get drunk, And we are not allowed to spend, As we are told that this is the end, A design for life…” It is also indicative of a working class relationship suffering under Thatcher’s Government. Alcohol is cheap keeping the masses quiet not facing the problems or invoking any rebellion just blotting out the slow decline of what was once a vibrant life and economy, putting up with the situation. As it continued to spread country wide.

CHUMBAWUMBA  – TUBTHUMPING comes from a radical context, quoting a UK anti-road protester, Paris 1968 graffiti, details about the famous McLibel case and the short story “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”. With artistic licence our female likens it to her life in the North “ Pissing the night away, Pissing the night away – He takes a whiskey drink, he drinks a vodka drink…” along with the strength and positivity that comes from the lyrics “…I get knocked down but I get up again, You’re never gonna keep me down…” PENETRATION – DON’T DICTATE soon becomes her mental anthem “…Penetrating voices going through my head, I haven’t listened to a thing they said …” followed by “…It’s my choice I’m taking a chance yeah, Don’t dictate, Don’t dictate, Don’t dictate…” EDIE BRICKELL & THE NEW BOHEMIANS starts to vocally exert opinions in a questioning and non arrogant way as she tries to make sense of constantly being put down and questions the person she is in dialogue with ,questioning if they are genuine or a fraud “…What I am is what I am, Are you what you are or what?…”

No longer able to cope with the injuries, from both mental and physical abuse ALABAMA 3 – WOKE UP THIS MORNING is the penultimate track on our female’s journey. It is best known from the American series The Sopranos. Written by Alabama 3’s South Wales front man Rob Spragg along with Jake Black after hearing about murder case of Sara Thornton, who stabbed her husband after 20 years of abuse, mistreatment and neglect, the lyrics“…Woke up this mornin’, Got yourself a gun, Mama always said you’d be the chosen one, She said, ‘You’re one in a million, You got to burn to shine’ That you were born under a bad sign, With a blue moon in your eyes (yeah)…” “…Woke up this mornin’, And-a all that love had gone, Your papa never told you, About right and wrong…” Alone in a prison cell in the following months following the murder of her abusive partner due to her actions she started coming to terms with the situation showing great remorse. Reflecting and concluding on her life journey to date, taking time out only to question the inner workings of her I-Pod shuffle which frequently would only play PEACHES & JOAN JETT- I DON’T GIVE A FUCK “…You know, I wanna tell you something, I wanna tell you something, You know what? I don’t give a damn about my reputation, I don’t give a fuck, I don’t give a fuck, I don’t give a fuck, I don’t give a fuck, I don’t give a fuck…”

CD Photograph © Tracey Moberly

of André Eugene Voodoo sculpture – Haiti

Like many contributors to Agit Disco I’ve been through a few political, protest and “folk” music scenes – including punk, post-punk and various forms of electronic/dance genres[i]. Whilst all that has become increasingly well documented over the last decade, I have found myself drawn to one of the more obscure strands of reggae.

English reggae has generally been seen as the poor cousin to “authentic” material produced in Jamaica, even by people living here. Whilst the music has been made in England since the 1960s, UK reggae really came into its own from the late seventies onwards.

As a white bloke who was a snotty infant and teenager in Hertfordshire when these records were made, I was hardly the intended target audience. Nevertheless, I think they are incredibly important – as both documents of social history during turbulent times, and also as cultural artefacts which lay the foundations for the UK urban music which was to follow.

Much of the material included on this mix was released on small record labels, often as an afterthought to the more important business of chatting live on soundsystems.

I found most of these records ridiculously cheap, gathering dust in bargain bins. It has been great to see them become more appreciated in recent years, although ironically the rise in prices in the second hand market is hindering my research somewhat.

People who wish to delve further are strongly recommended to seek out the recent “UK Bubblers” retrospective, the Saxon Soundsystem “Coughing Up Fire” live recording (both released by Greensleeves) and the excellent “An England Story” compilation put together by London dancehall crew Heatwave and released by Soul Jazz Records.

I make no apologies for including tunes in my selection with lyrics that deal with the problems of everyday existence rather than weightier issues like war. Whilst both have their part to play, “political music” is often overburdened with the global and universal at the expense of the local and specific, in my humble opinion.

On that note, I use the word “UK” here when I really mean “England”. I also use “England” when I really mean “London, and occasionally Birmingham” and of course I am not talking about the districts of Hampstead or Solihull when I mention those two cities.

1. X/O/Dus – English Black Boys (Factory Records, 1980)

2. Audrey – English Girl (Ariwa, 1982)

These tunes feature the children of the “Windrush Generation” wrestling with the idea of identity. Many black kids of the time felt pretty alienated – not feeling Jamaican like their parents, or “properly” English like their white school friends.

Reggae’s lyrics generally promoted Rastafari, black consciousness and a return to Africa. It is easy to see why this provided answers to a lot of questions about identity and displacement. But the situation was far from being simple, as these songs show.

X/O/Dus were a band from Manchester, the only reggae act I’m aware of releasing a record on Factory, a label most famous for Joy Division, New Order and the Happy Mondays[ii]. Whilst the group’s name pays homage to the Bob Marley tune exhorting the march to Zion, this track reminds us that repatriation was also being bandied about by white supremacists such as National Front[iii] boss Martin Webster:

“Martin Webster, he talks about repatriation
Margaret Thatcher about the population.
They try to say that we cause the problem (oh no we don’t)
[…] Now they talk about repatriation,
to make this country an all-English white nation.
What are they are going to do with us?”

Audrey’s tune deals with the harsh reality of immigration: Jamaicans being encouraged to come to the UK as cheap labour and then being blamed by racists for unemployment and crime.

3. Lion Youth – Three Million On The Dole (Virgo Stomach, 1982)

4. Steel Pulse – Handsworth Revolution (Island, 1978)

Roots reggae has always documented “sufferation”, albeit usually in the context of Kingston ghettos. Lion Youth focuses sharply on the unemployment statistics in the UK.

Steel Pulse were a band from the Handsworth district of Birmingham, who were closely allied to Rock Against Racism. Their tune suggests an overcoming of the poverty and inequality in the area through solidarity and revolt.

The track proved to be prophetic – the people of Handsworth rioted in both 1981 and 1985 in response to heavy handed policing.

5. Maxi Priest – Love In The Ghetto (Level Vibes, 1984)

6. Papa Levi – In A Mi Yard (Level Vibes, 1984)

Maxi Priest is best known for his commercially successful lovers rock output, but he began his career chatting on South London’s legendary Saxon soundsystem[iv]. This track is a great slice of UK roots.

Saxon is best known for unleashing a wave of brilliant MCs in the mid eighties. This period saw an explosion of young men (and the occasional woman) taking up the microphone in UK dancehalls and talking explicitly about their lives as black people in England rather than aping the styles they heard on soundsystem cassettes imported from Jamaica.

Saxon MC Peter King popularised the “fast chat” style in which intricate lyrics were spat out at a rate at least twice the speed of the backing track. This was also taken up by his colleagues and rivals.

Phillip (aka Papa) Levi was one of Saxon’s star MCs, a much feared adversary in soundclashes. His “Mi God Mi King” is the first actual vinyl single to emerge from this UK fast chat MC scene, proving so popular that it leapt to number one in the reggae charts in the UK, and crucially also in Jamaica.[v]

“In A Mi Yard” is a stream of consciousness in which Levi lets loose a slew of cultural signifiers from South West London over the same riddim as the Maxi Priest track:

“The time it just past 4:20

A newsflash come pon me Phillips TV

Concerning the ghetto and the community

It seem the council they take a big liberty

Them call nuff man with machinery

Fi tear down the frontline vicinity

But not a word was said to the community

So evening come, the youth get angry

Start throw firebomb in a ‘ole property

The IRU not the SPG,

The dread fi an go riot in a different stylee

Say when me a chat it ah no damn fuckry

The lyric could a turn make a documentary

The ATV or a BBC

You never find reporter man a fast like me.

Me could a chat show like Russell Harty….”

7. Papa Benjie – Fare Dodger (Fashion, 1985)

8. Laurel and Hardy – Video Traffickin’ (Upright, 1983)

There are many small ways in which working class people fight back against austerity. Benjie tells the story of losing his job at London Transport, then wreaking revenge and making his dole money go further by bunking the tube and busses. It includes some practical tips for free travel, many of which are no longer workable in the age of the Oyster Card.

Laurel and Hardy are often dismissed by the cognoscenti for being lightweight “variety show” MCs, but I’m still rather partial to them. “Video Traffickin’” is from their EMI-allied album, and sees them wrestling with the thorny issue of intellectual property rights. Well, sort of:

“Video, this a video traffickin’

Because a man we’re waiting

While the pirates duplicatin’

In America they thought they had tight security

So when them released ‘Superman 3′

Two hours later me and me friend go and see

Pirate copy down a Oxford Street”

Unfortunately the theme isn’t developed all that much. The lyrics deviate quickly into tales of TV detector vans nicking people who haven’t paid their TV Licence, and unusually large sections of the track are left lyric-free. It still brings a smile to my face, though. And I do wonder if EMI in 2010 would release songs which described copyright violation with such enthusiasm.

9. Macka B – Bean and Egg (Ariwa, 1986)

10. Pato Banton – Gwarn (Ariwa, 1985)

This pair of tunes bring us back to the theme of identity which began the mix, and also to Birmingham – the UK’s second reggae capital – where both vocalists grew up.

Macka B describes the plight a friend who is forced to subsist on a diet of bean and egg sandwiches after getting married to a white girl. Macka comes to the rescue with a righteous Caribbean meal and some excellent fast chat rhyming dietary instruction:

“Seckle bean and egg eaters ‘cos I know what you’re thinking

Who’s Macka B to say what or what not we should be eating

Well me I’ll tell you one thing, me a just a give a warning

Healthy food means healthy body, healthy mind and healthy thinking

Vary up your eating and not eat too much of one thing

Too much egg gives you cholesterol your heart it starts attacking

Too much bean fill up your belly with wind, all night you will be wind-ing

When people come to your yard at night the whole place will be stinking

Take time and make good food, the rewards you will be reaping

Fast food will stop your hunger but it will not keep you going

Nuff fruit and veg – ask any doctor – helps with longer living

I got to dun this lyric now ‘cos my belly is rumbling

I could smell my rice and peas just waiting in the kitchen

But before I done I would like to tell you something

Three shredded wheat is easy – have you tried three big fat dumpling?”

Pato Banton has lent his voice to Top 40 hits by Sting and UB40. Gwarn concerns patois and his Mum’s support from him making a living as a reggae artist, amongst a number of other themes.

11. Leslie Lyrics – Pull Back Your Truncheon (UK Bubblers, 1985)

12. Ranking Ann – Kill The Police Bill (GLC, 1984)

13. Raymond Naptali – On My Way (Fatman)

It isn’t possible to write about black people’s lives in the UK in the eighties without discussing the police. There are many records from the era which describe interactions with the forces of law and order. Smiley Culture’s “Police Officer” even crossed over into the national Top 40, ensuring he got on Top Of The Pops to tell his story, (less significantly, this was also my first experience of UK dancehall MC-ing…)

Lez Lyrix is now also known as Dr William Henry, author of “What The Deejay Said: A Critique From The Street!” – the first book to adequately deal with UK dancehall culture in the 1980s[vi]. His track here, and Naptali’s, are concerned with police stop and search incidents. Both also mention them being asked to sign statements not written by them.

Lord Scarman’s report after the 1981 Brixton riots recommended the repealing of the notorious “Sus Laws” that allowed the police to stop and search anyone they didn’t like the look of (i.e. black people). But the continuing currency of stop and search anecdotes in dancehall music suggests that this may not have made any immediate difference.

