uncarved.org blog

This just in from Nik at Housmans – sounds good, but I’m not too sure about the claim that Pauline was “the only woman in a movement dominated by men”. What about The Bodysnatchers, an all-girl band on the Two Tone label? The group included Rhoda Dakar, whose harrowing solo-single “The Boiler” I’ve written about here.

‘2-Tone London’

with Pauline Black

Wednesday 3 August, 7pm

£3, redeemable against any purchase

Launching her autobiography, Pauline Black, lead singer of The Selector, shares her recollections of the 2-Tone music scene, as well as her personal experiences of growing up in multi-racial London.

The only woman in a movement dominated by men, Pauline Black has plenty to share about the 2-Tone music scene of. As lead singer of The Selector Pauline was very much the Queen of British Ska.

But even as she found success in through music, Black struggled with her ethnic and cultural identity. Born to Anglo-Jewish/Nigerian parents, she was later adopted by a white working-class family in Romford. In her talk, Black recounts her struggles to find her way in a community that made her feel different at every turn, and shares her personal view of early multicultural London.

Combining her life at the top of the 2-Tone phenomenon with her search for her birth parents, Black will speak about her experience of London, as told in her new autobiography, Black by Design: A 2-Tone Memoir.

Housmans Bookshop, 5 Caledonian Road, King’s Cross, London N1 9DX

Tel: 020 7837 4473

www.housmans.com

Entry: £3 redeemable against any purchase

Nearest tube: King’s Cross

Forthcoming events include:

‘The Glorious Times of the Situationist International’
with McKenzie Wark

‘Thirty Years on from the Brixton Uprising’
with Alex Wheatle

‘Chavs: the Demonization of the Working Class’
with Owen Jones

“Support the shop that supports your campaigns!”

A slightly odd article by Dr Perry Stanislas has appeared in The Voice entitled “Why We Must Not Rush To Judgement Over Smiley Culture’s Knife Death”.

It’s odd because it wastes no time in arguing for the case that David Emmanuel may have killed himself and pouring scorn on others who say he may have been killed by the police. Which seems to be in direct contradiction of its title.

Let me be clear here in saying that I do not know how David Emmanuel (aka Smiley Culture) died. I wasn’t there – only the police and David Emmanuel were.

Dr Stanislas also mentions his involvement with the campaign following the death of Colin Roach by a gunshot wound in Stoke Newington police station in 1983. I’ve not been able to establish the extent of his involvement because he isn’t mentioned in my main source about the case: “Policing in Hackney 1945-1983″ commissioned by The Roach Family Support Committee.

The book does not conclude that the police killed Colin Roach:

The Inquiry does not commit itself to an alternative explanation of how Colin Roach died. What it clearly and incontrovertibly shows is that he could not have died in the way the police and the inquest say he did. The Report does not say or suggest, for example, that Colin Roach was shot by the police in their own station. But it does show convincingly that he did not shoot himself with a gun which he carried into the station: which is what the police and the inquest asked us to believe.

Was Colin Roach shot by someone else, in or outside the foyer of the station? The Report does not say definitively that he was because it does not know. However, it does remind us — as the inquest did not — that this is not quite so implausible a story as it appears at first.

[...] The police are not in a position to challenge this argument, says the Report, because they never investigated it. From the first to last, the police behaved as if the ‘fact’ that Colin Roach’s death was a suicide was a foregone conclusion. The police certainly advanced an account of what they said or thought happened. But they conducted no investigation.

It seems strange to me that Dr Stanislas has come to a conclusion about the Colin Roach case which are at odds with the campaign he was involved in.

The “Policing in Hackney” book also includes details of how Colin Roach was attacked by the press dept of the Metropolitan Police and the media after his death and how people protesting about his tragic demise were persecuted by the police when marching peacefully through Hackney. That is the context in which the investigation of Colin Roach’s death took place.

Smiley Culture’s family have stated that they were not aware of any reason for him to commit suicide.

They have asked that his mysterious death be investigated properly and promptly so that the truth about it can be revealed. That is all they have asked for, and I think most people would agree that their request reasonable and proportionate.

The family of Colin Roach did not get the benefit of a proper and prompt investigation and neither have the family of Ian Tomlinson. So the Emmanuel family can hardly be blamed for being suspicious about the process, or seeking to draw attention to it so that it is subject to a high level of scrutiny.

Speculations about the cause of David Emmanuel’s death are understandable, but they – and Dr Stanislas’ article – are a sideshow.

