Vivienne Westwood drives a tank to PM David Cameron's house to protest fracking

Still punk after all these years...one of the original punk provocateurs, Vivienne Westwood, co-owner of the London boutique Sex together with Malcolm McLaren, where the punk scene incubated...now a world famous designer...

September 9, 2015, the 74-year old, as part of a protest against fracking, drives a tank through David Cameron's constituency in Oxfordshire to his home in Chadlington.

Check out the vid here. More info here.

photo credit: PA

"Babylon": the Black British sound system/reggae scene

The Vimeo post describes Babylon thus: "A film of sheer sound and fury, the uncompromising subject matter (it all but anticipates the race riots that engulfed inner cities soon after release) and classic reggae soundtrack helped cement Babylon's reputation as one of the most powerful and historically significant documents about the black British experience ever made."

BABYLON from psychomafia on Vimeo.

I found the film via Dangerous Minds, which has this (among other things) to say about the film:

"The soundclash scene with Jah Shaka near the film’s end is just a flat-out great piece of film-making...I lived in Brixton in 1983-84 myself...and walked past a couple of outdoor Jah Shaka parties that I probably would not have been all that welcome at (his PA system was so loud it felt like the music was thicker than the air, like some kind of dub humidity)... Babylon perfectly evokes the growing racial tensions—and intense feelings of doom—of inner city London life during the late 70s/early 80s that ultimately culminated in the fiery Brixton riots."

“Punk Rock is more feared than Russian Communism"

Check out this BBC current affairs show, from 1997, which gives a vivid sense of how much sections of the British establishment were nervous about the punk rock scene.

The invaluable Dangerous Minds posted about it, and has this to say about it:

What the fuck were these people thinking? What were they scared of?
 
Well, to start with, 1970s Britain was in a mess. It had high unemployment, 3-day working weeks, nationwide power cuts, tax was at astronomic levels, food shortages, and strikes were commonplace, and the Labor government feared a revolution was imminent.

To explain why this all came about, let’s rewind the tape to a mass demonstration at Grosvenor Square, London, March 1968. This was where an anti-Vietnam War rally erupted into a massive pitched battle between protesters and the police. Outside of the American Embassy 200 people were arrested; 86 were injured; 50 were taken to hospital, half of which were police officers. The Labor government of the day, were stunned that a group of protestors could cause such disorder, and near anarchy, that could have led (they believed) to a mini-revolution on the streets of London.
In fear of such anarchy ever happening again, the government decided to take action. At first, ministers considered sending troops out into the streets. But after some reassuring words from Special Branch, Chief Inspector Conrad Hepworth Dixon, they were convinced that the boys in blue could handle any trouble. Dixon was allowed to set up a new police force: the Special Demonstration Squad.

This was no ordinary police operation, the SDS had permission to be literally a law unto itself, where its officers could operate under deep cover, and infiltrate left-wing, fringe organizations and youth groups, with the sole purpose of working as spies and agents provacteurs. Harold Wilson’s government agreed to pay for this operation directly out of Treasury funds.

The SDS carried on its undercover activities against any organizations that they believed threatened Britain’s social order. This include animal rights organizations, unions, and anti-Nazi, and anti-racism groups. They were also allegedly involved in the planting incendiary devices at branches of department store Debenhams in Luton, Harrow and Romford in 1987; and one member was later involved in writing the pamphlet that led to the famous “McLibel” trial of the 1990s.
The workings of the SDS were on a “need to know basis,” and only a handful of police knew exactly what this little club were up to. But their presence fueled genuine fears amongst the British Establishment that there were “Reds under the beds,” and that revolution was a literal stone’s throw away.

This was all going on behind-the-scenes, while out front, muppets like the councillors and journalists lined-up on this program, pushed the hysteria of Punk Rock riots and civil disobedience, that reflected the very genuine fears at the heart of the UK Establishment. (Note London councillor Bernard Brook-Partridge mention of “MI5 blacklists.”)

And here's the vid of the show. Essential viewing.