Then the 1983 Police Bill proposed a whole swathe of new powers and met with some resistance in a campaign which included Ranking Ann’s tune – released by the Greater London Council’s Police Committee Support Unit no less[vii].

14. Lorna Gee – Three Week Gone (Ariwa, 1985)

Lorna tells a great story in interviews about being really nervous before her first recording session, which was to take place at Mad Professor’s Ariwa studios. Apparently when she confessed her reservations to dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, he asked her what had been going on in her life. Lorna then related her tale of woe with the dole office, and Linton replied that this was more than enough material for a record. As it proved to be!

15. Horseman – Horsemove (Raiders, 1985)
16. Daddy Colonel – Take A Tip From Me (UK Bubblers, 1985)

After a torrent of tunes about police brutality, alienation, terrible food, unemployment and general badness, it’s high time to let off some steam at the bookie’s and race track, I think…

17. Tippa Irie – Complain Neighbour (UK Bubblers, 1985)

…or of course by dancing the night away.

Tippa Irie was another Saxon stalwart, who almost rivalled Smiley Culture for chart success with his top 40 hit “Hello Darling”[viii].  This ASBO-anthem deals with the murky underside of bass culture.

On the one hand blues parties, raves etc are an authentic expression of the culture of the oppressed. On the other it’s a right old pain in the arse if your walls are shaking from someone else’s bassline late at night and you have to be at work in a few hours.[ix]

Whatever the ins and outs, this is expertly delivered and features a nice glimpse of working class distaste for “high culture”:

“Could you come round right away please, Mr Officer?
Got a complaint to make about my neighbour
It’s the tenth time this week, I know! It don’t matter
Cos this reggie what they play is worser than opera”

18. Demon Rocka – Hard Drugs (Unity, 1988)

Having said that, not all incarnations of bass culture have been uniformly well received by the reggae fraternity[x]. Demon Rocka tells us about his experience of attending an acid house party. He is not impressed by the drugs and unrighteous behaviour on show.

Which leads us to another story…

John Eden

[ii] http://www.cerysmaticfactory.info/x-o-dus_history_in_cuttings.html

[iii] “UK Reggae and the National Front” http://www.uncarved.org/blog/2008/09/smash-the-national-front-part-two/

[iv] “Why You Are Wrong About Maxi Priest” http://www.uncarved.org/blog/2005/06/why-you-are-wrong-about-maxi-priest/

[v] “The Papa Levi Story Part One” http://www.uncarved.org/blog/2005/07/papa-levi-1/

[vi] “Handling Things Lyrically” – interview with Lez Lyrix in Woofah magazine issue 1, 2007.

[vii] “Police in ‘demanding more powers’ shocker” http://www.uncarved.org/blog/2008/06/police-in-demanding-more-powers-shocker/

[viii] “Top Notch Tippa” – interview with Tippa Iria in Woofah magazine issue 2, 2008.

[ix] “Shaking The Foundations: Reggae soundsystem meets ‘Big Ben British values’ downtown”    forthcoming in issue 11 of Datacide magazine

[x] “London Acid City: When the two 8s clash” http://www.uncarved.org/blog/2004/06/88clash/

1. Il partigiano John – Africa Unite (1995) from ‘Materiale Resistente’
The title of the album refers both to resistance to materiality and also the Italian Resistance of WW2. The song is John the Partisan or Freedom Fighter. It is also the title of a novel by Beppe Fenoglio. Evokes the new resistance against Berlusconi and the new right which started in the early Nineties.

2. Germi – Afterhours (1995) from ‘Germi’
A more recent song of protest. About the ‘infection’ of the righteous thought of the West. – The just wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s a strong indictment of the attitude of Western establishment culture. The music reflects this rage in a punk style. (punk tended to take off in Italy in the Eighties with groups like the CCCP)

3. Male Di Miele – Afterhours (1997) from ‘Hai Paura Del Buio’
This is about the contrasting morality of the people who think freely and those who follow a ‘herd instinct’. Conforming to authority. The song title can be translated literally as ‘honey ache’. One line goes “its not sweet to be unique”.
“You will have an infinite possibility of conformism and an infinite possibility of rebellion” Pasolini

4. Carizzi r’amuri – Agricantus (1996) from ‘Tuareg’
Sung in Sicilian. Agricantus are an ‘ethnic’ group interested in different sounds from around the world but go back to their Sicilian roots. Sicily was inhabited by Greeks, Romans, Normans, Arabs ….. All these layers of civilisations can be seen in the landscape of Sicily and A try to reflect this in their music.

5. Elettrochoc (Blu Vertigo) – Antonella Ruggiero (1997) from ‘Registrazioni Moderne’
Its about the desire for travelling, seeing different things, changing your perception. A kind of light hearted upbeat song. Not of escapism – more about exploring different roles, in gender, age, . Antonella is a quite charismatic singer I could compare to Annie Lennox.

6. Una Storia Italiana – Banda Bassotti (2002) from ‘L’altra Faccia dell’Impero’
Banda Bassotti is a band of famous Disney characters – of burglars.
This is a ska song that is about the other face of The Empire. One the one hand our Western society shows tolerance and on the other repression. The difference between what is preached and what actually goes on is huge.
Its about the two faced attitude of any government!

7. Arriva Lo Ye-Ye’ – Baustelle (2003) from ‘La Moda Del Lento’
I like this song because it mocks the Italian concern with being dressed well, acting well, all about appearance. Everything is fine, let’s have fun with no second thought. The song is surreal with image of superficiality of mini skirts, and she loves you Yeah Yeah music. The seduction of a very shallow society.

8. L’Eretico – Bluvertigo (1995) from ‘Acidi E Basi’
The Heretic… Italy is a Catholic country and its ethics are connected to the Catholic credo. This is about someone who doesn’t believe in god.
Solo perchè non mi professo detentore di chissà quale verità
Ma non per questo sono vuoto o privo di morale
Ho principi molto saldi, non prego per dolore

Only because I don’t teach whatever truth
That doesn’t mean I am shallow or without morals
I’m a man of principles, I don’t pray out of grief.

9. Creuza de mä – Fabrizio De André (1984) from ‘Creuza de ma’
Genoese or more precisely Ligurian for a little cobbled street which leads down to the sea. This song was written and performed by arguably Italy’s most important songwriter Fabrizio De André who died in 1998. De André was an anarchist interested in folklore and the lives of the poor. Performed with traditional Genoese instruments, in the background are the voices of real fishermen at the market. I love it because it depicts a part of Italy that has almost gone – not in a patronising way but with poetry.

10. La Cura – Franco Battiato (1996)
Franco Battiato is a songwriter and composer with a strong experimental streak. He uses a lot of electronic music. La Cura is ‘care’ its about a lover who tells the loved one that he will protect her from everything, even old age! She will be preserved as beautiful and lovely as she is now.
Its part of my personal story – I loved Battiato. Even if his songs are not political in a way they are, caring for others, taking responsibility. Love is a changing agent.

11. Pop Porno – Il Genio (2008)
A cheeky song about playing with a stereotype – a man staying up till late watching porn.

12. Il Solitario – Marlene Kuntz (2005) from ‘Bianco Sporco’
Solitario is a song about disengagement – Solitario means the lonely one. He stands apart and doesn’t intervene, he doesn’t contribute actively to the social life. He’s critical but never constructive.
This has been the typical attitude of the left wing in Italy. It’s because of the left wing coalition that B came to power. They talk a lot but when it comes to intervening with something actively different they don’t, because the don’t have the courage.

13. I Soldi Sono Finiti – Ministri (2006) from ‘I Soldi Sono Finiti’
The title translates ‘money has run out’ and it’s about the moral bankruptcy of Italy.
Its not about the economic situation but more about the way we spend money and we use it and how it effects us in moral and ethical terms.

14. Bella ciao – Modena City Ramblers (1995) from ‘Materiale Resistente’
A famous partisan song from WW2 and this is an adaptation of it. Modena is a small town near Bologna that has an exciting music scene as well as one of the most famous of Italian churches. The band is influenced by traditional Irish music and uses this sound to make the song contemporary. Now we need another kind of resistance to the right that is cultural as well as political.

15. Siamo i ribelli della montagna / Ustmamò – Ustmamo (1995) from ‘Materiale Resistente’
Another partisan song this time interpreted by Ustmamò. It’s revisiting the narrative of the Resistance – on the one hand as liberators and on the other as the criminals.
Italy went through a civil war during the War. Some supported Mussolini and others supported the partisans. This divide is still present in contemporary Italian society.

16. Nella stanza – 24 Grana (2003) from Underpop
This is a 48 second instrumental interlude.

17. Curre curre guagliò – 99 Posse (1991) from Curre curre guagliò
The title is Neapolitan and means ‘run boy run’. The 99 Posse are a group formed in the notorious social centre Officina99 in Naples. They talk about unemployment, organised crime and corruption. It is one of the first Italian rap groups from the early Nineties to become famous. Naples has always been a very exciting and edgy city in the way the Glasgow is. It is also very multi-cultural but it’s a very different kind of multi-culturalism to say London. It reminds me of places like Santiago or Havana. Chaotic but incredibly vibrant.

Luca Paci 2010
http://rizomatic.wordpress.com/

UK Decay – For my Country (1980)

I grew up in Luton, where UK Decay were the best of the first wave punk bands. ‘For My Country’ is an anti-war song clearly influenced by the First World War poets (Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est in particular). I was at school and getting involved in politics for the first time, helping to set up Luton Peace Campaign which became the local branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, resurgent in the face of plans to locate Cruise nuclear missiles in Britain.

Karma Sutra – Wake the Red King (1985)

In the mid-1980s I was very involved in the anarcho-punk scene in Luton. Political songs were ten a penny in this milieu, but I guess more significantly the singers (mostly) really meant it – there was no real separation between ‘entertainers’ and ‘activists’. The people going to gigs, forming bands, doing zines, were the same people going hunt sabbing and on Stop the City. At that time I seemed to spend large parts of my life in the back of a van, between gigs, demos and animal rights actions.

The main local band in this scene was Karma Sutra. For a little while I took my Wasp synthesiser down to their practices but it didn’t really work out, so I never played with them live. However, this demo tape version of their track Wake the Red King has my rumbling synth tone at the beginning. The title refers to Alice in Wonderland, I can’t make out all the lyrics but it sounds like the kind of situationist-influenced diatribe they specialised in – they later released an album, Daydreams of a Production Line Worker.

No Defences – Keep Running (1985)

When people think about anarcho-punk they often have in mind lots of identikit sub-Crass/Conflict thrash punk bands. There was plenty of that – and some of it was really good – but there was also quite a lot of musical diversity, from more melodic humourists like Blyth Power to mutant funksters like Slave Dance. One of the most interesting bands on the whole scene were No Defences, who as far as I know never released a record apart from a track on a compilation album. They were mesmerising live, delivering monotone litanies of abuse and rage over sophisticated time signatures. I saw them at squat gigs in London (including at the Ambulance Station, Old Kent Road), and they came to Luton to play at a benefit gig we put on at Luton Library Theatre, also featuring Chumbawamba. This track was recorded that night (30.5.1985). – ‘we don’t live anywhere, no sense of being in the world…’

Bikini Kill – Rebel Girl (1993)

I was lucky enough to see some of the great post-punk women-led bands live, including The Slits, The Raincoats, Essential Logic, Au Pairs and the Delta 5. The feminism and sexual politics of that time have had a life long influence on me. Ten years later, these bands started getting their critical dues with the birth of the Riot Grrrl and Queercore scenes. I used to go and see my late friend Katy Watson (of Shocking Pink and Bad Attitude feminist zines) DJing at London queercore clubs including Up to the Elbow and Sick of it All. Bikini Kill were the key US Riot Grrrl band: ‘when she talks I hear the revolution…’.

