Exiled: Bad Breeding.

Artwork by Nicky Rat.

I was alerted to Stevenage art activist collective Bad Breeding about a year ago by John of Girls In Synthesis, in an interview he commented ‘ I love Bad Breeding, they’re the best group I’ve heard in years. They’re a lot more hardline than us, both musically and lyrically, but I’m from a similar suburban area of Hertfordshire as them, so I identify with the way they project their frustrations’ (1). Obviously a man who knows his music! Bad Breeding released their first album, S/T, in 2016, then Divide the following year, an EP ‘Abandonment’ followed in 2018 and their eagerly awaited new album Exiled is out on 21 June. The band made three tracks available on Bandcamp pre-release, each track part of a statement of resistance, but more than than a statement of resistance, ‘a call to arms’ (2) in the continuing class war being waged by the rich against an already battered working class.Taking elements of hardcore punk and making it fit for purpose Bad Breeding are not about reproducing punk’s posturing; they know the difference between rebellious and revolutionary. Approach Bad Breeding as a radical art collective rather than conventional band, more in the line of Henry Cow, Crass, Gnod and the aforementioned GIS. Their releases are multidisciplinary art(efacts) not just albums, constructed and presented to facilitate the reader/viewer/listener in their political journey, a wakeup call to those lulled by the soporific effects of late capitalism’s ‘spectacle’. Neoliberalism’s greatest trick is its anonymity and its excluding of discussion of alternatives from the mainstream, to quote Mark Fisher (quoting Jameson/Zizek) ‘It’s easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism’ (3)...except Bad Breeding can! Their releases are structured to be both material for, and an avenue into, meaningful political conversation and action around radical left alternatives to ‘what is’.
Exiled lands in a UK that, to quote Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil, is in ‘interesting times’, I'd say ‘interesting’, is a euphemism for ‘shit’. Like Thatcher on speed the last nine years of Tory government has seen increases in poverty, inequality, homelessness, child poverty, the underfunding of public services and, according to the UN, systematic breaching of the human rights of the disabled (4). In a recent interview Chris Dodd, singer with the band, commented about the new album, “Exiled is very much a document of the impact of neoliberalism on a working-class community. It was written during a period in which calculated austerity measures have continued to bite with a prolonged intensity - you think of reaching a ‘breaking point’ but it never comes, we just keep hitting new lows of poverty and degradation and sucking it up...Our town (Stevenage) is a real victim of a global, systematic inequality - the rule not the exception. Lyrically it’s blunt in its description of material working-class concerns and is something that spells out the impact austerity has had on our community, as opposed to where the individual fits into the stifling mess of late capitalism” (2).
Exiled is 12 tracks of compassion fueled fury, anger at the deliberate construction of suffering and immiseration but it’s never black, there is always hope and optimism laced though, born of the bands involvement with grassroots activism, resistance and solidarity. Recorded by Ben Greenberg of Uniform (who Bad Breeding tour with in July) the album starts with ‘Exiled’, a ferocious hardcore track,

“Exiled, but choked for all to see
And I used to dread the thought of trauma, now it circles every day
Waiting in the wings, prowling like a stalking horse
See nature knows of hardship… at least it has its use
This is suffering as a construct - man’s longest-running gag”.

Next track up ‘Repossession’, chilling. Somehow the combination of music and vocals communicates the sense of fraught anxiety that pervades the lives of those pushed to the edges of precarity.

‘Raking Through the Screed’, is hardcore at it’s best as Dodd confronts the condescending pity of liberal poverty tourism;

“Shallow badges squeeze my plight
Preening tourists line the sides
Damp in the ceiling
mould spored and grey
Raking through the screed”.

OK, did I say ‘Raking Through the Screed’ was hardcore at it’s best? This is equally good! Good partner track to Test Dept’s ‘Landlord’ as Bad Breeding go for private landlords and their exploitation of those forced into the private rented sector in ‘Clear Blue Water’.

“It started with a shake down, one-up sport
Now I do my work with faux cross in hand
spend my nights laughing at the blighted flats
Shine ‘em up and flip ‘em around
A quarry blessed by blinkered fools,
our prize the labour of provincial scum
from stove, to mattress, to grave…
Swimming in the clear blue water”.

Next track up is one of the pre release tracks ‘Whose Cause?’. Chris Dodd commented that the track ‘explores political misdirection in the media and its role in sowing seeds of division, suspicion and distrust in our communities by using identity as a means of fear’ (2). The video is worth checking out too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC6mc7UFAb8

Precarious work, zero hours contracts, the devastation of war, homelessness, (with both ‘Theatre of Work’ and ‘A Rag Hung Between Two Trees’ shot through with intense unsettling saxophone from Lewis Evans), police brutality in 'Breaking Wheel';

“One more head to the pavement
Keeper of nothing but yourself
When pressure fails, call on the boot
Distrust cloaked by just pursuit
Approval in only the thin and blue
Keeper of nothing but yourself
Violence and intimidation
the only measures of your control”.

The album ends with ‘Tortured Reality’; intense, exhilarating, anxious.

“Thinning walls part sense and hysteria
The tired cling to the gloss of nostalgia
There is comfort in the spectre of nation
Gather the weary running blind
No war pure enough to peel the wool from their eyes
But for all your books built on blood
have you ever had to count the bodies?”.

If you can imagine G.L.O.S.S fronted by Paddy Shine with lyrics by Mark Fisher you won’t be too far out; Exiled is an extraordinary piece of work.

Exiled is out on One Little Indian Records on 21 June! 

Bibliography.
(1)http://musicculturevision.blogspot.com/2018/06/girls-in-synthesis-interview.html
(2)http://musicculturevision.blogspot.com/2019/06/bad-breeding-educate-organise-agitate.html
(3)Fisher, M. (2009) ‘Capitalist Realism: Is There Really No Alternative?’ Zero Books, Winchester, UK and Washington, USA.
(4)Butler, P. (2016) ‘UK austerity policies’amount to violations of disabled people’s rights’ https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/nov/07/uk-austerity-policies-amount-to-violations-of-disabled-peoples-rights
also referenced Division Promotions PR by Gardner, N.

Bad Breeding: Educate, Organise, Agitate.

Artwork by Nicky Rat. Image courtesy of BB.

More left wing art activist collective than conventional punk band Stevenage based Bad Breeding released their first album, S/T, in 2016 with Louder Than War giving it a massive 8/10 thumbs up (1). Keeping up a work rate as intense as their music Bad Breeding released Divide the following year and have their new album Exiled out on 21 June. The band have made three tracks available on Bandcamp pre-release; ‘Exiled’, ‘Whose Cause’ and ‘Theatre of Work’, each track part of a statement of resistance against the continuing class war euphemistically termed ‘austerity’; the Tories final eradication of the material/bureaucratic legacy of post war social democracy. Taking elements of hardcore punk and making it fit for purpose in 2019 (‘Theatre of Work’ includes some extraordinary saxophone), Bad Breeding eschew the empty posturings of ersatz rebellion instead constructing and presenting their releases as both material for, and as an avenue into, meaningful political conversation and action around radical left alternatives to ‘what is’.
With excitement building around the release of Exiled later this month and a tour with Uniform at the end of July, Echoes and Dust talked with singer Chris Dodd to find out more about the band, their motivations and their music.

