Comments on: Punk Comics 4

By: Tommy Chizel

Tommy Chizel — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 23:56:08 +0000

I am afraid Dudversion is taking out of his jaxy. How can anyone compare Blaggers with that group of Leeds based hippies? One was a working class anti fascist band and the other life style liberals with a student market.

By: Dubversion

Dubversion — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 23:11:25 +0000

they simply extended Martin’s point about seeking a wider audience. they always knew their window fame would be a small one, so rather than playing to the same crowd forever, they decided to bite the bullet and go for it. i’ve seen the footage of Alice talking about anarchy on a US network talkshow. This wouldn’t have happened without Tubthumping and EMI (by then, nothing to do with arms dealers etc by the way)….

By: john

john — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 23:05:21 +0000

Martin eats hitmen for breakfast, so that’s fine. I tried to search for chumba quotes around that time which were sensible but couldn’t find any. Which is a shame because they clearly became much more pragmatic afterwards.

However this: http://www.uncarved.org/music/apunk/wpob.html comes up as number two in a google search for “chumbawamaba blaggers emi” so I am clearly cornering the market in anarchopunk analytical angst or something.

By: dubversion

dubversion — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 18:16:36 +0000

agree with all this, apart from Martin’s comments about Chumbawamba, which have led to me taking out a contract on his life

By: martin

martin — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 10:25:20 +0000

Yeah, I think the journo had latched onto the fact that Matty had been involved with the NF (or a similar gaggle of goose-steppers) when he was a teenager, as if that made his anti-fascist stance irrelevant. And yes, I remember the utter hypocrisy from the music press – fascism wasn’t big enough to bother with until AFTER the Beackon election, funnily enough, when it was then deemed important enough for the NME to run a retro RAR cover and to big up…er…the Senseless Things. Who’d said racism was bad, or something equally daring.

There’s a valid anti-EMI argument, but life’s not black and white and sometimes it’s better to opt for the lesser of 2 evils. If ‘United Colors..’ had been distributed by a major it could have had a massive impact. What made me sick was folk hippies Chumbawamba slagging them off as sell-outs – didn’t stop them from taking the same route a few years later (and not even to say something worthwhile – some fucking toss about ‘cider drinks’..)

By: john

john — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 10:11:41 +0000

The Official Reassessment starts here!

What I find remarkable is that they had good politics, put them into practice, weren’t afraid to make sensible compromises to further their cause AND sounded fantastic.

It’s unfortunate that they lost a lot of anarcho-purist respect by signing to a major, but I guess they were aiming for a bigger audience. Getting full pages ads in the music press about anti-fascism is pretty damn good.

The press never really liked them because of their attitude, I think. I recall some singles reviewer going on about how there were only a dozen nazi skinheads etc left in Britain and this made the Blaggers irrelevant. A fortnight later Derek Beakcon was elected the first BNP councillor on the Isle of Dogs.

I think thie music press were looking for an excuse to squeeze them out, really, and when Matty thumped a journalist who’d been nagging him all night about being “as bad as the fascists” or whatever it was, I guess they found the stick to beat them with. If you compare that incident to countless others (didn’t the Stranglers kidnap a journalist and tie him to the Eiffel Tower or something!?) it’s a drop in the ocean. But the Blaggers ended up getting dropped of the bill at the Reading Festival because of pressure from Melody Maker and I’m sure all sorts of other stuff was going on behind the scenes.

Despite their loutish image, the members of the band that I’ve met have been sound people.

By: martin

martin — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 09:51:50 +0000

The Blaggers never got the credit they deserved – they’d literally been one of the only groups to advocate physically confronting right wing idiots, and the moment they signed to EMI, they were suddenly ‘pathetic poseurs’, slammed by fanzines with print runs of 50, written by dour anarcho-purists who were more interested in homebrew than direct action. Seeing them live in the early 90s was memorable, the atmosphere was always really charged and upbeat and it was inspiring to meet so many likeminded other young people with similar attitudes – especially as, at the time, there was quite a hefty BNP presence in Luton and particularly Dunstable and the boneheads weren’t slow in trying to intimidate anybody who looked remotely ‘red’ or ‘non-white’ (albeit always when they had 2 or 3 others to back them up, the cowards…) Blaggers ITA, Oppressed and Oi Polloi (even though I wasn’t really into that lot so much) are the only 3 groups I can recall who really encouraged militant fightback against the fash (as opposed to standing behind police lines and being stewarded by the SWP) and I’m grateful they were around.

By: Dubversion

Dubversion — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 23:53:10 +0000

a very much maligned band, Blaggers. i know it ended shabbily – and tragically – but in their prime – on the United Colors album – they were phenomenal. and yes, they weren’t armchair activists but really were right in it. saw them on the day of a big demo (i forget which) and half the band weren’t there, they’d been nicked..