Chumbawamba – Fitzwilliam (1985)

I was living in Kent when the 1984-5 miners strike started and helped set up a Miners Support Group linked to strikers at the three local pits (now all closed). I was also in Ramsgate in 1985 on the day the Kent miners voted to return to work, ending the strike. It was an intense year for me of pickets, demonstrations, collections and many, many arguments. Chumbawamba played an important role in swinging the anarcho-punk scene behind the strike – initially some people had the ludicrous line of ‘why should I support meat eating men working in an environmentally unsound industry?’. Fitzwilliam describes the end of the strike in a Yorkshire mining village – ‘it won’t be the same in Fitzwilliam again…’ This song was released on ‘Dig This – A Tribute to the Great Strike’. Some years later, I was involved in the Poll Tax Prisoners Support Group (Trafalgar Square Defendants Campaign) and we threw a party at our Brixton flat for a couple of people acquitted of charges relating to the 1990 poll tax riot – one of them an ex-miner from that part of Yorkshire.

Hot Ash – Bloody Sunday – This is a Rebel Song (1991)

I went to Derry in 1992 and took part in the demonstration to mark the 20th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when 13 people were killed by British troops. This song, from the 1991 Hot Ash album Who Fears to Speak, is about that event. At the start of this track there is a recording of the Jim O’Neill/Robert Allsopp Memorial Flute Band from New Lodge Road in Belfast. I was involved in the Troops Out Movement and prisoner support at this time and went on lots of Irish marches in London and Belfast. There were always flute bands on the march, giving rise to one of my pet theories (which may have no basis whatsoever) that there is a connection between the popularity of bass drum-led republican and loyalist flute bands in N.Ireland and Scotland and the popularity of bass drum-led variants of electronic dance music in these places (e.g happy hardcore and gabber in the late 1990s).

Planxty – Arthur McBride (1973)

Around this time I started to learn to play the mandolin, and began taking part in music sessions in pubs playing mainly Irish and some Scottish tunes. This was a new kind of collective music making for me, more fluid and inclusive than a band format, with less of a boundary between performers and audience – but with each session having its own unwritten rules of operation. The first song I sang on my own, at a party near Elephant and Castle, was the anti-recruiting song Arthur McBride. I learnt it from the version recorded by Planxty on their 1973 debut album.

Half a Person – The Last of England (2006)

… from here it was a step to writing my own songs. This is a demo version of a little anti-nationalist ditty I have performed a few times, most recently in my ‘Half a Person’ guise at a benefit earlier this year for the Visteon workers at Rampart Social Centre.

McCarthy – The Procession of Popular Capitalism (1987)

I enjoyed the indie-pop jingly jangly guitar scene in the second half of the 1980s and had some great nights at the Camden Falcon, a music pub at its heart. There was little in the way of explicit politics, although the cultivation of a ‘twee’ subjectivity also represented a refusal of ‘adult’ roles of worker/housewife/consumer and (for boys) of macho posturing. Bands like Talulah Gosh were later cited as an influence on the Riot Grrrl scene. McCarthy had a similar sound combined with the much more overtly political lyrics of Malcolm Eden. This song is a typically Brechtian tale of penniless pickpockets and wealthy ‘Captains of Industry’, the latter singing ‘This is your country too! Join our procession, that’s marching onwards to war’.

Joe Smooth – Promised Land (1987)

In the early 1990s I started going to squat raves and then to a whole range of techno and house clubs. This turned my conception of music and politics upside down, along with other aspects of my life. As a result I have come to see the political significance of a musical event as arising from the relations between people rather than the content of a song or performance. So, for instance, a crowd dancing together in a field to a commercial pop record might be more subversive than an audience in a concert hall listening to socialist songs. Dancefloors and festivals can be important for the constitution of communities and political subjects, almost regardless of the soundtrack.

Promised Land is a Chicago house classic that combines this affirmation of community with a hope for a better world, articulated in the religious language frequently used in Black American music: ‘Brothers, Sisters, One Day we will be free. From Fighting, Violence, People Crying in the Streets’.

Atmosfear – Dancing in Outer Space (1979)

I was involved in the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (AAA) from 1995 to 2000. My node of the network was Disconaut AAA, and I was particularly interested in the way space had been used as a speculative playground in jazz, disco and funk, a zone into which could be projected utopian visions of life beyond gravi-capital, racism and poverty (think Sun Ra’s Space is the Place or George Clinton’s Mothership mythos). Atmosfear’s Dancing in Outer Space is a lesser known UK disco/jazz funk classic – this is a Master at Work remix of the track.

Roteraketen – Here to Go (1999)

AAA put out a Rave In Space compilation, and I contributed to this track on it with Jason Skeet (DJ Aphasic). Actually my contribution was mainly supplying the sample and the name. Rote Raketen (red rockets) was the name of a communist cabaret troupe in 1920s Germany. The sample is from Yuri Gagarin’s first space flight. I have an ambivalent attitude to the US and Soviet space programmes, undoubtedly rooted in Cold War industrial militarism, but also representing a period of optimism in the possibility of the continual expansion of human subjectivity. One day community-based spaced exploration will be a reality!

Metatron – Men Who Hate the Law (1993)

I was involved with various projects at the 121 Centre in Brixton in the 1990s, and regularly attended the Dead by Dawn nights in the basement playing some of the hardest techno and breakcore to be heard anywhere. Again it was the crowd, the conversations and the antagonistic sonic attitude that constituted the music’s political dimension rather than any lyrical content. Praxis records was the driving force behind the night, this track is from Christoph Fringelli’s Metatron EP, Speed and Politics.

Lochi – London Acid City (1996)

There was a cycle of struggles in the 1990s UK that encompassed the anti-road movement (Twyford Down, Claremont Road, Newbury…), squat parties and Reclaim the Streets. The soundtrack was often a particular variant of hard trance/acid techno associated with the Liberator DJs and Stay Up Forever records. This track was the scene’s ultimate anthem, I believe it was the first record played on the famous Reclaim the Streets party on the M41 motorway in London in 1996. I took part in the party and later was involved in the RTS street party in Brixton in 1998.

Galliano – Travels the Road, Junglist Dub MIx (1994)

The various radical movements of the early 1990s coalesced in the campaign against the government’s Criminal Justice Act in 1994, which brought in new police powers to deal with protests and raves. The high point was a huge demonstration/party/riot in London’s Hyde Park, which I documented in a Practical History pamphlet at the time, ‘The Battle for Hyde Park: Radicals, Ruffians and Ravers, 1855-1994’. This track is from an anti-CJA compilation album called Taking Liberties.

Roy Rankin & Raymond Naptali – New Cross Fire (1981)

In the last few years I have been doing a lot of research into the radical history of South East London. This has included helping put on the Lewisham ‘77 series of events commemorating the 30th anniversary of the anti-National Front demonstrations, and marking the wider history of racism and resistance in the area. A key historical event was the New Cross Fire in 1981, in which 13 young people died. This is one of a number of reggae tracks about the fire, demonstrating how sound system culture functioned at the time as a means of alternative commentary on current events.

Afrikan Boy – Lidl (2006)

… today that alternative commentary is still alive in grime. I was involved for a while in No Borders and became very aware of the experience of those living at the sharp end of the regime of immigration raids, detention centres and forced deportations. Afrikan Boy, from Nigeria via Woolwich, gives voice to that experience on this track, as well as shoplifting adventures in Lidl and Asda!

99 Posse – Salario Garantito (1992)

I have been influenced a lot over the years by radical ideas and practice from Italy and have visited a few times, most recently earlier this year when I took part in the Electrode festival at the Forte Prenestino social centre in Rome. I first visited in the early 1990s, when I went to the Parco Lambro festival in Milan and visited Radio Sherwood in Padua. 99 Posse are an Italian reggae band named after the Officina 99 social centre in Naples; the title of this song relates to the autonomist demand for a guaranteed income for all, working and unemployed. It comes from a compilation tape called Senza Rabbia Non Essere Felice (Without anger, no happiness) put out in around 1992 by the Centro di Communicazione Antagonista in Bologna.

The Ballistic Brothers – London Hooligan Soul (1995)

Released in 1995, this is a look back over 20 years by the Junior Boys Own posse. It’s their history rather than mine, but there are several points where it overlaps with my own… house music, Ibiza, ‘old bill cracking miners heads’, ‘The Jam at Wembley’, ‘A poll tax riot going on’.

Neil Transpontine has written on music and politics under various guises for publications including Datacide, Alien Underground, Woofah, Mixmag, Eternity, Head, Trangressions, Practical History and Past Tense. He is largely responsible for the blogs ‘History is Made at Night: the politics of musicking and dancing’ and ‘Transpontine’ (South East London eclectica).

Links:
History is Made at Night: http://history-is-made-at-night.blogspot.com/
Transpontine: http://transpont.blogspot.com/

image cut out from: ‘Electronic Dream Plant Wasp Synthesizer’ by Richard Bartz, Munich aka Makro Freak

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic

Introduction

This selection was put together because I took up the challenge of doing a Sunday morning show on Resonance Fm as part of the weekend long 40th anniversary radio event. It was a mixture of looking back to Scratch Orchestra times and wanting to play political stuff that I had heard more recently. The show playlist is re-edited here to include things I couldn’t play on air and to leave out a couple of items that were not Agit Disco enough to be of interest here.
My shortlist seemed to fall into four themes:
The ‘problem’ of hipsters
Local musics
Music/book cross-overs
and finally how the political effects of music can be independent of the content of lyrics.

The problem of hipsters.

Mark Holborn was an Portsmouth Polytechnic ultra hipster whose partner was Denise Evans, who I went to secondary school with… In brief the idea was that Bob Dylan had been devalued by his commercial success. He wasn’t that committed politically at the end of the day. Richard Farina on the other hand couldn’t sell out because he died when he was young and in searing good form. He also wrote a novel ‘Been Down So Long it seems like up to Me.’ Mark told me about him and I went out and did something untypical of me with my shoestring lifestyle – I bought some American import LPs.

“Richard Farina was born at sea and has been traveling ever since. Of Irish-Cuban parentage, Dick was caught up in the Irish Republican Army’s movement for the liberation of the six counties still under English rule. At the age of 16 he was arrested and at eighteen finally deported from Ireland for his activities. Farina returned to America, attended Cornell, was dismissed after leading a demonstration, acted professionally, married twice, and has been publlished in the establishment press, The Atlantic, Mademoiselle, and the other press, Broadside.
The death of four sunday school children compelled his first song, ‘Birmingham Sunday’, which received wide attention at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival when sung by Joan Baez.” Josh Dunson (from sleeve notes on LP)

So what is the problem with hipsters? It is about lure of elitism with its holier than thou and superior pose. The first mods seemed to manage to be hipsters with an egalitarian message! They were in-the-know but only to spread the word. But hipsterism can also hide the old worlds ideology of the superiority of the supposedly more knowledgeable.