Your first release S/T came out in 2016, you then released Divide in 2017 and the EP 'Abandonment' in 2018 with Exiled out this June. Have you found the subject matter you engage with has changed over the releases?
Divide stands out as the record that was more conceptual than the others as we sought to challenge the narrative surrounding the nature of the EU referendum - not really in terms of ‘Leave’ or ‘Remain’, but more in opposition to the political misdirection and self-interest that hung over much of 2016. Lyrically I’ve always felt I’ve been writing about the enduring issues that have dogged working-class communities ever since Thatcher, and have been significantly more apparent in places like Stevenage since austerity measures crept in under Blairite guidance and continued to become ideologically more pernicious under the Conservatives.

Is there a sense of the four releases having a continuity, being a body of work or are they more a stand alone documenting of a period, of your response to a certain set of political/social events?
Apart from the S/T, which stood as a collection of ideas and songs we’d been building up when we first started out, the other three releases were written in fairly short timeframes and were always responses to the material realities we’ve had to contend with in Stevenage. Divide stepped beyond that to discuss a very particular point in time, whereas Exiled is very much a document of the impact of neoliberalism on a working-class community. It was written during a period in which calculated austerity measures have continued to bite with a prolonged intensity - you think of reaching a ‘breaking point’ but it never comes, we just keep hitting new lows of poverty and degradation and sucking it up. The record is a portrayal of a town at the fag-end of bourgeois concerns. People only tend to talk about this place through a patronising liberal lens focused on pity and preening poverty tourism. We wanted to make a record that stood in defiance of the virtue signalling that tends to infect so many discussions about towns like ours. This is a real place. Not a distant invented trope in the armoury of shallow liberal gesturing. Our town is a real victim of a global, systematic inequality - the rule not the exception. Lyrically it’s blunt in its description of material working-class concerns and is something that spells out the impact austerity has had on our community, as opposed to where the individual fits into the stifling mess of late capitalism, because we need to be blunt. This isn’t a request for sympathy, it’s a call to arms.

I’ve read a couple of books recently about the Russian Constructivists (2) and left Post-Punk (3) and both groups explored cultural production and form around the question of ‘What does a socialist process of production look like?’ Egalitarian democracy? The evidencing of production as a socially dynamic process? What does the process of production look like in Bad Breeding?
The early work of someone like Vladimir Tatlin is a decent starting point for the idea of art with a social function in that it rejects the notion of individual pursuit. I think in a lot of cases we’re now facing similar battles in the conflict between class and identity in contemporary times. Our early releases were put out off our own backs with the help of close friends. I think that focus on a small community self-producing has been a guiding principle ever since. Capitalism has infected, poisoned and contorted all that we do nowadays and confronting that is a constant ideological and practical concern at the forefront of our minds when writing, recording, making artwork and also releasing records.
At the heart of it all there needs to be a focus on community and social purpose, whether that be in artwork designing or doing fundraising, collecting and organising work for local groups in conjunction with shows or record releases.
Of course any kind of social event can be recuperated by capitalism and sold back to us. Look at the transition of rave culture from the national tabloid scandal of young people getting together to open their hearts to each other with the help of restricted substances to the super-clubs with VIP areas, celebrity DJs, where you’re charged an hour’s wages for a drink and working-class clothing is banned at the door. Obviously we don’t need to chart the journey of punk, which even more than rave, held the seeds of its own capitalist caricature within itself from the start. But assemblies of people remain dangerous to capital, and if the sedition being conveyed by the organisers is real - and in our case it is - it can be infectious. A sense of belonging and being self established outside the logic of profit, if even for a few hours, can stay with someone and blossom or explode at unexpected moments.

The associated question was/is ‘What form and content does the object/cultural product that is a comrade in the struggle for socialism look/sound like and how should it affect the individual and society? What effect do you hope a Bad Breeding song has?
The main focus is on resistance. Not necessarily in the commodified kitsch idea of punk, but instead representing an alternative to the conversations that are so often had about places like Stevenage. Art that reflects the working class is far too often centred purely on stale victimhood and sentimentality. Lyrically I want to produce things that run counter to that. Songs that may sometimes seem knuckle-dragging and overbearing in their depictions of the town, but that stand in defiance of our material conditions instead of bowing to them with art that is essentially accepting of our noxious political and economic climate. The concept of being “punk” isn’t enough, there has to be some sort of collective element to what you’re trying to achieve: paying to go to a show as an individual pursuit, purely to satisfy your own identity, feels like a political dead end. There is no radical resistance in simply consuming music and adopting a disobedient identity. Simply saying “I don’t consent to this” with a t-shirt of a hashtag, is not enough - yet so many of us have swallowed it as being the epitome of rebellion. Action is derided, but performative angst is universally acclaimed. To break out of this trap you need organisation and direction. If you can provide that then there is nothing more productive than a live show full of people committed to the idea of collective power and unity. Shows can become powerful environments that promote solidarity and community-driven inspiration based around the endeavour of the collective. Secondly, alongside side this, there is also the aim for us of using the records as a means of contributing to conversations. Partly the reason why there have always been essays and other pamphlets that come with the physical release of the records is to serve as an entry point for people to read up on towns like Stevenage, while also providing points of debate and argument for others.

In 'Resilience and Melancholy' Robin James seems to be saying, if I understand her correctly, that certain pop music structures parallel values of neoliberalism (4). Has the form of your music been shaped by the concerns of the band, by the subject matter of the songs, kind of ‘form follows function’?
That’s a good question given that the endpoint of what we create musically still sees us take part in a capitalist exchange. You make something and it gets sold on and with it so does the agency and notion of resilience that you’re trying to demonstrate. However pure you feel your intentions are, punk and the idea of opposition have been commodified to such an extent now that it makes little sense to be doing it without wider, organised political aims and objectives. The very notion of rebelling through art is arguably a commodity in itself, long appropriated by neoliberal forces to become just another selling point for a financially lucrative cultural identity, which is either peddled for monetary gain or worn as a means of moralistic gesturing. The petty-bourgeois student rebels of 1968 who captured the imagination of their era went on to use that same efficiency in sloganeering, battle-worn competence in communication to sell us their capitulation and personal freedom for the following decades. You constantly have to be aiming beyond cosmetic subversion if you want to have meaningful political conversations to reach genuinely radical alternatives. I am not saying ‘don’t make music because it’s completely redundant', but I feel like we have to always be thinking about ‘and what else, where is this going and what are we attempting to achieve with it’. That’s why the idea of collective power through shows and politically organising around music is crucial. If you can focus on community and the collective element of bringing like minded people together in a room you can attempt to strip away the dominance and power that capital holds over artistic expression.

