Anarcho-punk questions answered

Lance Hahn of Honeybear records has asked me a series of questions for a possible 'anarcho-punk' book project - working title 'Let the Tribe Increase'

Here are the questions and my dubious replies.


How did you get into punk rock? What was appealing about it?

When I was 16 and at school [Kirkcudbright Academy- in very small town in rural south west Scotland] in 1975 when a friend loaned me Patti Smith's version of 'My Generation/Gloria' but I didn't think it was very good so when the same friend said I should listen to Patti Smith's Horses I didn't bother.( Horses is now one of my all time favourite records). It was not until I heard New Rose by the Damned in late/ October 1976 that punk first grabbed me. The songs which really turned me on to punk were Neat Neat Neat by the Damned and White Riot by the Clash. The Sex Pistols 'Anarchy in the UK ' confused me - it did not sound as 'revolutionary' as I had been led to believe it was by the music press.

To confuse the situation more, I had visited London in the summer of 76, but spent my time searching for pre-punk counter culture Pink Fairies/ Hawkwind locations in west London e.g. Portobello Road. My main pre-punk music influence was late sixties/ early seventies counter culture. It was not really until summer 1977 (when the Rezillos played in my home town/ Castle Douglas Town Hall) and the whole anti-Jubilee / Pistols God Save the Queen 'political' aspect of punk hit home that I gave up my nostalgia for pre-punk counter culture and adopted punk as being 'my generation',

Do you think that there was a real relationship between punk and Situationist dogma or do you think that was mostly for fun?

To begin with, I doubt if Malcolm Mclaren and Vivienne Westwood were directly inspired by the Situationists, but once Jamie Reid was recruited a strong Situationist element was included. Jamie's work with The Suburban Press (1970-1974) was strongly influenced by Situationist theory and his Sex Pistols work continued this theme. Jamie's artwork for the [banned] cover of 'Holidays in the Sun' is pure Situ. Punk was never about 'fun' - it was always deadly serious. Or rather, punk took 'fun' seriously. Punk was revolutionary or it was nothing. If punk had not been revolutionary, it would have been just another a political popular youth subculture like Teddy Boys or Mods. But it was not. Punk took the suppressed elements of the Revolutionary/ Situationist late sixties/ early seventies counterculture and used them to briefly politicise popular youth culture - e.g. Pistols God Save the Queen in summer 1977. This was Situationist theory put into practice - as fun...

By the time of KYPP, Larry Law was producing his Spectacular Times which we cut up and sampled in various issues. I also remember at least one copy of Debord's Society of the Spectacle doing the rounds and for ages had a copy of The Revolution for Kids [? or some such title] I had picked up somewhere. I guess a lot depended on who you were. Some punks just listened to Anarchy in the UK, others tried to find out what 'anarchy' was. Ditto Situationist influences on punk - some punks went to places like Compendium bookshop in Camden or anarchist/ alternative bookshops and tried to follow the ideas through. In a way it was a bit like what happened with, for example, Bowie in the glam period - people/ kids like me would start by seeing Bowie on Top of the Pops, buy the single (Starman), buy the album (Ziggy Stardust) and then work backwards to Bowie's early material like Hunky Dory (from which Life on Mars got re-released after success of Ziggy) and then find mentions of Velvet Underground and connection with Lou Reed/ Transformer and go back to the original Velvet Underground records... which is how I ended I buying the first two VU albums in 1974.

But there was no attempt to fetishise 'Situationist dogma' within punk. It was there as an influence, just as glam and surrealism were.

What activities outside of the fanzine was the group involved with?

Many and various ... we helped run and organise several 'Anarchy Centres', a housing co-op (Black Sheep), went on political demonstrations, went to Stonehenge Free Festival and Greenham Common Peace Camp, the Stop the City demos in 1983 and 1984...





Who were some of the other members?

There were many members of the Kill Your Petty Puppy Collective - Jeremy Gluck of the Barracudas for example- in total about 20 people directly contributed, about 200 indirectly via the various Anarchy Centres, about 2000 as our readership, 20 000 through our link with The Mob and 200 000 as people who bought into the Crass version of anarcho-punk .