I started the programme with two versions of his first hit song.

track 1. Richard Farina – ‘Birmingham Sunday‘

- first as sung by Joan Baez (a version which brought the song and its author fame) – ( from a CDR) followed by Farina singing the same song from the LP ‘Singer Songwriter Project’ on Elektra 1965
This was a song to commemorate the racist bombing in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four children on Sunday, 15th September, 1963. I was 15 that year and three of the children killed were 14.
Then another another track by Farina which is a great record of a side of America which we didn’t hear about in the early Sixties.

track 2. Richard Farina – ‘House Un-American Blues Activity Dream‘

from the same Elektra LP.
To bring this up-to -date I was thinking of all those bankers that just lost their jobs and, who knows, might fall on hard times.

track 3. Scrapper Blackwell – ‘Life of a Millionaire’

This was really a stand-in for a Sonny Boy Williamson the 2nd track. When I looked it was no longer in my 45s box. (cue the blues…)
Sonny Boy Williamson II – Why is swallowing your harp in a Chertsey pub a political experience for a seventeen year old local white boy? Something about a visceral connection to an already almost mythical past in which oppression was real and expressed. Something also aesthetic about the power of his presence and performance a power I had not seen around me from the people I grew up amongst who were mostly placid. He died soon after returning to the USA in 1965 after the European trip on which I saw him.
“On the folk blues tours, Sonny Boy would be very dignified and laidback. But in the beat club setting, with young, White bands playing on eleven behind him he’d pull out every juke-joint trick he used with the King Biscuit Entertainers and drive the kids nuts.” Cub Koda in All Music Guide to the Blues – 2nd edition (1999) Miller Freeman Books.
Mods were about taking ownership of our identity from the big clothing corporations and the commodity machine. but they were also about being superior than the straights, more in the know. We felt aloof from what we saw as the stupidity of the previous generation, going about their nine to five lives, and selling their souls for commodity comfort.

When I discovered the SBW EP was missing, just before the radio show, I rushed out and bought an LP by the wrong Sonny Boy Williamson – the first one. I didn’t ever get a chance to hear him live because he was murdered… coming back from The Plantation Club in Chicago, at the young age of just 34 – a few months after I was born, .

Local Musics

The local issue is, in my mind, closely related to my experience of self-publishing. The local and self-published is below the treacherous radar of the media. A lot of brilliant music never makes it out of its own area and a small crowd of live audiences, and this is often because it is unashamedly vulgar or political, but also because people don’t recognise its importance and give it support it needs. Clubs like Andy Allan’s EasyCome have an open mic for local acoustic music and can sometimes surprise a visitor with a blaze of raw talent.

track 4. The 1926 Committee – ‘Attitude Problem’. My best example of an unsung local artist hero is Steve Cope. I have a cassette tape of his group ‘The 1926 Committee’ with the title: ‘More of the Same’ (1996). He used to play around Kennington, the area of South London I lived in. and his material would always impress me with its clarity and power. I didn’t play this track on Resonance due to lack of time to cue the tape up… Attitude Problem’ concerns a certain ‘embarassing’ identity problem that often dare not speak its name! Simply being working class! In this song he lists just about every menial job there is and then the chorus says: “…well I thought it was the working class, but it was just me with my attitude problem, I thought it was the working class, but it was only you and me. because there is no working class, so you better get to bed , you’re up early in the morning…”.

track 5. ‘Southeast’ by a young woman rapper called ExCentral Tempest. From the ‘Save the Spike’ CD. which I heard & bought at Spike Island in Peckam in 2008. The Spike was an oasis of sanity and alternative experimentation that was unnecessarily shut down at the end of last year. She rymes about South London in a way that makes me love where I come from, and be aware of where I am in the fresh and powerful way that music is capable of. This resurgent pride is contrary to the slow ebb of self-dignity that comes from an impoverished environment that is amplified in the media images.

Music /book cross-overs

I’ve come across some books with CDs or CDs with booklets, recently. These are often quite odd objects that lose the ‘authority’ of academic books. What I like is how they introduce sound into the literary object. Agit Disco was about verbalising the organic discourse of murmur and gesture that accompanies record playing and track sharing. Something quite outside the literary world and its pretentions. These books for a kind of bridge… They present a informal discursive reference point on the provenance and contexts of music in the course what here amounts to histories of aspects of Black music.

I dedicated this section to Kennington Park Cricket coach extra-ordinary – Tony Moody – The home-made compilation CD he gave me of ‘Music to Think by’ or ‘reggae music in the key of ‘C’ was a nudge on the way to the Agit disco project.
And whilst we’re on poor old Long suffering Kennington Common a toast to the Rastafarian Temple which once looked out over the community cricket ground but was evicted and demolished in 2007 – “May it rise from the ashes, I can see a red, green and gold temple shimmering through the Plane and Horse Chestnut trees of the common early on hot summer morning – soon come!”

First we have some selections from: Young Gifted and Black: The story of Trojan. by Michael de Koningh and Laurence Cane-Honeysett, Sanctuary Publishing 2003 – which includes a ’12-track CD of rare grooves’

track 6. The Ethiopians ‘Everything Crash’ 1968
“Over a heartbest rythmn produced by Sir JJ Johnson , lead singer Leonard Dillon recounts the strife caused by industrial strikes throughout Kingston in 1968. Everything did indeed crash back then, as he observes, ‘Firemen strike, watermen strike, telephone compay too…”

track 7. Joe the Boss – ‘Skinhead Revolt’ – 1970
“A heavy UK production from Joe Monsano with DJ Dice, The Boss and trombone player Rico Rodriguez combining to great effect. Not a well-known record at the time, but since has become highly saught after and is certainly one of the best ‘made for skinheads’ records.” Now I live in Thornton Heath which was, until his death in 2006, the home of Desmond Dekker, another Skinhead favorite.

track 8. Bob Andy – ‘You Don’t Know’ – 1973 (re-release)
“A chilling observation of the effects of cocaine, incisively written and sung by Bob Andy, who is undoubtedly one of the foremost singer/songwriters ever to emerge from Jamaica.”
At a time when several people close to me have recently suffered serious setbacks in their life due to the odious glamour of cocaine – it rings a bell.

In that period I had found some rock steady records (mainly Giant label) but my full contact with Carribean music only occured at the end of the Seventies when I was introduced to Big Youth’s dub sound by Andy Allan. I can leave Big Youth for another time.

The next CD/book I found was the female rap double CD ‘Fly Girls!’ celebrating 30 years of female rap recordings. A 2009 publication from Soul Jazz Records in Berwick street, Soho, near to my workplace. This compilation and history lesson led me back into my Sixtes/Seventies experiences. These works, and others like them, suffused the period and evoke it for me now.

track 9. Nikki Giovanni ‘Ego Tripping’ CD 1 Trk 5 1971. The white British working class could still learn a thing or two from the Black Pride strategies and contradicting the oppression that tells you that you are inferior.

In 1971 Giovanni was active in the radical Black Arts movement in 2009 she is Professor of English at Virginia Tech.
“The radical grammy nominated poet famously has a tattoo on her body with the words ‘Thug Life’ honouring Tupac Shakur, whom she greatly admired. Her book ‘Love Poems’ (1997) was written in memory of him, and she has stated that she would ‘rather be with the thugs than the people who are complaining about them“.p.11

track 10. Sarah Webster Fabio ‘Glimpses’ CD 2 trk 8 1972.
“Sarah Webster Fabio was a poet, educator and leading figure and pioneer in the Black Studies and Black Arts movements” After bringing up five children she taught creative writing at Merrit College in Oakland from 1965 when it was a ‘hot-bed for the emerging black power movement’. “‘Glimpses’ is a linguistical history lesson inthe African diaspora. The minimal naive punk-like music gives the track an almost proto punk/funk sound.” p.7 Fabio died in 1979.

Finally the third publication I recently found remaindered is The Message: the story of Sugarhill Records, Sanctuary 2006 – 4 CDs + 48pp book.
In 1979 no-one could forsee the upcoming and massive global success of rap. “Across the world from Paris to Havana, countless people now live their lives according to hip hop.” p.4.
“Hip Hop (9n the 1970s) had been a strictly live culture since its birth and mixtapes of live sessions were the accepted currency as far as physical recordings were concerned.” p.15
“Female MCs had played an important part in many of the key crews in the mid-70s – Liza Lee with the Zulu Nation, Sha Rock, one of the earliest and best female MCs with the Breakout Crew and Funky Four Plus One, Mercedes Ladies and The Sequence, featuring a young Angie B, now recording as Angie Stone.” p.20

track 11. Treacherous Three ‘Yes We Can-Can’ 1982. In the light of Mr Barack Obama freshly augurated I looked at some of the background in music. Obama got the main slogan wrong = it is not “Yes – we – can!” it is yes we can-can! Note “Allen Toussaint’s New Orleans bassline.” p. 35

track 12. Sugarhill All Stars ‘Malcolm X – No Sell Out’ 1983/4 This is the hardcore. All artist to hear this message. Keep it angry! Keep it real! Keep it on the street! Art must get out! No sell out! “Keith LeBlanc’s celebrated electro classic was one of the first to use new sampling technology.” p.37

track 13. Grandemaster & Melle Mel ‘Jesse’ 1984. Maybe not such great music but we have to give it up for this support for Jesse Jackson’s attempt at the Democratic candidacy – How things change! This was “The first solo track for Melle Mel on the label featuring Mirda Rock Reggie Griffin on vocoder.” p.37

Political effects of music outside of lyrics

In the show I referred to another Agit Disco selection and played Duke Ellington’s ‘Money Jungle’ from Agit Disco 8 by Howard Slater. I won’t repeat that here.
My teenage music was really all about Rythmn and Blues. I’ve mentioned Sonny Boy Williamson the second in the riverside pub next to Chertsey Bridge. Another moment of enlightenment was seeing one of the ‘devastating’ first performances by the Cream at the RickyTick club at Windsor. It was the music that ‘blew my mind’, even though they had the poet Pete Brown writing lyrics for some of their early songs.

Any way all that was kind of thrown into the maelstorm of moderneity when I came across the AMM playing in a room at The Place, near Euston. The room was completely blacked-out with no lights on. The roaring lack of conventions, the lack of individuality (compared with the Cream!), the utter improvisational path it took unwrapped the culture that had evolved around me. It was a complete and disorientating immersion that veered from sensitive exchanges to a tidal wave of noise. It seemed as if all my cultural preconceptions were were washed away and I had to listen for the first time with no banal framework but my own morphing and complex sensibility. There was no retreat to comfort or reassurance. It was liberating. It was important it was in the dark. Melody Maker of 18-12-71 described them as having “awesome power”.
We humans are attracted to comfort sometimes at the expense of a richer experience. Central heating over a wood stove and so it goes. Sometimes the harder experience is worth all inconveniences.