The video for ‘Burn This Flag; is really powerful and reminded me of Martha Rosler’s art, in 'The Gray Drape' and 'Cleaning The Drapes' she juxtapositioned American domesticity and the Vietnam War thereby drawing attention to the interconnectedness. In the ‘Burn This Flag’ video you very effectively do a similar thing, was that the intention?
The focus for that video was exploring a way of mirroring the distortion and misdirection carried out by the instruments of a ‘mainstream’ media largely backed by boundless capital and the intentions of a select few. We worked with Roger Sargent to find a way of commenting on that neoliberal trap of confused storytelling, deflection and false narratives, while the complex issues of our time are played out as peripheral events that we are believed to have very little grasp of and can supposedly have little bearing on.

The video to ‘Whose Cause’ is also a really powerful collage of images, could you talk us through it?
That song explores political misdirection in the media and its role in sowing seeds of division, suspicion and distrust in our communities by using identity as a means of fear. We wanted to create a video that touched on the nefarious ties between capital and a pocketed media class and to do that we tried to collage certain elements of working-class struggle and set them amidst examples of capital and state control. The video also tries to hint at the implications reactionary storytelling has on propping up late capitalism and the patrician outriders it funds and protects.

Barthes wrote about the death of the author, that the meaning of a cultural artefact is constructed by the viewer/listener. As an artist is that ever a concern, that people may misunderstand or misinterpret your music?
Not particularly. The intention in this band is to write as a means of resistance against the increasingly suffocating grasp of the conditions we have to navigate every day. The lyrics are measured and come from a very particular place. For me, once they’re finished and put out there that’s me done. They’re presentations, descriptions and reactions to systems that are constructed for the benefit of a small number of self-interested individuals. The point is to be blunt and direct in the face of a world confused and coerced by political distortion.

Capitalism would socialise us into constructing our sense of self from consumption, John Holloway talks about our sense of self being able to emerge from acts of collective creativity (5). Do you experience that tension? Have you found music has helped you derive your sense of self from creativity and community?
The band started as a release from the monotony of exploitative work and we found our grounding from there on, but that’s not to say an interest in community came purely from starting to write music. It has been shaped by the material conditions around us too. To suggest that our sense of self came solely from music would be slightly too individualistic. I don’t think we term this band as a collection of individual pursuits. So partially, yes, forming this band was a direct result of finding a collective release from the confines of abstract and concrete labour that someone like Holloway would be likely to discuss, but I’d also say we have left that era of nebulous ‘anti-capitalism’ well behind - not as a band, but as a society. That turn-of-the-century scepticism towards capitalism that led to slogans like ‘One No, Many Yeses’ and the come-as-you-are concept of a ‘Movement of Movement’ looks quaint and twee from our vantage point. Since then we have had unbelievable imperial carnage in the Middle East, the bursting of the credit bubble that had masked Thatcher and Reagan’s savage attacks on our class, and the final revelation that beyond any shadow of a doubt, the planet is being murdered by our economic mode. People like us will be the earliest victims of all of that. We live in a time of war.

You also emphasise that ‘place’ has played a part in your development as people and as a band, that the band and its music has emerged from a certain set of circumstances. What aspects of Stevenage have been particularly affecting?
When we first started the band we ran with this idea to engage people with what it means to be from a New Town. We put up statements that people had made about Stevenage as being sort of a ‘nothing’ town and wanted to see what kind of descriptions people went with when discussing the music. They essentially ended up being those same statements – excluding a few writers – without any other opinions being offered. It felt like that identity of the town, popularised in the press and in a lot of TV writing, was simply accepted. Stevenage is a difficult place but it’s also a town that shines with a defiant pride in the face of neoliberal destruction and ideological policy designed to punish the most vulnerable sections of our communities. That sort of endurance is something we’ve always been keen to mirror, both on record and when playing live.

I was reading the essays on your webpage (here), in the late 70s/early 80s there was a false dichotomy propagated by Garry Bushell that authentic working class identity excluded higher education (3), the reductive idea of working class identity as excluding education and therefore astute politicisation. Perhaps there is a bit of that in recent criticisms of Idles? Have Bad Breeding had to deal with that sort of nonsense at all, that if you’re intelligent, educated and articulate you can’t really be working class (punks)?
Yeah I think that’s bollocks. We’ve had that happen on one or two occasions but you do what you need to do and tell people how it is. What I would say, though, is that the notion of working class people becoming ‘intelligent’ smacks of liberal condescension. The kind of unidirectional university debates we are told are radical are conducive to the kind of conditions we find ourselves in at the moment, whereby working communities are preached at to the extent where material conditions are ignored at the expense of patronising sneers and dismissive intellectualism from the liberal, predominantly middle-class left, who very rarely have any immediate experience of what they’re commenting on. But at the same time, a lack of university - or any kind of education - is not something to be celebrated. The English working-class tradition is deeply grounded in radical and revolutionary thought that was absolutely self-taught. Marx and Engels formulated theories of socialism based on a pre-existing socialist movement that was led by manual workers who had learned to read by candlelight before heading back to those dark satanic mills before daybreak. They would spit in the face of anyone who claimed intellectual inquiry ran contrary to the identity of the working class. ‘Intelligence’ isn’t simply borne out by a university education. Politicisation may happen at an institution like a university, but it needs a grounding in material realities. You could even argue that universities seem to increasingly be a place where the pursuit of radical, anti-systemic ideas are neutered and nullified into a quest for self discovery and making peace with the status quo. Anything radical that is truly potent must shaped by experience and participation.

Would you identify as a political band, whereabouts would you place yourselves politically or is there a continuing evolving of thought?
I’d like to think this band has the ability to either introduce listeners to certain issues or contribute to arguments around them. Personally I would describe myself as a socialist, but I can’t speak directly for the others involved. As you can see by the work we do and shows that we play around Europe, there is an outwardly antifascist element - playing gigs and fundraising for communities to help stave off the divisional motives of fascistic forces both in the UK and in Europe. Political motivations often get worn as a badge of identity in contemporary guitar music, as well as in liberal politics at large, with very little actually being done on the ground in terms of organising and putting in work at community level. That’s where the battle will ultimately be won against the tide of the far right: by the organised working class on the streets and within communities that are pinned as targets for manipulation.

Your new album is out in June, can you give us any clues about its feel maybe relative to previous releases?
We recorded Exiled over the course of a week in the winter of 2018 having just come back from a month-long tour around Europe. It came together over the course of a month or so and was recorded by Ben Greenberg (Uniform), who did Divide and the ‘Abandonment’ EP too. We took a slight step back from the electronic padding and digital effects on Exiled when compared to Divide and instead tried to capture the nosier elements more naturally - more so by ragging the amps and using natural feedback to create layers in the songs. Thematically, Exiled focuses on the impact of neoliberalism on places like Stevenage, where I think large sections of the community have been ignored, but also punished as a matter of ideological course. The piece of writing that accompanied the announcement of the record provides an idea of what’s explored lyrically throughout the record. (read here).