To what degree was there an interest in magic and what did that mean for you?

Magic was very much a minority interest. Myself, Tony D. and Bob of Blood and Roses were pretty much the only ones originally interested, but once Throbbing Gristle became Psychic TV after 1981, the situation changed and 'magic' became more a mainstream part of (post) punk . I only got involved with 'chaos magic' after 1986 so that was my 'post-punk' phase.


What did you feel was the uniting factors between punk, magic, Situ politics?

There was no uniting factor. Punk and Situ politics were/ are realistic and rationalistic, focused on everyday life. Magic is anti-realist and anti-rationalist, focused on the Otherworld. They can be united, but only by constructing personal creative interpretations and meanings for 'punk' , 'Situ politics' and 'magic' - which takes a long time to achieve and cannot easily be put into words. It is a question of recognising through experience a sense of similarity between them.


What do you think was so important about the Mob?

The Mob were important for us because they were like a musical version of KYPP. In terms of wider importance it is difficult to say. The Mob were part of the scene and offered a creative alternative to the restrictions imposed by the identification of Crass with 'anarcho-punk'.


Were there other bands as close to the collective as the Mob?

Probably not, but variously Blood and Roses, Hagar the Womb, Brigandage, the Turdburglars, the Barracudas, Zos Kia, Flowers in the Dustbin, Charge, the Associates, Rubella Ballet... it was a shifting mix of relationships between members of the collective and individual members of bands rather than between 'the collective' and 'the groups'.

At the time, did you relate to much of the other anarcho bands?

Thinking about it, and with reference to 10. above, the question misunderstands the situation at the time (1979/ 85). What there was a punk version of the UK/ London late sixties/ early seventies counterculture where there were several thousand self-confessed punks, with a concentration in London. Within the counterculture there was no clear boundary between 'audience' and 'performers', between fanzine writers and fanzine readers. I remember this most clearly from gigs when one group stopped playing they would get off the stage and return to the audience whilst the next group to play would step out of the audience and onto the stage (sometimes there wasn't even a stage). The Kill Your Pet Puppy 'collective' were indistinguishable from the 'punk collective'.


How would you describe the Centro Iberico to someone today?

The Centro Iberico was a place where the Do It Yourself ethic of punk prevailed, where anarchist theory was everyday practice. Where there was no boundary between audience and performers. This was challenging - there was no-one in charge so for something to happen (e.g. to build a stage and wire it up) those with enthusiasm to make it happen, had to enthuse enough others to get the job done. There was no 'product of alienated labour', no 'spectacle' to be 'passively consumed'. The biggest challenge was how change attitudes - how to persuade alienated youth not to trash place and get them to realise they 'owned' it. It was a problem punks with a squatting background had faced many times before... The Centro Iberico was about what happens after the revolution. How do we find ways to move from destruction of the old world to the creation of a new one? I remember the experience as exhilarating and liberating - the closest equivalent being the atmosphere on Claremont Road in 1993/4 during the M11 Road Protest Campaign. See http://www.geocities.com/londondestruction/claremont.html for a bit of historic background




How did you get involved with All The Madmen?

My involvement began in the kitchen of Puppy Mansions, Westbere Road, West Hampstead, London in early 1983. Mark Wilson of the Mob was there and he mentioned the idea of the Mob making an album. At the time I was being trained as a ‘Project Engineer’ by the London Rubber Company (makers of Durex condoms) so I applied a bit of the theory I was learning to the problem - break down a project into small do-able units and cost/ time them. So Mark began scribbling down the costs etc. of making an album on a scrap of paper - cost of studio time, cost of mastering disc, cost of art work, printing costs, pressing costs - which he knew from the Mob producing their own records like Witch Hunt.

Mark then managed to get Rough Trade (who distributed the Mob’s singles and knew that their ‘No Doves Fly Here’ single on Crass’ label had been a best seller) interested. Rough Trade told Mark that if he could finance the recording costs, they would cover the other costs in return for a distribution deal.