It led to me being part of the Scratch Orchestra, as a visual artist. It was wonderful to able to be part of the power of an orchestra, to be at the centre of collective musical expression without feeling my tune-less-ness as a force of exclusion.
I didn’t actually get to play AMM on the Resonance Radio show because I brought the CD case but left the disc in a computer at home! Instead I played park ambiences I had recorded in the late Nineties in Hyde Park. Which ends with the sounds of a 21 gun salute. I won’t include it here as it really stood-in for the AMM tracks I had mislaid in the radio studio but will include here.

track 14 AMM – ‘Ailantus Glanulosa’ 1967
track 15 AMM – ‘In the Realm of Nothing Whatever’ 1967
The original AMM LP which came out in 1967 (same cover graphic of a lorry used on the later CD) was a treasured possession of mine but got ‘borrowed’ in the St Agnes Place era (please return along with my Big Youth album). The CD reissue on ReR Megacorp and distributed by Chris Cutler’s Re Records in Thornton Heath (where I live). Chris has recently been playing with Daevid Allen which segues into my final selection. The CD also contains a booklet with a fascinating text by Eddie Prevost in which he responds to the aphorisms on the back of the original LP (First published in ReRecords Quarterly magazine Vol 2 No 2 November 1988)
On the critics he says “The driving force of (their) ideology is not (as one ought to expect) ‘perfection’ but measurement. The measurable qualities of AMMMusic lead for example to erroneous and simplistic assumptions about a reduction of measurable standards and a drive towards musical (read technical) virtuosity. The ability to make one simple sound have a devastating aural and emotional impact is undervalued (attacked) because ‘anyone could’ (in theory) do it. Thus it undervalues expertise.” p.16 (no actual page numbers shown).
” …there is a sense of revulsion confronted with empty excesses of inflated technique – especially from musicians who are so inescapably entrenched in the cash nexus. To make the kind of music that AMM valued ans wished to participate in made technique potentially a hindrance. Whereas attention, awareness and sensitivity were the real means and maybe the real ends of making music.” p. 13
“AMM was a means of heightened awareness. The sounds and combinations of sounds we produced generated a physical, almost tactile, sense of being at the point of creation. Part of this heightened awareness was expressed as being simply in terms of enquiry.” p. 11

track 16 Daevid Allen – ‘The Switch Doctor’ (Broadcast by BBC 1967 although it was commissioned by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and made in 1965) – 28.38 mins It was reissued in 2004 by an unauthorised Russian label on a compilation CD called: ‘The Death of Rock and Other Entrances’.
At about the same time I heard AMM I was staying with my Grandparents who had just retired to a bungalow in Bramcote, Nottingham, where my mum grew up. This was probably the first (and only!) time I had stayed with them without my parents. They went to bed early as they were accustomed to do. Looking for something to do I put on their giant valve radio and tuned it in to Radio Three. By chance a sound collage by Daevid Allen was announced…. The Switch Doctor. This was a revelation. A whole piece made with sound samples and sound manipulations. Its effect was heightened by the contrast with the environment I was it. The silent cottage with my living history sleeping their old clock chiming the hours. The old fashioned smells and colours and fabrics and objects. I was taken into a utopia of sound displacement that seemed to embody the promise of the cut-up counter culture. Allen had in fact performed with William Burroughs in Paris c 1963.

Thanks you Ed Baxter, Carole Chant, and engineer Sarah at Resonance Fm 104.4
This CDR image was taken from a ride on the steam fair in Battersea Park.

I’m including it because I want to draw attention to the label as much as anything. Topic are a really interesting British label in that they essentially grew out of a Socialist theatre company and the Workers Music Association. They were set up to educate people in communist/socialist thinking through music and performance and draw attention to British urban (as oppose to rural) folk music history. Working class balladeers and historians ran the label and it and went on to spearhead the folk music revival that took place in the 50′s in the UK (simultaneously in the US) that contributed significantly to the 60′s countercultural activities. This track is really interesting now, as it highlights a certain romantic (or even fetishistic) attachment  to the Socialist cause. Given the history of imprisonment, murder and violence against the  people of China and the USSR by Mao and Stalin this early Topic recording seems rather dainty and naive in a very British way – almost twee. Whereas previously (upto the 1950′s) the perception of working class “folk” music as a lowly artform was reinforced by a culture of high classicism that perpetuated class distinction, now it was being used as a vehicle for political change.

2. Angelitos Negros – Roberta Flack – 1969 Atlantic

A poem that dates form the 1940’s written by Andres Eloy Blanco (Venezualan mixed race). First recorded in Spain in 1947 by singer Antonio Machin (black Cuban). An empassioned cry for multiracial unity. It asks of the church – Where are the black angels, and asks of artists – Will you not paint black angels? A powerful evocation of the responsibilities of all to be inclusive, sung at the height of the 1960’s counter-cultural revolution by a black African American.

3. Throbbing Gristle – Very Friendly - orginally recorded 1975, released 2001 Thirsty Ear

The personal is political. This track has curious resonances throughout my adult life. Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV were the first band that made me realise that politics (although I didn’t call it that at the time) could be an active experience. I didn’t know this track at the time, but knew about their Church and activities as mail artists. It was a punk nihilism that was very attractive to a teenager because it was going out and setting things up and creating experiences for oneself and others. Doing shit. I moved to Manchester and got to know exactly where they were talking about. It’s a window into that time, a straight forward but hallucinatory monologue that is really brutal. This was another difficult subject given another dimension through sound. Later, after we had our first child, I met David Smith (who was responsible for bringing the Hindly/Brady pair to justice) running a B&B in Ireland. He was very friendly. As an aside, one of the first music mashups (a copyleft political musical statement in itself that became known as Bastard Pop in the UK), it was a piece that used this track as part of the samples. It was by an artist called Shackleton – who went onto create some of the most politically subtle dance music to emerge in years under the banner of Dubstep with his Skull Disco label. One of which appears later.

4. I Don’t Like Mondays – Tori Amos – 2001 Atlantic

Once again it’s the news given another dimension by a musician. The Boomtown Rats were big in Northern Ireland (where I grew up) and this track was there in my childhood. I only found out later as an adult that it was about a massacre in a school, but seen form the point of view of the murderer. This moving version helps you understand that we are all capable of this kind of insanity, and only by avoiding the special circumstances that make it happen do we remain sane. It’s a lesson in not judging. This track was first performed about two months after the incident that “inspired” it.

5. Major Moments of Instant Insanity – Theo Parrish - Oct 2001 – Sound Signature

Similar, this track came out one months after the events of the 11th of September 2001 in the USA. It captures the shock of the moment like no other I’ve heard and playing it reminds me of the undiluted experience, when you know nothing will be as it was before. It changed the world – and everybody in it.

6. Blood on my Hands – Shackleton vs Villalobos – 2007 Skull Disco

A follow on to the above, a number of years later. The new global political environment meant new musical forms emerged in response. One of these in dance culture was the development of the dark, urban, heavily Arabic influenced Dubstep scene. With titles like Hamas Rule, Dubstep Halal and Death is Not Final, this was clearly reflecting contemporary thought patterns amongst newly nihilistic youth – regardless of their cultural background (which remained resolutely private). Microtonal remix by an artist at his peak. Utterly absorbing it effortlessly carries you on waves of complexity. What any good speaker should do.

7. Dem a Bomb We – The Bug featuring Warrior Queen – Oct 2005 Ladybug Records

A straightforward declaration to “bombers” to stop targeting innocent people. A response to the London tube bombings by one of Jamaica’s finest new voices.

8. Philosophy of the World – The Shaggs - 1969 private pressing, re-released Rounder Records 1980

The bottom line in nihilism, absolutely singular in the punk tradition and completely guile-free. These three women would be in charge of the planet if I had my way.

Discussion on track

Notes on track 2 – Throbbing Gristle – Very Friendly

SS: Very Friendly is awfully long and depressing… You say that the track has “curious resonances throughout your adult life” (different from the nihilism attractive to you as a teenager?) what are they? What was going on in Manchester!? Are we really ‘all’ capable of, or harbour desires for extreme sado child murder!? And I always mistrusted GPOs attraction to shock as a short cut to getting attention and fame.

RmcK: I don’t think that TB ever had that much fame really, at least not until they were taken up recently by the art world and elevated to a kind of significant performance action group.
The resonances with the TB and this track throughout my adult life are convoluted. The first I mentioned that as a teenager the ideas behind Thee Temple of Psychick Youth was fascinating to me – it opened my eyes to the possibility of action, communal living, art and experimentation (with everything). Then I moved to Manchester (where the track is set). My mother talked to me as a teenager about Hindley and Brady and the Moors Murders (she was a young girl living in Oldham at the time the story was unfolding).
On a trip to Ireland years later I ended up talking to some locals in a nearby B&B I was staying in with my wife and young son and they mentioned the Moors Murders. We had got on really well with the owners and had in fact only managed to secure the place by another co-incidence – we were passing and desperate, as it was getting dark. It was a beautiful and quaint to the point of twee thatch cottage, the door was open, we went in and sat by the fire. Later, Mary and Dave  - who ran it – came back, drunk, and we sat up for hours talking to them in the kitchen about Manchester and Galway. The gossiping old woman who had mentioned the murders wouldn’t be drawn any further. We went back several times until another friend opened up their own B&B nearer Galway City.
Shortly after, another freind (who I hadn’t seen since moving to England) sent me a CD with this track on it. About two years after that I happened to turn on the TV and caught a program about the Moors Murders as writtten by the brother-in-law of Myra Hindley (Dave Smith). It was Dave Smith that called the police to bring the pair to justice – a quick internet search confirmed it was the same Dave that ran the B&B and who is featured in this track witnessing the murder.
RmcK(later) The TV programme was mostly based from the point of view of his wife, Hindley’s sister.

HYPERLINK

So you can see how convoluted is the story…The reason for including this track is not that it is a good story, or a good track, but that it is simultaneously personal and political in the way that it humanised one of the most horrific events in the UK of the 20th Century. It’s easy to see these kind of events as negative holes, anolomlies in the general movement towards a perfectly moral and good society, whereas in fact the events and people involved in these events are often at the mercy of a perfect storm of coincidence, psychosis, insecurity, mania and perversion.
It indicates to me that vigilance is always necessary when judging events in the news, that people who are involved in events in the news are not two-dimensional and that we are probably not on a trajectory towards world peace because of this vulnerability to chance. Being on the receiving end of media attention is equally illuminating. I should tell you about the experience my wife and I had regarding the IRA bombing of Manchester sometime…

SS: There is obviously a global community of pain, from all kinds or war and abuse scenarios that can relate to acute cultural expressions of suffering and human cruelty. I guess the expression does not have to be the same as exact personal experience of the listener to work.
There is knowledge crucial to humanity to be gained from the experience of torture, the minds of murderers, rapists and terrorists. And our current literary academic methods are really not capable of entering into such territory. In spite of all the theorising of the body you don’t scream and cry in seminars. It tends to be walled off into ‘therapy’ or study of the effects of combat stress etc. To my mind every abuser or sado-masochist has suffered extreme abuse when young. How to be break the cycles of abuse? That seems to be the central ‘personal is political’ question to me.

Notes on track 5 – I Don’t Like Mondays – Tori Amos

SS: Would you say your youthful experiences in Northern Ireland, considering what was going on at the time, could be behind some of these choices? I have some inkling about how brain/body searing it was for young people during that time when communities and friendships were being torn apart. I don’t think people in Britain appreciate just how bad it is for people and especially young people when a civil war is kicking off. Put against that background the selection makes more sense to me, but I may be wrong.

RmcK: No, I think it would be naive to suggest that. Growing up in Northern Ireland certainly left me with an acute awareness of the sense of responsibility (this can mean life or death) that comes with engaging with politics. I would say that generally friendships and communities were galvanised by the situation, which had the perverse side effect of perpetuated division in hardline areas . A narrow band of the middle-income political classes were responsible for keeping ideological divisions going, but in general this filtered down as a perpetuation of clichés. I gave me some insight into that WW2 generation cliché that it was the best time in their lives.

RmcK (later): Apologies for this – naive may be a bit strong. It’s a common misconception that the people of Northern Ireland who grew up in the Seventies were traumatised by the events unfolding around them. In my experience this was not the case. I had many Catholic and Protestant friends, went to Orange parades and drank in traditional Irish pubs with fiddle music. I had a great time!  Throughout my life I have had friends and met people who had been brought up in conflict zones – and generally have to say that they are the most dynamic and positive people I’ve met.

SS: Good to read you experience of ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland
was personally ‘positive’. I was basing my view mainly on the
harrowing account of a design student I tutored some years ago.

RmcK: Of course some personal experiences would have been horrific. I was speaking generally of a cultural psyche. You have to remember that throughout the whole period Northern Ireland had the second (to Belgium) lowest crime rate per head of population in the whole of Europe. The streets were, ironically, very safe.

SS: This experience I heard was not ‘horrific’ in the way you might expect. It was about close friends being forcibly separated and kept apart by terror.

RmcK: It’s curious that you don’t mention Don’t Like Mondays as macabre. After all it’s about child killing too, and from the point of view of the perpetrator.