Looking forward to seeing you for the first time at Electrowerkz in July, how did the tour with Uniform come about?
We’ve done some shows with Uniform before, sharing festival bills in Europe just after we released Divide in 2017. We’ve known Ben for years having made three records together so it was a fairly easy choice to decide to play together when they were next over in the UK.

Are there any bands or writers you are enjoying at the moment?
Subdued are one of my personal favourites. State Funeral are great too. Sound people with great songs. I’ve not long finished Michael Parenti’s To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, which is a brilliantly fierce attack on the reach of US imperialism and the role of NATO in the bombing of Yugoslavia. Parenti strikes me as one of the very few Marxist writers who remains dangerously revolutionary amidst the wash of celebrity socialists that dominate popular academia. Having said that, one of the most touching and thought-provoking things I’ve read in recent years will always be Exiting the Vampire Castle by the late Mark Fisher. Anybody who perceives themselves as being on the ‘Left’ needs to read it and take a good hard look at themselves in respect of how they’re really contributing to solidarity and comradeship in the face of late capitalism. (read here)


Thanks to Chris and to James Sherry at Division Promotions for organising interview.
Interview by email.

Bibliography.
(1)Whyte, J. (2016) Bad Breeding: S/T-album review. https://louderthanwar.com/bad-breeding-st-album-review/

(2)Kiaer, C. (2005) ‘Imagine No Possessions. The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism’ The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA.

(3)Wilkinson, D. (2016) ‘Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain’, Palgrave Macmillan, London.

(4)James, R. (2014) ‘Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism’, Zero Books, Winchester UK and Washington, USA.

(5)Holloway, J. (2005) ‘Change the World Without Taking Power’, Pluto Press, London and New York.

Revenge of the She-Punks: A Feminist Music History from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot. Vivien Goldman.

Vivien Goldman has certainly packed alot into her life so far! Musician (she was in The Flying Lizards and has an album coming out later this year), journalist, an adjunct professor of music, author of five, no make that six, books, talking head on TV and radio and I’m pretty sure, when I was at an exhibition in Brixton recently, I heard her in a trailer for an upcoming documentary I Am a Cliche about Poly Styrene! Her recently published book Revenge of the She-Punks is as energetic and full of life as I imagine the author must be!

Revenge of the She-Punks races along; entertaining, invigorating, informative and, if I’m honest, at times a little frustrating, it is a book on a mission! It’s stated aim is to present ‘A Feminist Music History from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot’ and it pulls it off. Structuring the book thematically around identity, money, love/unlove and protest enables Goldman to join the dots up between a multiplicity of artists across time and space, seeing the similarities in struggles for equality, community, safety and freedom at various times and in various places

The book starts off each chapter with a playlist along the theme of that section, first up being ‘Girly Identity’, songs listed include ‘Identity’ by X-Ray Spex and Big Joanie’s ‘Dream Number 9’. Dominating the first few pages of the chapter proper is the insightful, inspiring Poly Styrene of course, at a recent exhibition of art(efacts) around Poly an introductory text included ‘she questioned her own identity, how the world saw her, how she saw herself and the ways in which identity labels would affect personal freedom and self expression’ (1), this book explores some of those questions in and through the life of Poly Styrene. Next up is Debbie Harry, before a section on The Raincoats including the intriguing comment ‘...the Raincoats were so good at answering that primal question ‘What might women’s music sound like, if it were different from the bloke’s?’, fast forward to Riot Grrrl and Bikini Kill in particular. Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Tamar-kali and Big Joanie are up next tackling issues of race, gender and class. Delta 5, Bush Tetras, Fea, the book never takes a breath as it charges on! But I had to, and when I did I wondered ‘Was the quote above essentialist? Does music created by women come from a different place from music made by men? Probably, due to different social experiences, so how would class/ethnicity impact on that? If we understand and express ourselves through the cultural resources available to us, what would the biggest influences on music be…?

Next section up is entitled ‘Money’ with a playlist ranging from 1975’s ‘Free Money’ by Patti Smith to Pussy Riot’s ‘Kropotkin Vodka’ (2012). The chapter starts with Goldman shopping with Patti Smith who has come into some money due to the success of Horses and treats her friend  to a new jacket. Goldman laces the book with anecdotes and her own conversations with some of the musicians who feature, but this never comes across as name dropping or egotistical as their inclusion always serves the purpose of the book. The chapter continues like the first, on a whirlwind tour of female musicians and their relationship to money and material life more generally. German band Malaria!, ESG from USA, Shonen Knife from Japan, then over to the UK for The Slits and then fast forward in time to Pussy Riot and then the UK again for Maid of Ace.

Revenge of the She-Punks’ third section is titled ‘Love/Unlove’ and of all the chapters is possibly the least well defined as it ranges over questionings of bourgeois constructs of romantic love, sex and sexuality. The chapter also touches on sexual violence and this is where it could possibly have done with a little more thought, after including a controversial comment from Chrissie Hynde’s autobiography a page or so later Goldman writes ‘The whole Riot Grrrl movement began because of a home invasion and the rape of Kathleen Hanna’s roommate. With men ever less sure of their place in society, violence against women only increases…’ (p.104) an (in the book) unsupported and odd comment especially as forty pages later, when writing about a Kashmiri band, Pragaash who had a fatwa issued against them, she writes ‘Indeed the Mufti thundered about ‘westernization’ and accused Pragaash of being part of a process of liberalization, which he claimed had led to the sharp rise in abuses ranging from mass rapes to acid thrown in women’s faces to the trafficking of child brides in the mountains of Pakistan. The Guardian reported, ‘(The Mufti’s accusations) outraged many who believed...sexual violence is the result of deep rooted cultural misogyny’ (p.145). I am still struggling to see clear water between Goldman’s comment and the Mufti’s, both seem to be claiming that cultural and societal changes (that impact on relationships between sexes) have led to an increase in sexual violence, although she clearly views the Cleric’s views negatively. Maybe I’m misunderstanding her. The chapter features sections on Crass, Indonesian band The Dissidents, Alice Bag and Grace Jones. Plus a playlist including Tribe 8, The Au Pairs and Neneh Cherry.

Chapter 4 ’Protest' is, for me, the most important section of the whole book. Starting off with Pragaash and Vinyl Records the chapter highlights the struggles of female musicians in oppressive  patriarchal societies. ‘Punk is still on the barricades’ Goldman writes, using Indonesia and Russia to illustrate that ‘... authoritarian regimes understand that punk’s quintessential raw primitivism is a threat to their control’ (p.148).  She goes on to write about Sleater-Kinney, Czech band Zuby Nehty amd Spanish punks Las Vulpes. Also included are Pauline Black and the Selector, Jayne Cortez and a section on the intriguing, wonderful Vi Subversa and the Poison Girls. The chapter ends with a final piece of global time travel as the book moves between seventies Nigeria (Sandra Izsadore), contemporary London’s Skinny Girl Diet and Columbian band Fertil Miseria.