Mark then got myself and others (Mick Lugworm for example) to contribute to the recording costs and the Mob went into the studio and made the record - Let the Tribe Increase. With the help of Tony D. , Mick Mercer and other fanzine writers who were now writing for music papers (NME, Sounds, Melody Maker) and magazines like Zig Zag and Punk Lives, the album got rave reviews and sold well beyond expectations. This meant that by the end of 1983, the Mob had several thousands pounds held in credit by Rough Trade. Mark had the idea of using this money to put out records by other groups on their All the Madmen label and asked me to help manage the project. This I did, though it meant going from being paid £90 a week at London rubber to getting £15 a week …

Unfortunately, after releasing ‘The Mirror Breaks’ as a single, the Mob then split up. None of the other groups (The Astronauts, Flowers in the Dustbin and Zos Kia) on the label were able to sell more than the 1000 copies of their records needed to break even… so the money slowly began to run out. See following questions for next part of this story.


Who were Clair Obscur and how did they wind up on the label?
What was the story with their live LP?

I can’t answer these questions, I had parted company with All the Madmen by the time they were on the label.

Who were Zos Kia and how did you know them?

Zos Kia were a Psychic TV spin off group and in their early days crossed over with Coil. Psychic TV (1981) in turn came out of Throbbing Gristle who were contemporary (1976) with punk. Genesis P. Orridge of TG/ PTV lived in Beck Road in Hackney and there was a strange cross-over between Brougham Road (a squatted street where Mark of the Mob and many others including briefly former Bader-Meinhof gang member Astrid Proll lived and with a link to the original hippy-traveller Ukrainian Mountain Troupe group) and TG/ PTV…

Min was the direct link, she was ‘sort of’ a KYPP collective member, I first met her at a Mob gig at Parliament Hill Fields/ Hampstead Heath in summer 1981- which was also our first encounter with the Mob themselves. Another link was through Mouse, who was briefly a member of PTV and a friend of Coil.

Anyhow, through the various overlaps and connections, Zos Kia put out their single Rape on All the Madmen.

What was the “Rape” 7” about? I remember it being extremely shocking at the time.

The words of Rape were a graphic description by Min of when she was raped in the Australian outback whilst on a family holiday there. I am not sure how old she was at the time, about 14 I think. It was a traumatic experience. I cannot forget her describing it to me a couple of years before the record came out. She later told me she only listened to the record once. It was a personal exorcism. It is still intense and powerful, far more so than the ‘distanced’ explorations of extreme realities of other PTV or TG songs. After touring with Zos Kia, Min became a traveller and was at the Beanfield (Stonehenge Peace Convoy) police riot in 1985.


What were your main duties running the label?

I was the only employee / manager so had to do everything.. I did the marketing and promotion, kept the accounts and paid VAT, hung out at recording sessions, replied to fan letters, organised printing and pressing, liaised with Rough Trade/ the Cartel ( co-operative distribution network). Boring stuff.

Did you enjoy running the label?

Yes I did. Way back in 1972, long before punk, I became a fan of Hawkwind (after hearing their single Silver Machine and In Search of Space album). Hawkwind and the Pink Fairies were part of the late sixties/ early seventies UK counterculture and I wanted to be part of that… but by 76/7 punk was the scene and I wanted to be part of that as well. Running All the Madmen in 1984 and being part of the Puppy Collective seemed to me to be the fulfilment of my teenage dreams… the Mob were like Hawkwind/ Pink Fairies ( or the Sex pistols and Clash) and KYPP like International Times and OZ or Sniffing Glue.

But then the reality was also a necessary disenchantment/ disillusionment. Like the Gertrude Stein said about Los Angeles - ‘when you get there, there is no there there’. In theory I was ‘there’ at the heart of anarcho-punk, of the early eighties ‘post’ punk counterculture … but it seemed strangely empty .

How did Rob Challice wind up running ATM? Why did you quit?

I did not quit, I was asked to leave by Joseph (with the support of Curtis) of the Mob who got annoyed when he asked Rough Trade for some Mob money and was told that I was the only person who had access to the funds. Which is fair enough, since no formal agreement about how money earned by the Mob via the deal with Rough Trade should be paid out had been worked out. They left a letter on my desk saying Rob Challice was now in charge of ATM. I took this as a dismissal / redundancy letter. The only thing which annoyed me about this was that it meant that the Anarcha and Poppy record never got released. I thought this was a brilliant piece of music which should have been released… which it now has been.