Ian Penman reviews Richard Wight on Mods: Amphetamines, Jean-Paul Sartre and John Lee Hooker

He doesn't much like the book, but the review is rad, man. (I know, I'm not referencing the right subculture.)

 

Some snippets:

What Richard Weight calls the ‘very British style’ of Mod found its initial foothold in late 1950s Soho with the arrival of the jazz ‘modernists’, who defined themselves in strict opposition to the reigning gatekeepers of Trad. Modernists were wilfully brittle, stylish, working-class Cains, different in every way from the whoop-it-up trad jazz Abels. Trad – hugely and improbably popular in its day – had a predominantly middle to upper-class and purposively vulgar fanbase. In its ranks were Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and George Melly, who all later wrote of this time as of a lost Eden. Larkin’s jazz column for the Telegraph ran from 1961 to 1968, a period roughly coextensive with Mod’s quiet rise and noisy fall.

Trads embraced a louche, boho scruffiness (silly hats, sloppy jumpers, duffle coats), where Mods dressed with considered exactness. Trads were British to a fault (real ale, CND, the Goons) while the Mods had a magpie eye for European style, from the Tour de France to the Nouvelle Vague. Trads followed Acker Bilk, Mods worshipped Thelonious Monk: even at fifty years’ remove, you can see how sharing the same club, city or country might have been problematic. If the Oxbridgey Trads had a philosophical pin-up it was Bertrand Russell, with Freddie Ayer for real deep kicks; Mods backed the darker horse of existentialism. How much the Mod crush on continental philosophy was a pose, and how much serious engagement, is a moot point. Even as ‘mere’ pose it’s a very interesting one. In the dourly socialist cinema of the British New Wave, working-class characters are portrayed as sooty beasts of burden, life-force bruisers, 12 pints a night men; Camus-rifling aesthetes are thin on the cobbled ground...

For the Mods, as with the Situationists (awol from Weight’s index), there was a conflict between rowdy group identity and individual slant. They mixed outdoor jaunt with indoor dissipation, group jamboree with sombre reflection, and they took very small things very seriously indeed, things other people wrongly perceived as frivolous. The Mod obsession with Blue Note album sleeves and Italian fashion had the quality of fetish, in both the Marxist and ritual senses. It required near-fanatical commitment to ‘source’ the materials required for a makeover...Early Mod shared with Bauhaus an almost puritan obsession with clean style and correct design. Early Mods had a deserved rep for sartorial aloofness, which shaded into a kind of radiant anonymity. Like the ‘man of the crowd’ in Baudelaire (and Benjamin) they were in the crowd but not of it, tracking sociability like spooks instead of being haplessly caught up in it like everyone else.

Early Mods could ‘pass’ between work and play without changing their suits, which is perhaps one of the reasons they were never sent up in the culture at large...

Mod’s ‘very British style’ was initially a tasteful synthesis of American flash and European savoir faire.

Colin MacInnes

Fascinating account of the life of Colin MacInnes, author of Abolute Beginners, from Ed Vulliamy.

"Colin MacInnes was the first writer to pinpoint the birth of the 'teenager' and multicultural London. His books were alive with the city's subcultures. But, half a century later, as Absolute Beginners hits the stage, was his fascination with Notting Hill's emerging black culture radical, or something more disturbing? Ed Vulliamy, who grew up on those very streets, explores the iconclastic author's legacy."

"MacInnes was the decadent chronicler of 1950s Notting Hill, a restless, volatile neighbourhood which was home to one of the UK's biggest West Indian immigrant communities, and the scene of notorious race riots in August 1958. Openly gay when homosexuality was still an illegal taboo, MacInnes revelled in what he saw as the impoverished area's exuberant exoticism. Absolute Beginners was the first novel to capture the city's emerging youth culture, its lustful, teenage adventure dovetailing into MacInnes's sexualised idolisation of black life in Notting Hill and climaxing with the riots that seared the neighbourhood. Nowadays known to many only by way of Julien Temple's almost universally derided film of 1986, Absolute Beginners and MacInnes's preceding book City of Spades, achieved cult status after their publication, and were the first to chronicle, for a white audience at least, the culture of the new immigrants to London."