Revenge of the She-Punks pulls off its stated remit of educating the reader about the rich and diverse history of feminist and female musicians from Poly Styrene (and Lora Logic) of X-Ray Spex to contemporary bands like Skinny Girl Diet. Vivien Goldman’s encyclopedic knowledge of punk and global music plus (I imagine) a lot of research and hard work has produced an exciting, inspiring and thought provoking book that should be an important weapon in women’s ongoing battle for equality, space and freedom.    

Bibliography.
(1)Identity! A Poly Styrene Retrospective. 'Curators Intro' by C. Bell and M. Loyce.
Quotes from Goldman, V. (2019) ‘Revenge of the She-Punks: A Feminist Music History from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot’. University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas USA.  

Where is The Disco in This Town?

Photo courtesy of SSATM.

Formed in 2014 after Semeli Economou and Haraldur Agustsson met while working on a short film, Santa Semeli and the Monks are an eclectic, impossible to pigeon hole band! Having seen them live a couple of times they veer between European avant garde and punk, with echoes of early Bowie, Nick Cave and 'Cabaret' sitting alongside full on rock! Full of honesty and warmth their eponymous album came out in 2014 confronting and engaging with the human condition, the real lived experience that each of us uncomfortably recognizes, dealing with hope, disappointment, love and our own inconsistencies-like listening to the soundtrack of you life-not your Facebook life, your real life-evoking memories that make you smile and wince.
Their diverse songwriting has resulted in an intriguing collection of work that, while being coherent, contains plenty of surprises, the latest being the release of disco track and accompanying video ‘Where is The Disco in This Town?’. Instantly catchy and keying into half remembered hits from the 70s the song/video is a full on postmodern collage of disco.

Your eclectic song writing gives you a lot of options, why did you decide to go for a disco homage release?
I was actually literally looking for the disco when the concept of the song was conceived. A place to go where you can dance and have fun. It was a Saturday night when my friend Aisling came over for us to dress up and go out. I asked her ‘Where is the disco in this town?’ and after a night of adventures and misadventures we came back to my house at 4am when she said to me: ‘You do realise that WE are the disco in this town.’ We met a lot of freaks that night, drunks, people high on drugs telling me they were poetic geniuses, some strange group in a Chinese restaurant etc hence the ‘freak’ middle section in the song.
From a personal aspect, I come from a generation where we used to go out to discotheques. Dress up and dance, often to impress the boy we fancied and then hopefully make out in the corner or during the slow dance section before the club would close. It’s kind of romantic in my mind.
But from a social standpoint it’s an homage to an era where life was more carefree. People would let their hair down and just enjoy themselves. I feel that’s what’s missing in today’s life and as an artist and a storyteller you contemplate what message you want to put out there for the world to hear. I feel that at the moment people need to have their worries unloaded. I can’t do it through changing legislations or solving poverty and other social or personal injustices, but I can maybe cheer people up and make them forget their woes for four and a half minutes.
I wanted to create a song that everyone will hear and feel happy when they do. A happy hit!

I ended up revisiting Sylvester's 'Mighty Real' after listening to 'Where is the disco in this town'! Were there any artists that you felt particularly inspired by when you were writing and recording the song?
I don’t think anyone in particular. It’s probably an amalgamation of many people I like, like Earth, Wind and Fire, the Jacksons, Chic, etc..I wrote the song in one go, words, music and all. We haven’t changed a line or a chord. It’s funny how these things happen.
And the fact that we recorded it in Bryan Ferry’s studio was perfect. You know being surrounded by all these glamorous women on posters on his wall. It gave us the disco seal.

The song and video are light hearted and fun in a time that feels neither, was that a deliberate decision?
Yes. I am a pretty joyous person and I have the ability to convey that joy to my friends and other people I come across in life, so I wanted to extend that embrace to a wider audience. I am a healer and as much as it may sound hippy-dippy or pretentious, I am aware of my abilities and not afraid to use them for the good. I recently read a Picasso quote that brought me to tears. He said: ‘The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.’ It struck such a chord with me because that’s exactly how I feel.  In a world where people are concerned with Instagram followers or asking me what my PR angle is…it’s hard sometimes you know…keeping the discipline and focus intact to retain your purity. That's 98% of the work I do. The 2% is just the execution of it. Shed the light!

Was the 'disco vibe' hard to capture for the video?
Again, it took a lot of mental effort to prepare but then it all came together very quickly and effortlessly. I invited some friends who were available at the time to take part in the music video and there was a spirit of celebration throughout the shoot. Apart from my musicians who are in the video, the rest of the cast all have an interesting background and story. It’s a coming together of people party. So many friends of mine were jealous that they weren’t included in the shoot but I had a time frame and many of them live abroad or weren’t around. I was lucky to have a great team of three cinematographers and a brilliant editor who instinctively always knows what I want and is needed. The wardrobe was mine. If I think about it really my life is not that different from the video. Haha!

Do either of you have a background in drama and dance?
I studied acting and directing but my first love was dance. I wanted to be a ballerina. I nearly went to Moscow as at the age of ten to study under the guidance of legendary Russian prima ballerina Maja Plisetskaya, who was a close family friend but my parents were against it.  In hindsight I think they made the right decision for me. It’s a hard life to be a dancer and most of them retire in their thirties. Looking back, all my idols and crushes as a kid had always been dancers. Never actors or rock stars or whatever. To this day I still have a crush on Bob Fosse who was an incredible director and choreographer. A genius and quite the rascal. My ideal type really.
Haraldur also studied acting and in all fairness he steals the show in the video. The dancing Disco Elf!

The video is very pan European, was that a message you wanted to send? A reminder of how fun things can be when we work and relax together?
Yes I wanted to convey a spirit of unity and collectivism. We are not so different from each other as human beings. We all want more or less the same things in life. It’s things like the news or the media that like to fragment and find PR angles because it sells more. But what’s to sell and for what purpose? You can’t sell peace of mind.

Early Discos were a safe space for black and gay people in a hostile 1970s America. Was the cultural importance of early Disco something you were conscious of when writing the song?  The idea of Disco's historical role as a cultural resource against prejudice?
I don’t think I went that far in my thinking but I had a feeling that Disco was going to make a big come back for the simple reason that there’s not much current music out there that’s made for dancing. If you look around even fashion has caught up now with sequence and glitter and general disco glamour. The disco era wasn’t around for very long and to think that they were burning all the records at some point. I invited someone to our launch from a well known punk band who told me that he was a punk and would not even get through the door past the disco bouncers. I told him that this was punk too but in a different way. He didn’t get it but that’s OK.