Between the KYPP, ATM, Centro Iberico, etc. what do you think was your main interest and your best memories of the times?

My main interest was Kill Your Pet Puppy. I thought it was brilliant then and I still do. I put it up there with sixties counterculture magazines like International Times and OZ. Fuck Crass and their idiot ilk, KYPP was the real thing, they were just background noise. KYPP was PUNK. ATM and the Centro Iberico were interesting asides to KYPP and to the evolution of punk and I am proud that I was part of them. But when it comes to punk as revolutionary, as visionary, as creativity, as ‘be realistic: demand the impossible’ - it was KYPP which demanded the impossible and delivered it as reality.


How do you reflect back on those days?

OH! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!--Oh! times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!

As Wordsworth described the French Revolution. Our Revolution was inspired by the French revolution of May 1968, by the Situationists, by the Surrealists, by the Doors, by the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, by Patti Smith, by David Bowie and Marc Bolan, by the Pink Fairies, by the Sex Pistols, by… the Mob, Blood and Roses, Charge, by Adam and the Ants, by punk… but not Crass…

How do you reflect back on that music scene?

Ooops, think I have answered this above. Zounds, Rubella Ballet, … Hagar the Womb. Look Mummy, Clowns. But we also listened to the Human League and Soft Cell (well I did!) to Killing Joke and the Pop Group, to Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Psychedelic Furs, to Syd Barrett and the Misunderstood, Bow Wow Wow and the Slits, to Joy Division and New Order …. We were not bound to the constraints of ‘anarcho-punk’. We were anarchists, we were punks but the very act of such self-description destroyed the narrow boundaries of ‘anarcho-punk’ and librated us to create a ‘music scene’ beyond the puritanical constraints of ‘anarcho-punk’ as defined by Crass and their clones.

Hackney anti-road flyer 1992

Here is a flyer from the Hackney No Through Roads camapign 1992(?)

Centro Iberico flyer 1982

This is a flyer Tony made for Centri Iberico in March 198. A bit of real history!

William Blake sez Fug off

Further to A Touch of Hysteria (see below) Gerard has just told me that after Flowers in the Dustbin he was in a group called First of May in Brighton who used William Blake's Garden of Love lyric for one of their songs. So I had a quick check on who else had used Blake - apart from the Doors /End of the Night and Suzi Pinns/ Jerusalem (on Jubilee soundtrack) and found that The Fugs did. But who were the Fugs?

Check http://www.thefugs.com/home.html
for details. But meanwhile here the first part of The History of the Fugs 1964-65
from their website :

I rented a former Kosher meat store on East 10th Street in late-1964, with groovy tile walls and chicken-singeing equipment which I transformed into a vegetarian literary zone called the Peace Eye Bookstore. I left the words "Strictly Kosher" on the front window.

Next door above the Lifschutz wholesale egg market lived Tuli Kupferberg, a beat hero who was featured in anthologies such as The Beat Scene, and who published several fine magazines, Birth and Yeah, which he sold on the streets of the East and West Village. I had published Tuli's poetry in my literary journal, Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts.

The term "folk-rock" had not been invented in late-1964 when I approached Tuli, after a poetry reading, about forming a rock group. Tuli eagerly assented, and was the one who came up with the name, the Fugs, borrowed from the euphemism in Normal Mailer's novel, The Naked and the Dead.

We drew inspiration for the Fugs from a long and varied tradition, going all the way back to the dances of Dionysus in the ancient Greek plays and the "Theory of the Spectacle" in Aristotle's Poetics, and moving forward to the famous premier performance of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi in 1896, to the poèmes simultanés of the Dadaists in Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, to the jazz-poetry of the Beats, to Charlie Parker's seething sax, to the silence of John Cage, to the calm pushiness of the Happening movement, the songs of the Civil Rights movement, and to our concept that there was oddles of freedom guaranteed by the United States Constitution that was not being used.