A great interview with UK hip hop artist Ty on what Smiley Culture and soundsystems like Saxon and Coxsone Outernational meant to him when growing up in South London:

Ty and Roots Manuva (featured on Soul Jazz and The Heatwave’s essential “An England Story” compilation):

(Original LP released by Santic in 1974)

“London was more forward as well because music that was recorded back home… some of them were reaching here long before they were released in Kingston. I put together the ‘Harder Shade Of Black’ album in London from the singles and put it out with Bert… I never knew I was going to release an album! The lady on the cover is my first wife. She’s the mother of three of my kids. I actually took the photograph myself. It’s Downs Park in East London…”

Leonard Chin – quote from the sleevenotes of the reissued version by Pressure Sounds.

“Hackney-ites – seckle! Stoke Newington – seckle, Tottenham posse – easy! Finsbury Park and Wood Green posse – easy!”

Hackney Downs was also the site of an open air soundsystem session in 1985 by Sirena Hi-Fi featuring guest appearances from Saxon MCs Tippa Irie, the late Miss Irie, Papa Levi and Daddy Colonel as well as Cinderella, Chargan and Banton Irie.

You should still be able to download the audio from this session at Who Cork The Dance. Someone else sent this to me a while back, but I’ve forgotten who it was – so apologies and thanks to them. Saxon do what they do best here – tuff lyrics over Studio One and other riddims – marred by the odd technical problem. You can hear Tippa’s take on the Heysel Stadium disaster (May 1985), so the dance must have been after that… (includes mild homophobia and general slackness)

It also looks like Saxon played Hackney Downs the year before in August 1984. There is video of this floating around but it’s a huge file so I dunno if my rubbish connection will cope. If a kind person could stick it on youtube or something that would be great.

It’s also likely that some of north east London’s reggae, jungle or hip hop stars were educated at Hackney Downs school…

Shaking The Foundations: Reggae soundsystem meets ‘Big Ben British values’ downtown.

My article for Datacide issue 11 is now online. I wrote it a couple of years back in preparation for the talk I did at the launch event for the previous issue.

But actually it has stood the test of time quite well, anticipating some of the recent debates about multiculturalism. It was quite gratifying to see Professor Anthony Glees spouting yet more nonsense on Channel 4′s “Ten O’Clock Live Show” last month.

Obviously I’d be interested in any comments or criticisms people have of the piece.

Some other content from the current Datacide has also been uploaded to their site, including a piece by Stewart Home on Dope Smuggling, LSD Manufacture, Organised Crime and the Law in 1960s London.

Don’t forget to buy a copy of the current issue to get the full contents and support what Datacide is doing.

Jez: Look Mark, I’m a musician, in case you’d forgotten. Yeah? I answer to a higher law. The law of “if it feels good, do it”.

Mark: Oh, that’s a great law isn’t it? What’s that, Gaddafi’s law?

Jez: It’s the musician’s law. Colonel Gaddafi could not lay down a bass hook, Mark. That should be clear even to you!

[Peep Show Series 3 - with thanks to Bandshell on Dissensus for the quote and for inspiring this post]

Hopefully Gaddafi will be gone by the time this post goes live. I certainly won’t miss him, but I will grudgingly admit that he brought a certain erratic charm to international politics.

In the eigties and nineties fascist idiots like Nick Griffin and Blood Axis’ Michael Moynihan fell for this charm, distributing the Colonel’s Green Book - seemingly in the belief that he was a profound thinker.

fascist loons Nick Griffin and Derek Holland pose under a Gaddafi portrait in Libya

Griffin actually went one step further and headed off to see Gaddafi in the hope that he’d be able to tap him up for some funding for the National Front. Apparently this didn’t come to anything (unsurprisingly!), but the episode is certainly worth remembering now that Griffin has gone pseudo respectable and rabidly anti-Islam.

More enjoyable by far were the punks who recognised that Gaddafi’s charm was more about his flamboyant mentalism than any insightful philosophy.

God Told Me To Do It were a Hackney-based band would be universally recognised as being rubbish, were it not for their genius sense for the controversial and a neat turn in slogans. Their artwork was liberally reproduced in Vague back in the day and they were notorious for winding up the po-faced.

Having used the Colonel’s image on a few flyers, the group noticed in 1986 that the Libyan Embassy in London was temporarily  vacant, presumably in the aftermath of WPC Yvonne Fletcher being shot by one of its occupants whilst policing a demonstration outside…

[All GTMTDI images found via Kill Your Pet Puppy.]

Gaddafi also makes an appearance alongside some “loony left” tabloid bugbears in Stewart Home‘s black-humoured “Kill” which is available on the classic Stewart Home Comes In Your Face CD. The tune was later re-versioned as “Islam Uber Alles” by Blackpool psych-punk legends The Ceramic Hobs, but here is the original in all its dumb boot-stomping glory:

Stewart Home - Kill Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

More recently (and less interestingly), MIA has described Gaddafi as “always being one of my style icons”, and Asian Dub Foundation made an opera about him.