How did the ‘on-location’ bits of the video go, how did people respond?!
It was great fun walking up and down Old Compton Street blasting out ‘Where is the Disco in this Town?’ Everyone was filming us and watching the shoot. And then of course there were the alleyways in Soho where we shot the scenes with Phil Dirtbox and Andrjezek playing the freaks. It was very funny because if you put them next to each other, they look like chalk and cheese and yet they’re both great raconteurs and entertainers. And  great mates of mine.

Does the change in the lyrics from 'Where is The Disco in This Town' to 'We are the disco in this town' reflect a realisation that fulfilment is not found in consumerism of the spectacle but in co-operative creativity and community?
When I wrote the song, and I don’t know if people notice it, I wanted to write a song that starts in a minor and ends up in major, i.e hope and resolution. Kind of like a Bach prelude. So yes, WE ARE the disco in this town means that the fun is within us and that there’s no need to seek for outside gratification to find fulfillment. It’s a very yogic approach.
The power of music is awesome and I wanted to create a mantra: WE ARE THE DISCO IN THIS TOWN. Imagine everyone repeating that over and over in their heads and aloud. Imagine the impact it would have!

Check out the song/video here. 
and the single is available here on their website: http://www.santasemeliandthemonks.com/ 

Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain: Interview with David Wilkinson.

At the end of the 70s the initial energy of punk had begun to dissipate, the Sex Pistols had broken up and, with the election of Thatcher, like a drunk getting lost on the way home, Britain stumbled out of social democracy and into neoliberalism, an ideology that over the next 40 years would reshape the UK in it’s own unpleasant image. With the two strands of art college sensibility and raucous singalong present in the first wave of UK punk, and exemplified by the Sex Pistols, coming apart (1) there emerged one of the most innovative and exciting periods in 20th Century music! Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain explores the developing politics of this group of musicians as they evolved and explored their way into the 1980s. Drawing attention to the latent and expressed utopianism in post-punk’s politics and practice it contextualises post-punk as one of the key political struggles of that period, the battle ‘over pleasure and freedom between emerging Thatcherism and libertarian, feminist and countercultural movements dating back to the post-war New Left.’ (2) By contrasting and comparing bands including Gang of Four, The Fall, The Raincoats and the Slits and foregrounding the importance of Rough Trade, David Wilkinson, who lectures at Manchester Metropolitan University, explores 'who made post-punk, how it was produced and mediated and how the struggles of post-punk resonate down to the present'. (2) Having got very excited by such an insightful, relevant and engaging book I contacted David to see if he would be interested in answering a few questions about the book and post-punk more generally. Despite a busy life he kindly agreed...