Tuli and I began to write songs at a fevered pace. We created at least 50 or 60 between us. Soon we asked a friend, Ken Weaver, to join the Fugs. Weaver had been a drummer in his high school band, and brought fine song-writing skills and stage presence to our performances.

Steve Weber and Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders were friends, and agreed to perform at the grand opening of the Peace Eye Bookstore in February of 1965. They also joined in with the Fugs, our world premiere, at that party. Peace Eye was very packed; Andy Warhol had done cloth wall banners of his flowers image, and literati as diverse as William Burroughs, George Plimpton and James Michener were on hand for the premier croonings of "Swinburne Stomp" and other Fugs ditties.

First Album
We knew the famous filmmaker and artist Harry Smith, who had produced one of the most influential collections in history, The Anthology of American Folk Music for Folkways Records in 1952. It had influenced an entire generation of singers. Harry came to many early Fugs shows, and brought our attention to Moe Asch of Folkways, who agreed to issue our first album.

The first Fugs recording session, in April of 1965, featured Sanders, Kupferberg, Weaver, plus Steve Weber and Peter Stampfel. Some of the tunes on the first Fugs album came from the 23 tunes recorded on this session.

The second Fugs recording session occurred in June of 1965. Its purpose was to create a demo tape for Verve/Folkways, a new label. On this second session were Sanders, Kupferberg, and Weaver, with John Anderson on bass, Vinny Leary on guitar, and Steve Weber. Peter Stampfel did not perform on the second session.
I listened to the tapes over and over, for both sessions, selecting a sequence of tunes, and then Harry Smith and I edited the album. I wrote some notes and it was ready to be released.

Performing
The Fugs began appearing in galleries, clubs and theaters in New York City beginning in early 1965. They sang, for instance, at the opening party for the new location of Izzy Young's Folklore Center on 6th Avenue. They performed a number of times at Diane Di Prima's American Theater for Poetry on East 4th St. And they began a series of midnight concerts at the Bridge Theater on St. Mark's Place, which were always packed.

First Tour
In the fall of 1965 the Fugs headed out on their first cross-country tour, part of an anti-Vietnam War protest, and performed here and there at colleges, and while in San Francisco did concerts with the great bard Allen Ginsberg, the Mothers of Invention, Country Joe and the Fish, and other bands. The Fugs then consisted of Sanders, Kupferberg, Weber and Weaver.

We returned to the Lower East Side in our Volkswagen bus in the late fall to find that our first album, titled The Village Fugs-- Ballads and Songs of Contemporary Protest, Points of View and General Dissatisfaction had been released by Folkways Records.

Determined to Thrive
The Fugs returned to New York with very little position in the world of music, but determined to make their mark. We felt a little like Rastignac at the end of Balzac's Pere Goriot, standing at the summit of Pere-Lachaise cemetery, looking down upon Paris and hurling out a determination to thrive and survive. We vowed to live from our art, to have fun and party continuously, and to get our brains on tape.
It wasn't going to be easy. We were challenging the system on several levels, and yet we were determined somehow to survive in the economic apparatus of the system. We knew there would be trouble; in fact there already was trouble. The police raided Peace Eye Bookstore a few hours after a midnight New Year's Eve (1965-'66) concert at the Bridge Theater. They seized copies of my magazine and I was arrested. The ACLU, to my lasting gratitude, took my case, which I ultimately won after a trial in the summer of 1967.

We began performing at the Cafe Au Go Go on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, where we shared bills with Danny Kalb, Al Kooper and the Blues Project, with the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, and with a young man named Richie Havens, who sat bent over close to his guitar singing Bob Dylan's tunes sometimes better than Bob Dylan.
At the end of 1965, Steve Weber left the Fugs. We ran ads in the East Village Other and Village Voice for a replacement and found Pete Kearney, a guitarist who worked at the New York University bookstore. Pete Kearney had a gravelly, high tenor harmony which can be studied on "Coming Down" on this CD. He looked good on stage. We sometimes called him "Bomb Eyes," because they had a haunting combination of wastedness and wildness.

A Deal with a Record Company
We met a human being named Bernard Stollman who owned a record company called ESP Disk, which his parents were bankrolling for him. We lunched at a vegetarian restaurant by Union Square, and worked out a tentative deal. The Fugs very badly wanted an Off-Broadway Theater where we could set up scenery and lights to work our tunes and routines. ESP agreed to acquire us a theater, and we agreed to record an album for them.