Notes on track 7 – Blood on my Hands – Shackleton vs Villalobos

RmcK: Strictly speaking the Shackleton Track I sent you is a remix by dance musician Richardo Villalobos – so not actually Dubstep, but dance. I’ve always like the social space of dance, its liberating and elevating effect on the self, the curious way it makes people look like wasps in bottles. I sometimes lament the lack of physical touch in dance music though. I have a lot of Dubstep material too – but thought that this would bridge the dance divide.

RmcK (later): “Dance” music is obviously too vague. I was rushing. Villalobos is more commonly associated with “Techno”. Although in mind ears this is more “Minimal” or “MicroMinimal”. Labels all, but just to say that it’s not “classic” “Dubstep” this track.
Simon Reynolds work on the Hardcore Continuum is really interesting in its scope. His blogs cover a lot of ground in this area. Steve Redhead is also good on the subject, though I haven’t read this stuff for years.
HYPERLINK 1
HYPERLINK 2
SS: my own contact is via Datacide and specifically Dead by Dawn

SS: I spose the core of this project for me is that it is about working class music and culture and the way we communicate about it. My idea is that working class culture cannot focus or forge itself in some way at present. It cannot tool-up to start dismantling oppression. How we communicate cannot just be writing, or even talking, but needs the disco. A kind of update of Habermas’ coffee shops. A darkened space where you can respond how you like, and with others. Its a visceral kinesthetic level of communication that gets beneath words and holds the promise of full sensory contact between humans.

RmcK: Rave music of course was probably the most covertly political art form of the modern age. It was such a threat that it brought about the criminalisation of repetitive beats, stopped the right to gather for fun and harnessed police powers to permanently remove legitimately owned property from citizens. All within a couple of years. Brilliant. I think we communicate best not through direct action, but through the pursuit of lifestyles and ways of behaving that might inspire others or at least question others behavior. I think pubs are a good start in terms of social spaces to air views. The later in the evening it gets, the more you get beneath words (though hopefully not beneath tables). More people should open their own little micro-bars maybe!? Any place that encourages the free mingling of cultures is a place with potential to change things for the better. Just talking to people on trains helps too.

SS: Working class music was always bowdlerised as it came up to the dominant media. ie gutted of threatening political and sexual content. So an emphasis on the political is a shorthand for making working class music whole again.

RmcK: Exactly the point I am trying to make in the selection. Except I wouldn’t call it working class - just human.

Pete Seeger – Little Boxes (1963)
I was very young when I first heard this on the radio, about nine I think. I really liked it but I didn’t listen to the words properly or understand it. I thought it was something about Council Houses. I heard it differently when I was older when I realised it was about the nature of classism and how it creates such mind numbing conformity, especially on the middle classes, and then I liked it even more. Although it was about America, we are not so different here. It still seems quite funny and rude.

Peter Paul and Mary – There But for Fortune (1983 – Ochs 1963)
A beautiful song and it made me think about being a disabled person and how anyone could become one at any time. But really I think the song is about not standing in judgement over people whose lives are a mess because you never know what has happened to them, or are free from the possibility that it could have been you. I agreed with that.

Tom Paxton – Jimmy Newman (1988)
Tom Paxton was a favourite of mine in the 60’s and this song said something to me very powerful about war, death and people losing their friends. Maybe it made such an impression on me because it was set in a hospital while the men were waiting to be sent home from Vietnam to recover from their injuries. I could identify with it somehow. It felt very real and very sad.

Bob Dylan – A Hard Rain is Gonna Fall (1962)
I first heard Bob Dylan listening to Radio Caroline on a tiny transistor radio in bed at night when I was supposed to be asleep. I was just into my teens I think. I was electrified by his voice and his songs. They seemed very different to anyone else I had heard. I liked him because he was telling me that I wasn’t the only one who thought the world was a screwed up and unjust place. I loved this song. Dylan wrote it at the height of the Cuba Missile Crisis when the possibility of a nuclear holocaust seemed alarmingly real. Although I didn’t really understand much of the imagery, (nor did he apparently), he seemed to be saying that something was very wrong out there and if we didn’t heed the warnings then we were in for hard times. I particularly liked the last verse about going back out before the rain starts falling, and telling people what he had seen. I like to think that I have done that.

Bob Dylan – The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carol (1964)
This song stuck in my mind for years because of the last line. It is based on a true story I believe about a rich man who murdered one of his servants. Dylan said that the thing which really deserves our tears was not the act of murder itself, but the fact that he got away with it because of his privileged position in society. I was still young and learning about the depth of the inequality between people based on the class ridden society. This song helped solidify my own emerging understanding.

Peggy Seeger – I’m Gonna Be an Engineer (1973)
I thought this song was funny and it arrived in my life as I was making my first contact with the women’s movement and getting an understanding of the role of sexism in our lives. I just loved the line “Dainty as a dishrag, faithful as a chow”. Laughter is just as liberating as tears and anger. Thank you Peggy.

Melanie Safka – Look What They’ve Done to My Song (1971)
I liked Melanie very much ever since hearing the Roller Skate song. She seemed a bit eccentric and unique. This song is one she wrote after becoming very famous and finding that fame, and the commercialisation of her music, difficult to handle. She seemed to fade out of the limelight soon after this song came out, but I always loved it. At the end, as she did in many songs, she goes loud and over the top and it always made me smile.

Diane Coleman – We Will Ride (1994)
There are very few songs written about the oppression of disabled people and I do not think any have been produced commercially, with the possible exception of ‘Spasticus Autisticus’ by Ian Drury, but I didn’t like that at the time. I was too riddled with internalised oppression to want to be associated with those words I had spent a lifetime running away from. This of course was the whole point of the song, but I wasn’t ready for it. (

“We will Ride” was written to be sung during the many direct actions taken by disabled people in the USA and later in the UK about the inaccessibility of public transport, especially to wheelchair users. We felt that it was not enough that we had escaped from the long-stay institutions into out own homes in the ‘community’ if once there we could not go out or get to places. Not all of us could drive so access to public transport was vital if we were to be part of ordinary life. We chained ourselves to buses and trains, got arrested and sometimes hurt. It has been a partly successful battle however, because much of our public transport system must now be accessible, but we still need to sing the song.

Roy Bailey – Song of the Exile (1992)
One of the most beautiful and hopeful anti-war songs I have heard. I only got switched on to Roy Bailey in the last few years, mostly I believe because folk clubs and festivals have only started to become accessible to me as a wheelchair user in the last few years. Most of my formative years I was a ‘Radio/TV Dependent Person’, and that is why so much of the music which influenced me was from the USA, I now realise.

Diane Coleman – Free Our People (1994)
A great song about the history of exclusion and imprisonment of disabled people. As this story is still often hidden from the public eye, I use this song in training courses to bring alive to people the struggle that disabled people have made, in solidarity with each other and our allies, to build a better world. My favourite line which still brings a tear is “How many gifted people are caged against their will?”. (Both songs are from a CD called ‘Stolen Lives’ available from http://www.adapt.org/cdoffer.htm)

Willy Mason – Oxygen (2004)
I was stunned by this song which I heard about two years ago when Willy Mason was only nineteen. Many young adults are struggling to find the way to a purposeful life in the modern world. He captures so much of their sadness and disillusionment, but also the hope that they can find a way. I liked the line about wanting to be ‘louder than Ritalin for all the kids who think they have got a disease’. Wow. My daughter loves it too.

Pete Seeger – And I’m Still Searching (1997)
Pete Seeger is now 89 and still singing. I think this little song and accompanying music is exquisite and says it all for me.

Track 2 – Patriot Game by Dominic Behan – the younger brother of Brendan – is about the young bucks being sucked into the fake heroics of nationalism and whether you happened to be on the side of the colonialist crown or the revolutionary freedom fighter the dangers of such romantic sentimentalism applied. In other words – it’s the same old story and it just goes round and round in circles – never changing from one generation to the next. 

Track 3 – Irish Ways – written by John Gibb who scribbled it on a scrap of paper and handed it to Christie Moore at a concert who in turn sang it and later recorded it. But this version is sung by John Close from Belfast. The song sums up the long history of oppression in Ireland from the Vikings to the present. 

Track 4 – No More Auction Block – Paul Robeson’s version of this song typifies – once again – the struggle against oppression and for freedom and dignity.

Track 5 – Wasteland – by Iris DeMent – chosen because it’s a recognition of the pretence we inhabit in a Western world where ideas of freedom and high moral values abound – whereas the actual truth speaks of an impoverishment materially and spiritually felt and experienced by the greater majority of society. 

Track 6 – Sink ‘em Low – a prison worksong sung here by Bessie Jones from an album entitled Southern Journey.

       Please the boss and he’ll maybe spare you…or maybe not…

Track 7 – Nothing But The Same Old Story – Written and performed by Paul Brady from Strabane in Northern Ireland. A song about his personal experience of going to work in London as a young fella – perpetuating the timeworn imposed culture of diaspora. In London the Irish were all tarred and scarred by The Troubles in Ulster.  They were often tolerated, even sought after, for their music and good craic  – a bit like pub-performing monkeys – but treated with huge mistrust by the majority of Londoners, especially the authorities, landladies, and politicians.

Track 8 – Farewell My Own Dear Native Land – sung here by Ireland’s Queen of the Gypsies, Margaret Barry whose coarse and unrefined vocal style lends an extra edge to the sentiment of enforced emigration.

Track 9 – King’s Shilling – sung by Frank Harte, an architect and collector of folksongs who was based in Dublin – is a traditional song from the Napoleonic Wars, which relates a woman’s story of loss and the wastage of her husband and young father – once again the fatalistic and romantic lure of heroism, the stark reality of which is that he, like so many, becomes an anonymous scrap of cannon fodder.  

Track 10 – Deportees – written by Woody Guthrie – tells the tragic story of a plane crash in Los Gatos, California, in which 28 nameless migratory Mexican workers were killed. Guthrie identified with these poor working class Mexicans who were forced to endure harsh working conditions with no health and safety provision, nor insurance cover in the United States – and 62 years later conditions for foreign workers and refugees is little improved. There is then a resonation of the experiences of Irish labourers in England and America.

Track 11 – Damn the Day – written by Ashley Hutchings – sung by Pete Morton. A modern-day tale of the inequalities in our society – the young boyo caught up in illegal and antisocial acts which lend a folkloric heroism to him but he is then dumped in the anonymous trash bin by peers and police – another type of cannon fodder.

Track 12 – Gallis Pole – pay the hangman and escape the gallows – life’s only worth a bribe to the hangman! Fred Gerlach’s jaunty almost gleeful guitar playing and singing belie the reality of the situation.

Track 13  – Little Boxes written by Malvina Reynolds in the 1950’s – is a great sideways skelp at the upwardly mobile pretensions of the middle classes in the utopian ‘land of opportunity’. 

Track 14 – Do Me Justice – sung by Len Graham from Coleraine in Ulster, a folksong collector and singer.  This is a rendition of the Irishman as the butt of English prejudice which is disguised as humour while he makes a clear and dignified request for fair treatment.

Track 15 – Auld Triangle – originally credited to Brendan Behan – an Irish blues – sung here by Ronnie Drew – sounds as though it has been around for as long as Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin – first opened in 1796.  The thick stonewalls of Kilmainham Gaol contained the execution by firing squad of those Irish freedom fighters who instigated the 1916 Easter Uprising – and held about 6000 criminals who were transported from Ireland to the penal colonies in Australia between the1790s and 1840s. From 1846 the average intake of between 700 to 800 prisoners per annum escalated to over 9000 in 1851 as starving victims of The Great Hunger (potato famine) broke any law they could in order to get a portion of prisonfare.  Now the Gaol, a symbol of Britain’s oppressive colonial policy, is a museum and venue for art installations.