You were born in the mid 80s? How did your interest in post-punk come about?
I got into post-punk as a teenager when there was a media-driven revival of interest in it at the start of the 2000s. This didn’t just consist of magazine articles and compilation CDS, reissued albums and reformed acts; it also involved a crop of new bands forming as part of this wave. I was part of the last generation whose teenage tastes were shaped significantly by print music journalism. I couldn’t get enough of reading about post-punk’s alternative world, its DIY ethic and its artistic and political radicalism. I have writers like Simon Reynolds to thank for that.
At some level, I must have associated all this with my developing political consciousness (I was involved in movements against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq). I think others probably had a similar experience; post-punk influences can often be detected amongst today’s global network of small-scale ‘DIY’ bands and their audiences, many of whom seem to share a broadly progressive political outlook. And I also suspect this connection has continued generationally. Certainly a lot of people I know through left politics who are five, ten, even fifteen years younger (especially in the Labour Party) have a disproportionate interest in post-punk!
The post-punk revival of the early 2000s, however, did not really link up more generally with the anti-war movement. The revival also corresponded with the ‘regeneration’ strategies of post-industrial cities, which (especially in Manchester, my home city) drew on post-punk history and aesthetics to market urban space. They continue to do so in ever more ridiculous ways - Joy Division lyrics advertising luxury flats and so on. Although from my political perspective that’s dispiriting, it did teach me an important lesson – that culture is always politically contested and must be fought for.
What makes post-punk so special?
I struggle to think of many other subcultural/countercultural movements in rock that have so compellingly brought together musical, political and economic radicalism. There is also something hopeful about the way it arose at the same moment as neoliberalism but – at first – offered a very different take on the world. Post-punk suggests that the ‘capitalist realism’ that Mark Fisher has convincingly argued goes along with late capitalism may not be quite so total in its hold.
Have there been any other musical movements that had/have similar oppositional, prefigurative practice? Early Rave?
I think there’s something about the sociability of rave that might have a utopian dimension – the way that it potentially opens people out to others they may never have crossed paths with, makes us acknowledge at some level our dependence on each other and our shared humanity. Rave’s DIY elements were often more self consciously entrepreneurial than post-punk – and let’s face it once someone’s on a comedown the last thing they want to do is be sociable. But there’s still a glimmer of hope. There’s probably some connection between rave’s rediscovery in recent years and the way we’re all a lot more networked now via social media. Maybe the revival of raves is partly an attempt to make good these proliferating connections in a less alienating way. Just a speculation…
Left post punk is in a line of art movements, stretching back to the Russian Constructivists, that explored cultural production and form around the question of ‘What does a process of production that is truly socialist look like?’ (3). What answers did post-punk arrive at?
The first important thing to say here is that post-punk reflects a growing working class involvement in the leftist avant-garde that we can trace back to the expanded opportunities of the postwar years. John Cooper Clarke reckoned it was ‘the furthest the working classes had gone into areas like Dada’ and he was probably right.
On the question of production, post-punk threw up different answers – not all of them explicitly committed to socialism, it has to be said. But of those that were committed, you got a split, basically – between those who thought it looked like building a different infrastructure of independent labels, distribution, media and so on – and those who thought that as things stood, maximum impact could be achieved by ‘subverting from within’ – using the existing music industry to promote an oppositional stance (what came to be known as ‘New Pop’). I’m more sympathetic to the former because I think New Pop was very quickly absorbed into the system it critiqued - but that doesn’t mean there weren’t problems with the DIY approach – one problem being the difficulty of sustaining such an effort against all odds.
The associated question was/is ‘What form and content does the object/cultural product that is a comrade in the struggle for socialism look/sound like and how should it affect the individual and society?’ (3)
This is something that post-punks (and the music journalists who helped build the movement) argued over endlessly! It’s a constant debate that runs right through the subculture, always popping up in zines, letters to the music press, interviews, even music lyrics themselves with a band like Scritti Politti for instance. Post-punk was a very self-conscious movement – but in a self-critical rather self-absorbed way, thankfully. There was no consensus but that’s what makes it fascinating.
What were the main cultural influences on post-punk? Art history, left politics, feminism, preceding counterculture, punk, working class experience?
All those things and more. Post-punk can’t be separated from over a decade of radical upheaval on all fronts that terrified the ruling class and culminated in a reactionary swing behind Thatcher. Even Harold Wilson was spied on by the secret service, such was the paranoia!
On the question of art: It’s often assumed to be the work of a faction of middle class art school students within punk – but that leaves out the fact that a) Not everyone who went to art school was middle class, especially in an era of grants and a social safety net not yet torn up by successive governments since 1979 b) You didn’t have to go to art school to be interested in oppositional ideas and politics. Working class experience is important, not only because it contributed ideas like mutual aid and autodidacticism but in more oblique ways. Despite the demystifying thrust of post-punk it also picked up where the counterculture left off with the esoteric – and there is a tradition within working class culture that gets tapped into here. I think Mark Stewart from the Pop Group says somewhere that his grandmother held séances; Mark E. Smith’s interest in the supernatural and the occult is well known – and figures like Poly Styrene were drawn to mysticism and ended up a Hare Krishna. Folk knowledge was important too – a pre-industrial survival from peasant culture and a transformation of it in changed conditions. The feminism of someone like Una Baines can’t be separated from her interest in Celtic mythology.
In Resilience and Melancholy (4) Robin James seems to be saying, if I understand her correctly, that certain pop music structures parallel values within neoliberalism. Did similar ideas inform post-punks preoccupation with form, that musical structure and sound could mirror a politics?
I’ve not read James but yes, there’s a connection – perhaps it’s not so much that music mirrors a direct politics but post-punks definitely got that certain ways of doing music might ideologically reproduce the status quo – and conversely, others might shake it up. That didn’t just come across in their experiments with musical form - e.g. shunning individualistic solos - but also their experiments with actually making music e.g. swapping instruments to keep things fresh.
With The Raincoats do you think their musical structures were more organic, that having internalised a socialist/feminist narrative the structure of their music gave voice to that alternative worldview as an integral part of their creativity?
Yes – and I write more about this in the book. They faced accusations of ‘worthiness’ for attempting this but especially their later material on Moving can often be quite playful.
There were tensions within post punk; culturalism v anti culturalism/ individualism v collectivism/ essentialism v gender as social construct. Were those tensions an important part of the dynamic or a hindrance to the full realisation of some bands’ potential?
It depends. Sometimes it really did get navel-gazing; other times the self-scrutiny produced a backlash that fed into the New Pop desire to just have ‘fun’ and forget all that intellectual stuff; but more often than not it was the fact of wrestling with these thorny questions that animated the movement and made it so admirable.
Punk gave women the opportunity to explore and deconstruct gender but pretty much perpetuated traditional working class male identity as unchallenged (5)-do you think post-punk gave men that opportunity to explore gender identity and relationships- to start to deconstruct the gender models?
This is something that isn’t discussed much in the book. There’s more on it in the thesis that the book’s based on – and in a piece I wrote for the Zero anthology Punk is Dead. I think punk was conflicted from the start on masculinity, class, sexuality. Think of a figure like Pete Shelley – shy, thoughtful, anti-macho, bisexual and consciously drawing on yet subverting the ‘boy next door’ imagery of pop music. Post-punk carried that on but it wasn’t always easy to undo dominant forms of masculinity, so I don’t think it’s as simple as ‘punk = traditional, post-punk = subversive’.
I have a PhD student who’s just started working on post-punk masculinity and I’m interested to see what he comes up with – it’s a productive topic and worth thinking about in relation to bigger shifts of the era like women’s liberation, or changing types of work and consumption and how this redefined manhood.
There was a false dichotomy propagated by Garry Bushell that authentic working class identity excluded higher education. Was this the start of the reductive idea of working class identity as excluding education and politicisation? Do you think this story supported the neoliberal dismantling of working class political organisation and the move to construction of identity around consumption?
Yes, in short! That said, I can see the impulses that motivated a figure like Bushell. Obviously I have no common ground with him now, but back then he saw himself as on the left and as defending a form of working class culture that was being eroded, patronised and neglected – one based on community, loyalty and shared values apparently untainted by contact with either middle class education or ‘leftie student’ politics. Of course it wasn’t as simple as that – working class culture and employment had been changing dramatically since the 1950s and had become something very different by the late 70s/early 80s. Meanwhile social mobility had produced a large chunk of young people positioned awkwardly between the working class and the middle class both culturally and in terms of the work they did or the education they had. But Bushell wasn’t alone in his nostalgia – it was part of a wider tendency that hasn’t yet gone away and partly animates today’s hopelessly confused debates about Brexit (hopelessly confused on both sides of the divide, I should add).
You observe that the Gang of Four were hot on analysis but lacked any alternatives to ‘what was’, did any of the other bands you looked at strike you as more Utopian, able to give more clues as to ‘what could be’?
Yes. The Raincoats tried to reimagine sexuality; The Fall warped and twisted the everyday world in a way that showed it could be transformed; The Blue Orchids put the questions of ecology and even the meaning/purpose of life on the table.
Even Gang of Four, despite their pessimism, did short-circuit that ideological division between ‘being clever/political’ and ‘having fun’ – you can dance and sing along to them and get into it not in spite of the content but because of its radical fervour!
David Harvey writes about capitalism generating new senses of needs and wants (6). One of the themes running through the book is the reimagining of freedom and pleasure from a non capitalist perspective- could you elaborate on that?
It comes down to this – there has always been a strand on the left that’s said: ‘Capitalism not only needs to be superceded because it produces grotesque inequality, exploitation and cyclical crises that are usually paid for by those least able to bear the strain; it also holds back the human potential of the vast majority by making them work for the benefit of a tiny elite rather than to satisfy their own needs and desires and for the benefit of society as a whole.’ You can trace it back to Marx on alienation – even further back if you like, to the Utopian socialists. After WWII, you see a revival of this strand in the work of thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, partly because it’s no longer just work that’s alienating - but also mass consumerism and its deadening, pacifying, wasteful effects. That’s hugely influential – and the most radical strands of youth culture, post-punk included, were often trying to imagine what a truly fulfilled future might look like. That, I argue in the book, is one of the key things neoliberalism had to shut down or co-opt.
What’s exciting is that this strand has popped up again in the present around the idea that automation, artificial intelligence etc, if used right, could free us up to spend more time on the things that really matter. It’s there in Srnicek and Williams’ Inventing the Future, in the feminism of the Laboria Cuboniks collective, in the ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’ meme and so on. We could learn a lot from those who’ve been over this ground before – which is why my latest research is looking back at the counterculture, one of the main forerunners of post-punk.
Did post punk’s ideas and form influence the mainstream in time or did the segue into ‘new pop’ blunt post-punk's effect?
It depends what kind of influence we’re talking about. Indie wouldn’t exist without post-punk – both musically and in the sense of independent record labels driven by a commitment to more than just profit. You hear musical echoes of post-punk in the most unlikely places now that we live in a world where the past can be cannibalised by the internet.
You compare and contrast Scritti Politti and Gang of Four, The Fall and Blue Orchids, The Slits and The Raincoats to explore similarities and differences within leftist post punk. Were there any other bands you were tempted to include?
Oh, loads. It was hard to narrow it down to those six and I do worry that the book may come across as unrepresentative – but I did want to concentrate on a particular element of post-punk and really do it justice rather than spread myself thinly and risk writing superficially. In the book I justify my in-depth readings by saying that post-punk tends to attract particularly intense fans who would be likely to think about the music in this level of detail!
You identify early Rough Trade’s oppositional and prefigurative practice as an egalitarian, democratic collective model, was it an important space for the exploration which was such an essential part of leftist post punk?
Yes – it couldn’t have happened without initiatives like Rough Trade. Not just the ideas they spread and the opportunities they gave to those who wouldn’t otherwise have been heard – but the radical experiments with the form of popular music. The cultural thinker Raymond Williams is a big influence on the book and one of his arguments is that you can’t separate the form of culture from the way it gets made.
Do you think digital technology has democratised the means of (cultural) production to the point that it is so decentralised it's hard for a movement to coalesce like it did around Rough Trade?
Probably, yes. In some ways that’s all to the good but in others we have lost something – we have to remember that although the technology’s there for people to make and release music much more easily now, the channels they often have to do it through are rarely motivated by leftist values in the way that early Rough Trade was. That shapes what comes out – more and more we’re forced to be ‘entrepreneurs of the self’ in the music and culture we make and we have to fight against that – we have to make stuff that communicates something about the world, not a polished, false and partial version of ‘identity’.
You comment that the revival of post-punk in the early 2000s was politically contentless, in Inventing the Future (7) Srnicek and Williams make the point that cultural change often precedes political change, have you come across many contemporary bands that have the concerns you identify in the book, that take the process of production and musical form seriously? One band I was thinking about are Gnod who are involved with Islington Mill in Manchester (8) and Tesla Tapes (9).
Yes – there’s loads of stuff going on across a multitude of musical scenes but of the contemporary post-punk acts I can think of, maybe Shopping, Lonelady and Downtown Boys off the top of my head. This idea of cultural change preceding political change (taken from the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci) is right – something was in the air before you saw the revival of the left in Britain, Europe and the States.
Your final chapter talks of post-punk as a resource relevant to contemporary political and cultural struggles. What specific aspects of post-punk do you think we should be re-examining and learning from?
I’ve probably covered a lot of this already, but to sum up: The link between cultural form and politics; the attempt to democratise cultural production and de-link it from the profit motive; the related decentralisation of power; the attempt to start improvising what a better future might look like in the here and now; and its sheer utopianism in shitty times.

