” Black is a colour just like white — but I only think black is more perfect in Jah sight.”

Give me a break ! I can’t listen to crap like that to be honest, even if people say it was ok within its historical context. Ignorance is ignorance, whatever time or place.

Thankfully, lyrics that reveal prejudice aren’t that common at all in old school reggae.

I dunno about “modern” reggae — I never listen to it. ( I’d better watch the latter part of my sentence — don’t wanna kick off a “modern reggae is rubbish” debate! )

I left punk rock and post punk after the first two PIL records and the first two Killing Joke albums, but I really never liked DIJ — I felt very uncomfortable with their fascist flirtation, but also, it was all done in such an expolitative, kitsch way — I got the impression they knew full well that if they camped it up in the camoflague/ancient Greek masks etc, they’d pull in the “kids” who have always liked an air of threat and amoral gloom, from the days of the first Black Sabbath album to Joy Division.

After all — If you are a post punk band seriously down on your luck, stuck in a fading genre, then it may have seemed a smart survivial move to DIJ, stuck as they were in their “very small punk band we play RAR for a tenner” category as Crisis.

Well, either that, or play in pubs to 15 people in studded belts/ripped leather jackets as Crisis, or get an office job or sign on.

Was that it?

After a google search about DIJ, I remember ending up on one of those creepy, sleazy right wing sites that leave you feeling dirty. You know the ones — they discuss everything from the supposedly “elevated/intellectual” such as Indo European nobility, mention of Aryans in Hindu scripture, ancient Celtic culture etc, right down to the stinking gutter ( “wogs out”/blacks are genetically inferior” etc ).

Anyway, there fequently seemed to be long discussions on that kind of board about whether DIJ represented the “higher mysteries” of Aryan power — or whether they were “a bunch of vegetarian old queens” in Nazi drag. I must admit, after seeing a picture of their singer in a jacuzzi, posing in a Nazi helmet with a dagger and a bunch of roses, both categories seemed likely, and if they were making a buck out of that, it seemed pretty shameful and sickening too.

Mass murder ( as the Nazis went in for ) is not something “cool and mysterious” to play around with — I have no objections to the “tapping” of deeper European sensibilities ( albeit often morbid ones ) that , say, Joy Division/Factory Records went in for ( tapping energies for example, from such sources as Romantic poetry, architecture, Kant’s ideas of the sublime etc ), but — let’s get it straight — a line is crossed ( in my book anyway ) when someone romaticises the impulse behind ignorance and mass murder. C’mon, under the “aestheticism” of the Nazi imagery, uniforms, architecture — Nazis were about mass ignorance and the power of brute force through blood and soil nationalism. To me, there is no way around that, however “interesting” to some their uniforms were.

By all means, “flirt” with European sensibilities and aestheticism, after all that holds a lot of good points too ( what’s wrong with Schopenhaur , Kant etc ? ) — but I draw the line at blood and soil nationalism. That is serious in my view.

I felt disquiet about what DIJ were/represent, either in a real, or an expolitative money making sense before that — but felt nauseous after reading the rot on those nazi boards.

PS. John, did you get my email eventually? I sent it from my hotmail acc just in case, but I’d prefer if you reach me at my Yahoo acc.

Aesthetically, my main problems with DIJ have been 1) the vocals mostly suck - like a really, really bad Scott Walker impersonator (Jim Backhouse said that) being filtered through a pregnant cow. THE EUROPEAN BLACKBIRD IS COMING (MOOOO!!!) 2) musically, they just always seemed like a bloodless Joy Division or a less funky Bauhaus (at least ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ and ‘Terror Couple Kill Colonel’ are a bit of fun…)

Having said that, I do seriously love the drumming on ‘Til the Living Flesh Is Burned’ and genuinely rate “She Said Destroy”