Sarah Falloon

December 2008
{/column 1}

Track 1 -  starts with the staccato rhythms of lambeg drums –  long associated with war –  but in more recent times associated with Protestant Unionism in Ulster, however there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that such a sectarian usage was not always the case for during the post WW2 period before The Troubles began,  when communities chose to coexist, the big lambeg in particular was shared between Catholics and Protestants for their respective parades. I like the juxtaposition of the warlike Ulster lambeg with Ronnie Drew’s rendition of a comical Republican song about the IRA commandeering an English motorcar.

 

Track 2 – Patriot Game by Dominic Behan – the younger brother of Brendan – is about the young bucks being sucked into the fake heroics of nationalism and whether you happened to be on the side of the colonialist crown or the revolutionary freedom fighter the dangers of such romantic sentimentalism applied. In other words – it’s the same old story and it just goes round and round in circles – never changing from one generation to the next. 

 

Track 3 – Irish Ways – written by John Gibb who scribbled it on a scrap of paper and handed it to Christie Moore at a concert who in turn sang it and later recorded it. But this version is sung by John Close from Belfast. The song sums up the long history of oppression in Ireland from the Vikings to the present. 

 

Track 4 – No More Auction Block – Paul Robeson’s version of this song typifies – once again – the struggle against oppression and for freedom and dignity.

 

Track 5 – Wasteland – by Iris DeMent – chosen because it’s a recognition of the pretence we inhabit in a Western world where ideas of freedom and high moral values abound – whereas the actual truth speaks of an impoverishment materially and spiritually felt and experienced by the greater majority of society. 

 

Track 6 – Sink ‘em Low – a prison worksong sung here by Bessie Jones from an album entitled Southern Journey.

       Please the boss and he’ll maybe spare you…or maybe not…

 

Track 7 – Nothing But The Same Old Story – Written and performed by Paul Brady from Strabane in Northern Ireland. A song about his personal experience of going to work in London as a young fella – perpetuating the timeworn imposed culture of diaspora. In London the Irish were all tarred and scarred by The Troubles in Ulster.  They were often tolerated, even sought after, for their music and good craic  – a bit like pub-performing monkeys – but treated with huge mistrust by the majority of Londoners, especially the authorities, landladies, and politicians.

 

Track 8 – Farewell My Own Dear Native Land – sung here by Ireland’s Queen of the Gypsies, Margaret Barry whose coarse and unrefined vocal style lends an extra edge to the sentiment of enforced emigration.

 

Track 9 – King’s Shilling – sung by Frank Harte, an architect and collector of folksongs who was based in Dublin – is a traditional song from the Napoleonic Wars, which relates a woman’s story of loss and the wastage of her husband and young father – once again the fatalistic and romantic lure of heroism, the stark reality of which is that he, like so many, becomes an anonymous scrap of cannon fodder.  

 

Track 10 – Deportees – written by Woody Guthrie – tells the tragic story of a plane crash in Los Gatos, California, in which 28 nameless migratory Mexican workers were killed. Guthrie identified with these poor working class Mexicans who were forced to endure harsh working conditions with no health and safety provision, nor insurance cover in the United States – and 62 years later conditions for foreign workers and refugees is little improved. There is then a resonation of the experiences of Irish labourers in England and America.

 

Track 11 – Damn the Day – written by Ashley Hutchings – sung by Pete Morton. A modern-day tale of the inequalities in our society – the young boyo caught up in illegal and antisocial acts which lend a folkloric heroism to him but he is then dumped in the anonymous trash bin by peers and police – another type of cannon fodder.

 

Track 12 – Gallis Pole – pay the hangman and escape the gallows – life’s only worth a bribe to the hangman! Fred Gerlach’s jaunty almost gleeful guitar playing and singing belie the reality of the situation.

 

Track 13  – Little Boxes written by Malvina Reynolds in the 1950’s – is a great sideways skelp at the upwardly mobile pretensions of the middle classes in the utopian ‘land of opportunity’. 

 

Track 14 – Do Me Justice – sung by Len Graham from Coleraine in Ulster, a folksong collector and singer.  This is a rendition of the Irishman as the butt of English prejudice which is disguised as humour while he makes a clear and dignified request for fair treatment.

 

Track 15 – Auld Triangle – originally credited to Brendan Behan – an Irish blues – sung here by Ronnie Drew – sounds as though it has been around for as long as Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin – first opened in 1796.  The thick stonewalls of Kilmainham Gaol contained the execution by firing squad of those Irish freedom fighters who instigated the 1916 Easter Uprising – and held about 6000 criminals who were transported from Ireland to the penal colonies in Australia between the1790s and 1840s. From 1846 the average intake of between 700 to 800 prisoners per annum escalated to over 9000 in 1851 as starving victims of The Great Hunger (potato famine) broke any law they could in order to get a portion of prisonfare.  Now the Gaol, a symbol of Britain’s oppressive colonial policy, is a museum and venue for art installations.

Sarah Falloon

December 2008
{/column 1}

]]> http://www.agitdisco.com/?feed=rss2&p=596 0 http://www.agitdisco.com/?p=592 http://www.agitdisco.com/?p=592#comments Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:55:54 +0000 stefan http://www.agitdisco.com/?p=592

Siouxsie & The Banshees – Poppy Day – 1979

The Cure – Killing An Arab – 1979

Young Punx – Destroy Celebrity Crap – 2005

UB40 – One In Ten – 1981

Nick Harrison – Something Specials – 2008

Dans Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip – Thou Shalt Always Kill – 2007

Sultans Of Ping F.C – Where’s Me Jumper – 1992

The Larks – Maggie, Maggie, Maggie – 1986

Lee Dorsey – Working In A Coalmine – 1967

SKAndalous All-Stars – Anarchy In The UK – 1999

Sid Presley Experiance – Hup 2,3,4 – 1984

Rage Against The Machine – Killing In The Name of – 1992

Peaches – I Don’t Give A Fuck – 2003

Cassette Boy – We Are New Labour – 2002

Agit – Disco 15 – Andy T

When choosing tracks for my Agit-Disco mix I wanted to get across the anger involved in protesting against things that are just wrong whilst attempting to keep what I feel to be some kind of musical integrity and humour.

All these tracks have meant a lot to me at different points in my life and it was a great opportunity to revisit old tracks and also to introduce some newer music. Listening to ‘Poppy Day’ by Siouxsie and the Banshees was a treat I had forgotten for some years and still had the same emotional effect it did the first time I heard it back in the late seventies. For me this is a powerful anti-war poem given a post-modernist industrial edge.

The Larks’ ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie’ is a true anthem that could be heard on picket lines when Thatcher (Aka The Milk Snatcher) was ripping the unions apart. We don’t really get this kind of chanting that crosses over from football terraces to demonstrations these days. ‘Davie Davie Davie – Out Out Out’ doesn’t have the same ring to it somehow…

My distaste of celebrity culture is reflected by ‘The Young Punx’ – Destroy celebrity crap. Particularly poignant as it steals directly from Mylo’s  Destroy Rock ‘n’ Roll.

The re-using or sampling of older music is still the new punk. The ability to sit at home on a pc and cut and paste samples together to make a new tune is absolutely Punk ethos. There are some great tunes around that combine samples and screaming/shouting/ rapping over the top. ‘Something special’ is an example of this – Sampling Ghost Town by the Specials and casual rapping over the top to create a fresher version for a younger generation.

Another example of cutting and pasting is the excellent Cassette Boys’s – We are new Labour.

When I put this selection together it was prior to ‘Killing in the name of’ by Rage Against The Machine being re-released for the xmas number one challenge against the usual X-Factor shit that dominates the xmas charts. Had I chosen after xmas it may not have made the selection for being too mainstream (Yes, I am a complete musical snob!)

The choice of ‘Don’t give a Fuck’ by Peaches made the selection due mainly to the fact that it’s loud, screechy and that’s how I feel (sometimes)

Choosing tracks for this project was quite difficult and I found myself continuously changing the selection. Even when the C.D was eventually burnt and sent I felt that I’d left off some important tracks and artists. I berated myself for not including anything by Crass or Fehlfarben but sometimes hard decisions need to be made.

The artwork is an update of the anti-war poster ‘Why’ – This version as much about anti-war as being about anti-social drinking.

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Siouxsie & The Banshees – Poppy Day – 1979

The Cure – Killing An Arab – 1979

Young Punx – Destroy Celebrity Crap – 2005

UB40 – One In Ten – 1981

Nick Harrison – Something Specials – 2008

Dans Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip – Thou Shalt Always Kill – 2007

Sultans Of Ping F.C – Where’s Me Jumper – 1992

The Larks – Maggie, Maggie, Maggie – 1986

Lee Dorsey – Working In A Coalmine – 1967

SKAndalous All-Stars – Anarchy In The UK – 1999

Sid Presley Experiance – Hup 2,3,4 – 1984

Rage Against The Machine – Killing In The Name of – 1992

Peaches – I Don’t Give A Fuck – 2003

Cassette Boy – We Are New Labour – 2002

Agit – Disco 15 – Andy T

When choosing tracks for my Agit-Disco mix I wanted to get across the anger involved in protesting against things that are just wrong whilst attempting to keep what I feel to be some kind of musical integrity and humour.

All these tracks have meant a lot to me at different points in my life and it was a great opportunity to revisit old tracks and also to introduce some newer music. Listening to ‘Poppy Day’ by Siouxsie and the Banshees was a treat I had forgotten for some years and still had the same emotional effect it did the first time I heard it back in the late seventies. For me this is a powerful anti-war poem given a post-modernist industrial edge.

The Larks’ ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie’ is a true anthem that could be heard on picket lines when Thatcher (Aka The Milk Snatcher) was ripping the unions apart. We don’t really get this kind of chanting that crosses over from football terraces to demonstrations these days. ‘Davie Davie Davie – Out Out Out’ doesn’t have the same ring to it somehow…

My distaste of celebrity culture is reflected by ‘The Young Punx’ – Destroy celebrity crap. Particularly poignant as it steals directly from Mylo’s  Destroy Rock ‘n’ Roll.

The re-using or sampling of older music is still the new punk. The ability to sit at home on a pc and cut and paste samples together to make a new tune is absolutely Punk ethos. There are some great tunes around that combine samples and screaming/shouting/ rapping over the top. ‘Something special’ is an example of this – Sampling Ghost Town by the Specials and casual rapping over the top to create a fresher version for a younger generation.

Another example of cutting and pasting is the excellent Cassette Boys’s – We are new Labour.

When I put this selection together it was prior to ‘Killing in the name of’ by Rage Against The Machine being re-released for the xmas number one challenge against the usual X-Factor shit that dominates the xmas charts. Had I chosen after xmas it may not have made the selection for being too mainstream (Yes, I am a complete musical snob!)

The choice of ‘Don’t give a Fuck’ by Peaches made the selection due mainly to the fact that it’s loud, screechy and that’s how I feel (sometimes)

Choosing tracks for this project was quite difficult and I found myself continuously changing the selection. Even when the C.D was eventually burnt and sent I felt that I’d left off some important tracks and artists. I berated myself for not including anything by Crass or Fehlfarben but sometimes hard decisions need to be made.

The artwork is an update of the anti-war poster ‘Why’ – This version as much about anti-war as being about anti-social drinking.