Here’s hoping that Libya will shortly become “the land of the free” and with that Gaddafi will become history.

The Radical History of Hackney

A new archival site featuring radical publications from this corner of North East London.

Items added so far include

• A “Hackney Against The Cuts” newsletter from 1991, which is obviously quite topical right now as well.
• The first issue of the original “Hackney Heckler” newsletter, also from 1991, which includes an account of a Tory minister getting flour-bombed mid-speech at the town hall. (The all new revamped 21st Century Heckler is available for download here).
• An introduction to Hackney Community Defence Association – the police monitoring group I mentioned here previously.
• “Up Against The Lawmen” – an account of HCDA’s investigations into corruption and drug dealing by officers at Stoke Newington police station. This includes some disturbing first person accounts of shitty behaviour by the cops, but the calm and resourceful work of HCDA is very inspiring.

I think it’s a site worth keeping an eye on – the material here is useful for politicos but also more generally to Hackney residents who have an interest in the social history of where they live.

An interesting podcast about the New Cross fire, which includes documentary spoken word (both archival and new) and music:

Celestial Navigation 26 - Remembering the Embers - New Cross 1981 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Some of the music is taken from the Lovers Rock mix I did with Paul Meme. I find this recontextualisation very interesting (and saddening). These tunes may have been the last sounds that 13 of the people at 493 New Cross Road ever heard. (14 are commemorated on the plaque and elsewhere because Anthony Berbeck, who was also present on the night, committed suicide two years later for reasons believed to be linked with the trauma of what he witnessed.) So the heartbreak and love evoked by the songs

Also featured is a haunting tune by Zena Edwards which was one of many highlights at the recent evening remembering the fire at The Albany.

There is more information on the podcast here.

I’m very happy to be taking part in Stefan Szczelkun’s Agit Disco project. My installment is now available here.

It covers UK reggae and dancehall from the 1980s, with a particular emphasis on the politics (with a small “p” and a big “p”).

There is no audio on the Agit Disco site, so I will be circulating my mix myself initially. But I haven’t quite decided how yet.

Previous Agit Disco selectors have included Neil Transpontine, Stewart Home, Howard Slater, Tom Vague and Stefan himself. All the contributions are worth your attention.

Or: Pseudo Gay Rastas part one

Sex Boots Dread – Tickle Tune (Rinka, 1980)

A nice bit of traditional toasting over the Pick Up The Pieces riddim:

Me think about the lion as him rest upon the sand
Me tink about the help that me have from white man
And me want to crying
Becah me listen to the lying
Me know when me talk that me [real break something - not sure?]

Me know that me mix up with real good friend
Good [earth or 'erb ration - not sure?]
It not absurd situation
Because me black and me proud and me Rastafari
Me and yah people we nah see eye to eye

Which then deviates jarringly, and hilariously, from the norm:

There’s a difference in me lifestyle
There’s a difference in me dance style
What a difference in me case file
Because me black and me proud and me Rastafari
And me homosexual
Homosexual
Homosexual

The lyrics then move on to some explicit and jaw-droppingly funny descriptions of gay sex, before concluding with some more philosophical musings:

And me mind goes asunder with the wonder of life
‘Ow people give you pressure for to pick up a wife
And me know it not a sensible
Brrrrr! me know it not a sensible.

Because me like all me brother and me like all me sister
Me like everybody and me not a resister
Me open up me mind guy
Me open up me mind guy

And me love, me love, me know about love
me also think of sex and me know it from above
and me like a man cocky style

East west north and south
I take it up the arse and I take it in me mouth
North south west and east
I play the beauty and me boyfriend play the beast

North south east and west
Sexual freedom – always the best!

Sex Boots Dread – Pentel (Rinka, 1980)

Pentel (aka Pentil) is in a similar vein, covering Mr Boots Dread’s relationship with an a young Indian bloke – their love life taking place in his parent’s cornershop with an increasingly bizarre variety of the merchandise used as props.

I like these tracks – they are very well done with an obvious affection for reggae and a who give a fuck attitude to the prevailing sexual codes of conduct. And they are very funny.

I first heard of Sex Boots Dread on Woebot’s blog. These tunes came out on a 12″ and were rumoured to have been given a great review in the NME because of their pro-gay lyrics – something unheard of then and now for what seemed to be a Jamaican artist.

But there are a few clues, just from listening, that suggest everything is not what it seems. For example “think” is pronounced think and the more patois tink in the first two lines. And the sexually explicit content is very different from the usual “slackness” of the genre.

