Punk and Reggae bands played on the back of moving lorries and at night-time gigs. No week-long RTWC march was complete without the crucial component of live culture. I first met him before the band had even struck their first note, on the 1981 Right to Work Campaign (RTWC) march from Liverpool to Blackpool. This was largely down to Chris Dean, their singer and guitarist. The Redskins were a different breed to the local bands I knew. We were hoping to create a cultural life as an alternative to the deadly nine to five grind. That left us with endless time to plot, dream and, occasionally, rehearse. Like many I had gravitated towards the local music scene and a crowd of young people in bands who were either signing on, in casual jobs or attending college. I was not alone: 3.5 million people were unemployed. As a friend observed at the time, I was, “ripe for religion”. At 21 life hadn’t panned out as I’d wanted.
New model army no rest for the wicked rar free#
My big hope that being in a band would free me from a life of boredom was fading fast. Since that time I’d done badly at my A Levels, become bored with crap jobs, and tired of time on the dole.
I was one of the many teenagers whose world had been turned upside down by the rebellion of punk, and formed a punk band at school. I’d been drawn into activism as a teenager but had resisted the talking shops of left wing meetings. But before they imploded they realised much of their potential. The price they paid? Years of debt, stress, and possibly worse. The band fanned the flames for a few years but eventually burned out. They were also the catalyst for an anti-racist youth movement which prospered in Europe for a decade. Touring extensively over a few of years, with a handful of dynamite songs and a unique, astonishing album, they helped to inspire a generation of young activists.
The Redskins were formed by a couple of committed revolutionaries that loved music and saw it as a vehicle to popularise revolutionary politics. If you type ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’ into a search engine the first results that appear are not references to the slogan of the International Socialists and, later, Socialist Workers Party, but an album by the Redskins. Take no heroes – only inspiration: the Redskins and me My only criticism is the five totally biz tracks and the non-inclusion of the Newtown Neurotics’ ‘Kick Out The Tories’, which we all know is the best song ever. Best Moniker For A Song Ever award must go to Chaotic Disorder for ‘F-word Politics, F-word Religion, F-word the Lot of You’.
There’s some heavily juicy stuff here – The Upstarts’ ‘Woman In Disguise’, Vice Squad’s ‘You’ll Never Know’, The Dead Kennedys’ ‘Kill The Poor’ and Action Pact’s epic ‘Open Your Eyes’. For sure the grungemongers got the upper hand but there were enough bands like the Abrasive Wheels and The Partisans writing loud, fast, political music to sustain a momentum. It’s a tragedy that so much good music got squeezed between the gutter mumblings of the Vile bushell and the post-modernist prannynattering of the art ninnies. Whilst the Wedge trot out the scrubbed sound of cuddly niceness, Anagram rip open the punk crypt to release 16 tracks of naught anti-Tory (pro-human) hatred, Punk compilation reviewed in the NME, 13 June, 1987. If ever in Darlington – well worth a visit. Big, beefy constructs dripping with real gravy and reeking with the power chord-assisted stink of adolescent sexual frustration. The tunes, and tunes there were in plenty, shone all the more for being saddled with such ropey lyrics. Subjects of the songs trotted very neatly over the ground clearly marked as fit to tread for those johnny-gob-lately punk-rocker type bands more influenced by John Selwyn Strummer’s flabby rhetoric than Joshua Rotten’s artful dodginess – The Dole, Violence, Alienation, Borstal, Getting Glued Up and so on and so on … The Jam, Redskins, Three Johns, New Model Army and the Neurotics. Last Rough Cause field a democratically weighted version of the tried and trusted Angry Young Stripling formula viz.
One thin one, one fat one and an inbetween one on drums. And the poor deprived hordes will boycott the event in favour of Ale-houses, bingo, and the box.Īll credit then to Darlington which risks its arm in the direction of local bands, It will feature genuine Northumbrian folk music and the Liverpool poets on the same bill as lectures on the relevance of morality in the modern soap opera – delivered by bearded back street boy made good, Alternative Playwright Adrian Prohlierthanthou. A vast modern shoebox shunned by the majority of the citizens it was built to serve. The arts centre is too often a peripheral ghetto of nice middle-class aspiration. The rather good Northern Oi band get a review in the NME, 27 April, 1985.
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