]]> http://www.agitdisco.com/?feed=rss2&p=592 0 http://www.agitdisco.com/?p=527 http://www.agitdisco.com/?p=527#comments Wed, 03 Dec 2008 11:13:13 +0000 stefan http://www.agitdisco.com/?p=527

As a teenager in the 80s I lived through one of the golden ages of British chart pop, listening to music that was by turn, political, danceable, challenging and entertaining. I attended CND rallies, marched against South African apartheid, ran the feminist group at school and went to GLC-funded music festivals. I came out as a lesbian in 1986 and spent the next three years immersed in student politics, campaigning against Section 28 and helping to produce an alternative girls’ magazine called Shocking Pink. During late-night layout sessions we listened to endless mix-tapes: soul, reggae, lovers rock, country & western, African pop, jazz, 60s girl groups and alt folk. The tracks I’ve selected are all tunes I first heard some time between the ages of 13 and 23. Music was a huge inspiration to me, then as now, offering moments of political recognition or identification, as well as pure listening pleasure.

Patti Smith Gloria (1975)

This was still being played in lesbian discos when I came out in 1986 and its energy and intensity puts shivers down my spine even now. As an advert for lesbianism this cover of Van Morrison’s original is irresistible, especially combined with Mapplethorpe’s cover image of the compellingly androgynous Smith. Compare and contrast with Katy Perry’s contemporary pop-paean to same-sex experimentation: “I kissed a girl and I liked it”? No competition.

The Special AKA Nelson Mandela (1984)

I’d already marched against apartheid when this came out in 1984, so the message wasn’t new to me, but it was still fantastic to hear it playing at discos, at parties and in the changing rooms at Chelsea Girl. When everyone on the dance floor – no matter how apolitical, apathetic, or right wing – was singing along to the chorus, you really felt Mandela would one day be free…

Salt n Pepa I Desire (1987)

When I put this on the decks at student discos in 1987, half the shoe-gazing dance floor went to the bar, but I was thrilled by Salt n Pepa’s frenetic flow, the sound of girls proudly declaring their ownership of hip-hop’s skills, from rapping to mixing. Later the Queens duo would record huge chart ‘n’ dance floor hits like Push It, but this is from their first album, considerably more raw – a healthy roar of sisterhood that cleared the way for hip-hop giants like Missy Elliot.

The Specials Too Much, Too Young (1980)

I loved The Specials but this one always drove me a bit crazy. As an ardent 16-year-old feminist, the lyric “Keep a generation gap – try wearing a CAP!” pissed me off, and guess what – it still does. Just like protecting ourselves from rape, protecting ourselves from pregnancy has always been seen as a female responsibility. The message is pervasive: we pay the price, so we carry the can. Listening to Too Much, Too Young back then, I just felt the sting of the double-standard. Today I think, the message doesn’t work. With teenage pregnancy and sexual assault stats rising, rising, rising, it’s time to try another approach. For god’s sake, let’s start talking to boys about issues like responsibility and consent. It can’t hurt, can it?

Helen Humes Living My Life My Way (1950)

Hume’s lovely voice soars and wheels around this beautiful, personal blues about individual freedom and choice. It’s apparently free of political overtones – unless you consider that for a woman (of any race) in 1950, Humes’ lyrics amount to a revolutionary statement: “I’ve known since the day I was born, I just have to carry on, living so carefree and gay, I’m living, living my life my way”. From the first time I heard this, in my mid-20s, it’s touched me to feel the sense of connection with someone whose life was so different from mine.

Bobbie Gentry Ode To Billy-Joe (1967)

I was fascinated with this song before I ever heard it – the song with the secret, the mystery in it, the forbidden, unmentionable thing. A sad, subtle, story about the consequences of an abortion, like a novel by Carson McCullers in three minutes. Can you imagine the reception it got in 1967? Now, Amanda Palmer’s quirky cabaret-pop song about a trip to the abortion clinic (Oasis) is on YouTube, and the topic seems almost mainstream, but it’s still socially controversial and women’s reproductive rights are a political hot potato.

Sylvester You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) (1978)

Disco was the soundtrack to gay liberation before AIDS struck and the backrooms and bath-houses of New York and San Francisco closed down. I first heard Sylvester’s high-energy, falsetto paean to sex and sexual attraction decades ago, but it still gets me. There was something heroic about that crazy level of sexual activity that characterised the period immediately following the birth of the Gay Pride movement, the huge sense of release it represented. It’s like those guys, with their Tom of Finland hard-ons and handle-bar ‘taches, were fucking for all of us.

Bronski Beat Small Town Boy (1984)

This came out before I did, in 1984, and reached number three in the charts. I didn’t yet think of myself as a lesbian but I was massively struck by the story of small-town isolation and escape. Although internet communities now offer a lifeline to lonely gay teenagers, Small Town Boy is as pertinent as ever. What seems quite extraordinary now is that more than 20 years ago a song about a young gay man fleeing violence and parental neglect could make it into the charts. According to research by Stonewall in 2007, 65% of young lesbian and gay people report being bullied at school because of their sexuality, and in the playground the word “gay” means lame or crap. Are we travelling backwards, or what?

Rhoda Dakar The Boiler (1982)

Another anomalous 80s release! I don’t know who in their right mind would pop this on the record player when they got in from work – it’s an exercise in uneasy listening, from the disturbing lyrics that recount a vulnerable girl’s rape to the rackety, nerve-jangling musical arrangement that surrounds them. I used to daydream about a re-recording in which a vigilante gang of angry young women (my feral friends from a south London squat, maybe) interrupted the assault and castrated the rapist, leaving him to bleed to death in the dark, frightening alley. I imagine this single propelled a lot of young women into self-defence classes.

Michelle Shocked When I Grow Up (1988)

I always liked this playful, tongue-in-cheek song by alt folk-singer Shocked. She was a friend of mine back then and I appeared with her in the video for this. But I’ve picked it because of its central assertion that being an old woman is something to aspire to, to look forward to – not fear. “When I grow up, I want to be an old woman,” sang Shocked to her adoring young audience of late-80s’ lesbians and feminists. Today, in my 40s and surrounded by the relentless clamour of society’s neurotic fear of ageing or appearing old, it sounds like music to my ears…

]]>

As a teenager in the 80s I lived through one of the golden ages of British chart pop, listening to music that was by turn, political, danceable, challenging and entertaining. I attended CND rallies, marched against South African apartheid, ran the feminist group at school and went to GLC-funded music festivals. I came out as a lesbian in 1986 and spent the next three years immersed in student politics, campaigning against Section 28 and helping to produce an alternative girls’ magazine called Shocking Pink. During late-night layout sessions we listened to endless mix-tapes: soul, reggae, lovers rock, country & western, African pop, jazz, 60s girl groups and alt folk. The tracks I’ve selected are all tunes I first heard some time between the ages of 13 and 23. Music was a huge inspiration to me, then as now, offering moments of political recognition or identification, as well as pure listening pleasure.

Patti Smith Gloria (1975)

This was still being played in lesbian discos when I came out in 1986 and its energy and intensity puts shivers down my spine even now. As an advert for lesbianism this cover of Van Morrison’s original is irresistible, especially combined with Mapplethorpe’s cover image of the compellingly androgynous Smith. Compare and contrast with Katy Perry’s contemporary pop-paean to same-sex experimentation: “I kissed a girl and I liked it”? No competition.

The Special AKA Nelson Mandela (1984)

I’d already marched against apartheid when this came out in 1984, so the message wasn’t new to me, but it was still fantastic to hear it playing at discos, at parties and in the changing rooms at Chelsea Girl. When everyone on the dance floor – no matter how apolitical, apathetic, or right wing – was singing along to the chorus, you really felt Mandela would one day be free…

Salt n Pepa I Desire (1987)

When I put this on the decks at student discos in 1987, half the shoe-gazing dance floor went to the bar, but I was thrilled by Salt n Pepa’s frenetic flow, the sound of girls proudly declaring their ownership of hip-hop’s skills, from rapping to mixing. Later the Queens duo would record huge chart ‘n’ dance floor hits like Push It, but this is from their first album, considerably more raw – a healthy roar of sisterhood that cleared the way for hip-hop giants like Missy Elliot.

The Specials Too Much, Too Young (1980)

I loved The Specials but this one always drove me a bit crazy. As an ardent 16-year-old feminist, the lyric “Keep a generation gap – try wearing a CAP!” pissed me off, and guess what – it still does. Just like protecting ourselves from rape, protecting ourselves from pregnancy has always been seen as a female responsibility. The message is pervasive: we pay the price, so we carry the can. Listening to Too Much, Too Young back then, I just felt the sting of the double-standard. Today I think, the message doesn’t work. With teenage pregnancy and sexual assault stats rising, rising, rising, it’s time to try another approach. For god’s sake, let’s start talking to boys about issues like responsibility and consent. It can’t hurt, can it?

Helen Humes Living My Life My Way (1950)

Hume’s lovely voice soars and wheels around this beautiful, personal blues about individual freedom and choice. It’s apparently free of political overtones – unless you consider that for a woman (of any race) in 1950, Humes’ lyrics amount to a revolutionary statement: “I’ve known since the day I was born, I just have to carry on, living so carefree and gay, I’m living, living my life my way”. From the first time I heard this, in my mid-20s, it’s touched me to feel the sense of connection with someone whose life was so different from mine.

Bobbie Gentry Ode To Billy-Joe (1967)

I was fascinated with this song before I ever heard it – the song with the secret, the mystery in it, the forbidden, unmentionable thing. A sad, subtle, story about the consequences of an abortion, like a novel by Carson McCullers in three minutes. Can you imagine the reception it got in 1967? Now, Amanda Palmer’s quirky cabaret-pop song about a trip to the abortion clinic (Oasis) is on YouTube, and the topic seems almost mainstream, but it’s still socially controversial and women’s reproductive rights are a political hot potato.

Sylvester You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) (1978)

Disco was the soundtrack to gay liberation before AIDS struck and the backrooms and bath-houses of New York and San Francisco closed down. I first heard Sylvester’s high-energy, falsetto paean to sex and sexual attraction decades ago, but it still gets me. There was something heroic about that crazy level of sexual activity that characterised the period immediately following the birth of the Gay Pride movement, the huge sense of release it represented. It’s like those guys, with their Tom of Finland hard-ons and handle-bar ‘taches, were fucking for all of us.

Bronski Beat Small Town Boy (1984)

This came out before I did, in 1984, and reached number three in the charts. I didn’t yet think of myself as a lesbian but I was massively struck by the story of small-town isolation and escape. Although internet communities now offer a lifeline to lonely gay teenagers, Small Town Boy is as pertinent as ever. What seems quite extraordinary now is that more than 20 years ago a song about a young gay man fleeing violence and parental neglect could make it into the charts. According to research by Stonewall in 2007, 65% of young lesbian and gay people report being bullied at school because of their sexuality, and in the playground the word “gay” means lame or crap. Are we travelling backwards, or what?

Rhoda Dakar The Boiler (1982)

Another anomalous 80s release! I don’t know who in their right mind would pop this on the record player when they got in from work – it’s an exercise in uneasy listening, from the disturbing lyrics that recount a vulnerable girl’s rape to the rackety, nerve-jangling musical arrangement that surrounds them. I used to daydream about a re-recording in which a vigilante gang of angry young women (my feral friends from a south London squat, maybe) interrupted the assault and castrated the rapist, leaving him to bleed to death in the dark, frightening alley. I imagine this single propelled a lot of young women into self-defence classes.

Michelle Shocked When I Grow Up (1988)

I always liked this playful, tongue-in-cheek song by alt folk-singer Shocked. She was a friend of mine back then and I appeared with her in the video for this. But I’ve picked it because of its central assertion that being an old woman is something to aspire to, to look forward to – not fear. “When I grow up, I want to be an old woman,” sang Shocked to her adoring young audience of late-80s’ lesbians and feminists. Today, in my 40s and surrounded by the relentless clamour of society’s neurotic fear of ageing or appearing old, it sounds like music to my ears…

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