Still, historical revisionism is meat and drink to nazi boneheads, eh?

Plus, last time I looked, Hyde Park corner was in Hyde Park. No doubt when the white race rises up it will be annexed to Germany or something, but for now I’m happy with it where it is.

John Eden
Errrrr – like what?
2004/12/06 @ 02:51 pm

siebe ( / http://www.siebethissen.net )
It’s not my intention to offend you or anyone else, but remembering the days of UNCLEAN and the folks who admired PTV then, I can’t say they were the most “progressive” types around…Let’s say the story doesn’t surprise me and I’m looking forward to a further investigation of these connections/similarities….
2004/12/06 @ 07:00 pm

John Eden
I’m very difficult to offend I was 15 years old in 1984 so all this is before my time.

I think it’s fair to say that PTV have always had more than their fair share of knob-ends for fans, especially when it was all skulls, skinheads & scarification.

I honestly don’t think that necessarily follows on to the band members themselves though.

Where were you based at the time, Siebe? Be interested to know more, either on here on by email…
2004/12/07 @ 09:20 am

martin ( / )
My take on this – Gen’s always been a bit opportunist, and I’m sure he would have been familiar with Crane’s standing at the time. The idea of featuring the ‘enemy’ – a BM organiser with links to far right violence – in a PTV video would probably have been too tempting (to Gen) to pass up.

As for Crane, if he’d just got out of jail, he’d have been short of a few bob, and it’s fair to say he probably got paid for appearing in the vid. He obviously enjoyed being in front of the camera, having previously appeared on the Oi! album and in Nick Knight’s “Skinhead” photo book (posing with a skingirl identified as ‘Belsen Bev’). Plus he had the bonus that very few of his nazi muckers would be caught dead watching vids by degenerate artists such as PTV and so wouldn’t spot him.

While we’re on the nazis appearing on vids they really shouldn’t be in, Ian Stuart is one of the skinheads who bursts out of the toilet cubicles in the Madness film ‘Take It Or Leave It’
2004/12/08 @ 11:24 am

siebe ( / )
In 1984 I had just moved to Rotterdam (The Netherlands) and I was glad I left Tilburg, a university town with a pretty big appetite in experimental/weird stuff. I used to be in several bands there, influenced by all kinds of industrial music (Einsturzende Neubauten, Sprung Aus den Wolken, SPK, Cabaret Voltaire…), producing a kind of sonic & cultural (& political) anarchy. Around 1984/85 scenes & bands were torn apart when a weird kind of post/neo/religious/tribal/pseudo-artistic/therapeutic/occult/sex-death fundamentalism came to blossom. I remember half of my scene digging into this new age crap, reading Austin Osman Spare, Allister Crowley, Georges Bataille and Genesis P. Orridge. Digging through my archive I just found a magazine some of my friends produced in the eighties, called SILENCER, published by KF, Katharos Foundation – on the cover Genesis is looking at me with a grim face, wearing a bone on his shoulder. Anyway, I never liked that stuff, felt it was pseudo-scientific bullshit, didn’t like the doomy art work and experienced it as a kind of religious fascism or tribal fundamentalism, a kind of unconscious surreal fascism. Maybe if I would have dived deeper in it, I would be more cautious in choosing my words, but I just hated the whole appeal. Maybe I was too rational for it (music & the sonic was my surrealism). (Anyway, some folks of my scene became part of The Temple and later founded the Psychic Warriors ov Gaia – you might remember them). Going through that zine once more I feel that suffocating atmosphere again. I can send it to you if you like? In short, I still don’t know why I mingled in you Crane story, but I have always felt there was a weird kind of connection between the growing White Power movement and these types of (white) occult movements in the eighties. Perhaps you or one of your readers is able to elaborate on this theme. Thanks for your space – you got a great blog.
2004/12/08 @ 11:48 pm

John Eden
I think perhaps the exploration of “the dark side” maybe lead people down some dubious alley ways. I only really got involved with this stuff in late 80s, when there had been a bit of an injection of hedonism into that network.

We met Reiner and the PWOG boys when they came over for Megadog in the early 90s and they all seemed pretty sound.

Of course, by then people had made their choices really – there was a whole scene around Boyd Rice and the C.o.S. which had turned this whole pseudo-fascist aesthetic into an off the peg youth cult.

Most people I knew made the right choice at the time, and even people who fell for that stuff soon realised it was stupid soon after…
2004/12/12 @ 09:09 pm

John Eden
further to that, this link:

http://www.uncarved.org/othertexts/satan.html

Is a good indication of the directions in which people travelled in the early to mid 90s.
2004/12/12 @ 09:33 pm

siebe ( / )
Thanks for your comment. Guess one of the things is I never got into techno and stuff (that is, in the digital age – I loved the analogue era).
2004/12/15 @ 11:20 pm

John Eden
techno was industrial’s salvation!
2004/12/16 @ 09:45 am