David Wilkinson Lectures at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He has worked on the Leverhulme project ‘Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture’ and is involved with the Interdisciplinary Network for the Study of Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change.

Buy this ace book here


Bibliography.

(1)Laing, D. (2015) ‘One Chord Wonders; Power and Meaning in Punk Rock’, PM Press, Oakland, CA, USA.

(2)About this book, (2016) https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781349698073

(3)Kiaer, C. (2005) ‘Imagine No Possessions. The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism’ The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA.

(4) James, R. (2014) ‘Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism’, Zero Books, Winchester UK and Washington, USA.

(5) Laing, D. (2015) ‘One Chord Wonders; Power and Meaning in Punk Rock’, PM Press, Oakland, CA, USA.

(6) Harvey, D. (2005) ‘A Brief History of Neoliberalism’, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK and New York USA.

(7) Srnicek, N. and Williams, A. (2015) ‘Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work’, Verso. London UK and Brooklyn, NY, USA.

(8) http://www.islingtonmill.com/who-we-are/

(9) https://teslatapes.bandcamp.com/

Music and Resistance: GIS.

Photo by Bea Dewhurst.

Though written more than thirty years apart both Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain and File Under Popular explore the idea that radical music is about more than lyrics, that the production of radical culture/music should ideally also engage with and reconstruct the process of production, distribution and musical form. Music emerges from a certain set of wider economic, political and social circumstances but also from the far more specific set of circumstances that exists in and around the band; how it operates, the creative process, its relationship to the means of production etc. London based Girls In Synthesis take their inspiration from post punk and consequently have a deliberate DIY (DIT?) ethos, they’ve kept everything in-house; artwork, videos, performances and recordings all being created by the band and a small group of collaborators. In an interview from 2018 John commented ‘There was definitely a strong and clear vision before we played a note or wrote a song. The vision was to bludgeon the ears, without resorting to heavy riffing, distortion, rock n roll clichés etc. It has certainly evolved over the last year and a bit into something a little more nuanced and subtle. We present the group as a full package, so if we can’t sell an idea to each other (visuals, music, presentation etc) then we veto it. That has been in place from the start.’(1) Ideas and music emerging from an egalitarian democratic art collective that’s trying not to merely reproduce existing musical forms.

Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain, Resilience and Melancholy and File Under Popular all explore the importance of musical form and the concept that certain musical forms can convey particular ideologies (values and worldviews) due to either the structure mirroring (neoliberal) political values or via socialised associations. The idea that musical form can have political content/effect. Often musical form can perpetuate the cultural hegemony of a dominant ideology but it is also true that music can disrupt and challenge that hegemonic representation of society, be an artform that gives dissident expression to the lived experience of a community/class.This is obvious in GIS music which sounds like, and evokes, working class experience in 21st century Britain. It is the sound of music as self conscious resistance, music as protest constructed from cultural experiences/resources of fraught urban intensity, turning the weapons of neoliberalism back on itself. It is a music born of, and conveying, an intense, urban precarity. And, despite the fragmenting of working class solidarity and consumer capitalism’s emphasis on individualism and competition this working class experience is recognised as shared. That’s why GIS music communicates so effectively because it comes from, and enters into, a shared experience, it is a reminder, recorded and live, of the excitement, strength and hope of community and empathy. Live this sense and experience of community is encouraged by the physical structuring of a GIS gig where John and Jim position themselves within the crowd, creating a participatory interactive situation, deconstructing the passive spectacle of entertainment consumption.  

Watch the video to Disappear from the band’s first release. An amusing video of three people getting covered in gunge? Or a visual representation of life for those on zero hours contracts, on benefits, in casual work? Watch the bands faces, in 2.12 it somehow manages to encapsulate the sense of anxiety, of vulnerability, of entrapment that characterises many people's lives. The band as presented to the viewer have no agency, no options, they have to sit there, cope with adverse experiences that have their source elsewhere, show minimal reaction, cope while simultaneously carrying out the next prescribed function. It is an expression of solidarity, of shared knowing, and in that is its importance, a reminder that despite the isolating effects of late capitalism our experiences are ‘in common’ and can be a basis for solidarity and class consciousness.


Bibliography.
(1)https://www.echoesanddust.com/2018/06/girls-in-synthesis-an-interview/

Wilkinson, D. (2016) Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain, Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Cutler, C. (1985) File Under Popular:Theoretical and Critical Writings on Music, RER Megacorp, London and Seiotext(e)/Autonomedia, New York.

James, R. (2014) ‘Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism’, Zero Books, Winchester UK and Washington, USA.