And, again without any outside help, such as a lawyer, we signed a strange, shackling contract. We had signed a strange deal with Folkways, and the deal with ESP was stranger. For example, the ESP royalty rate was 25 cents per album, regardless of the retail price, which in 1966 was $5.00 per unit. The 25 cents included both publishing and recording royalties, so our royalty rate was less than 3%, one of the lower percentages in the history of western civilization.

A Touch of Hysteria on vinyl at last

A Touch of Hysteria

Don’t believe a word that I say in the following until you have heard the record. To get the record, contact

Kerry Taylor
1 Beck Nook
Stavele
Kendal
Cumbria
LA8 9ND

Telephone 01539 822 088

Looking back over the anarcho- goth- punk pages of Greengalloway they sometimes read more like another sociology lecture or a history of a sub-sub culture. As if it was all ‘No Fun’ -to quote those sell-out capitalist corporate glam pub rockers the Sex Pistols on their version of The Stooges classic sixties anthem…

Were we all musical masochists, subjecting ourselves to the ear-splitting racket of groups whose anarchist ideals never got beyond the ‘can’t play, won’t play’ stage? What on earth possessed us to waste our youth tramping the back streets of London, A to Z in hand, in search of grungy squatted venues in order to have a ‘bad time’?

Reading Ian Glasper’s history of anarcho-punk (The Day the Country Died) twenty five years on , I began to wonder if I should have put more effort into my career in the rubber sex- wear industry [condoms not catsuits] ?

But then Kerry Taylor sent me a copy of a vinyl e.p. by A Touch of Hysteria. It was recorded in 1983 . I have to confess a sense of dread possessed me as I put it on the turntable. I had just been listening to a few of the ‘classic’ tracks recommended by Ian Glasper - like Dirt’s ‘Resist Refuse’ - and was not sure if my middle-aged self could cope with more of the such appalling rubbish. I braced myself and…

… did a mental double-take. I even swore out loud: “Fucking hell, this is good stuff.”. .. and then “Shit, this is better than just good, this is really good - it is musical. It is tuneful!”. I kept playing the record over and over again (much to my teenage kids annoyance). It was as if I could not quite believe my own ears.

I am listening to the record again as I write this, trying to work out why it should have come as such a revelation. I think the answer is ‘punk’. In fact I am sure the answer is ‘punk’. It sounds like, its is punk. Not postpunk, not anarcho punk, not goth punk, not new wave not anything other than 100% pure punk rock as in -for example- the Adverts. Or the Ruts . Or Zounds. Or even - to push the boundaries a bit, the Members. I loved the Members. I loved X-Ray Spex, Penetration… the whole imaginative expansion/ explosion of punk beyond the Pistols/Clash core to which it has since been reduced.

Punk as a ‘vague’ (thanks Tom) attitude and way of life rather than fixed and defined musical genre/ popular subculture. Punk as vague and undefined as ‘anarchy’ is. What is anarchy? Chaos and confusion? Or creativity and liberation? Punk was anarchic, but anarchists were not punks. Anarchists, like Crass claimed to be, are deeply moral, almost puritanical. Anarchists do not need the state to lay down the law, they do that for themselves. As Crass themselves put it ‘They can call it (anarchy) freedom, but slavery is the game’. [I think that is a joke, but maybe it isn’t].

The anarchy of punk was that of chaos and creative confusion, not the quasi-religious puritanical moral anarchism of Crass and 99% of ‘anarcho-punk’. Or that is how I see it now. Back then in the creative and chaotic confusion of punk it was difficult to see Crass as the ’priests in black gowns’ described by William Blake in this poem:

The Garden of Love
I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this chapel were shut,
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be,
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.


Too extreme? No doubt. But then listen to and compare this record with most of which passes for ’anarcho-punk’ and weep for what might have been. But then laugh with A Touch of Hysteria. Punk lives in the strangest places ( like Cumbria). Crass couldn’t kill the spirit, we are like a mountain, we go on and on…