Sex Boots Dread is rumoured to be the work of comedian and personality Keith Allen.

The actual evidence for this is a bit sketchy, especially as I haven’t read Allen’s autobiography, “Grow Up” (Ebury Press 2007). But I’m more interested in writing about the context the record might have been made in, than who actually made it. So there.

West Side

Sex Boots Dread also appears on an album entitled The Roughler Presents The Warwick Sessions Volume 1, which came out in 1987.

The album also features Keith Allen, and is a product of the eighties Ladbroke Grove scene in West London. The Roughler was a fanzine which was set up to cover news of the Rough Trade cricket team (a concept nearly as incongruous as occult order the Ordo Templi Orientis having a baseball team, but apparently this is also true – I’ve never had much of a grip on sport) which operated out of The Warwick pub.

As fanzine veteran and West London historian Tom Vague puts it:

“Of all the local mags, the Roughler most definitively represents Notting Hill and the area’s contrasting psychogeography. Originally the scoresheet and fixture list programme of the Rough Trade cricket team, the Old Roughians, the satirical mag/fanzine/website etc was founded in the early 80s by the local pub legend Welsh Ray Roughler-Jones.

The Roughler covered the scene at the Rough Trade pub, the Warwick Castle at 225 Portobello Road, and the activities of Keith Allen, the Comic Strip actor who was in the local groups, the Atoms and Tesco Bombers, and arrested in the ’76 Carnival riot. In the mid 80s Allen achieved further local notoriety with his ‘first gay Rasta’ spoof record, Boots Sex Dread’s ‘Tickle Tune’.”

[link to whole publication - Entrance to Hipp: An historical and psychogeographical report on Notting Hill compiled by Tom Vague for HISTORYtalk Vague 44]

Tom also states that Keith was involved with legendary reggae pirate radio station Dread Broadcasting Corporation.

I’ve not found any corroborating evidence for that, but here he is interviewing Lepke of DBC for Channel 4 in 1982:

It seems like Keith had a project called “Breakfast Pirate Radio” which was either a station or released on cassette or both. Either way, that also featured Sex Boot Dread tracks:

Breakfast Pirate Radio [ 1:34:25 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

(relevant section commences 56:30)

The show also includes Gerry Arkwright, the “northern industrial gay” character and a very camp presenter. Allen clearly felt homosexuality was great source material, and it is certainly worth remembering how transgressive this must have felt at the time. There are also a fair few pops at politicians and middle class people which suggest an anarchist influence.

Ian Bone and an early incarnation of Class War used to knock about in Ladbroke Grove too. According to Bone’s autobiography “Bash The Rich”, Keith once played drums in his band “The Living Legends” and filmed several hours’ worth of footage of Class War’s “Bash The Rich” excursion to the 1985 Henley Regatta. Although it’s fair to say Mr Bone was less than impressed with one of Mr Allen’s latest ventures.

Dogging

A piece in the News of the World reveals the source of the record label name:

“Keith becomes uncharacteristically coy when he records a night of lust with one of the biggest stars in British drama. He refuses to name her but teasingly reveals she was later honoured with the title Dame.

He won her over with the bizarre story of how he came by his tattoo of a dog’s head and the word Rinka.

Keith had it done in a fit of anger over Seventies Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe being found not guilty of plotting to murder male model Norman Scott, his alleged gay lover.

In the drama leading up to the case Scott’s dog Rinka had been shot through the head. It was an odd chat-up line to a top actress but Keith reveals: “An hour later we were in her bedroom snorting amyl nitrate—her with a pair of headphones on, listening to opera, and me with my tongue all over her. And no, it wasn’t Judi Dench!”

Rinka Records also released a seven inch by The Atoms in 1979, featuring Keith Allen on vocals and piano. That record has a catalogue number or R23, but it may explain the Rinka2 imprint on the Sex Boots Dread label.

Sex Boots Dread: The Movie

“Tickle Tune” appears in the 2001 Larry Clark movie “Bully”, which I haven’t seen – but apparently it’s playing in a nightclub.

The track credited as follows, but does not appear on the official soundtrack CD:

“Boots Sex Dread”
Performed by Rinka
Written by Rinka and J. Cafritz
Published by Just Send the Money to Us Music (BMI)

“J. Cafritz”?! Well that turns out to be Julia Cafritz, former guitarist of Pussy Galore and now of Free Kitten infamy.

Kim Gordon and Julia Cafritz

Julia confirmed her awesomeness by dropping me an email and asking about the track when she found me discussing it over at the Chatty Mouth reggae board. I was happy to bung her an mp3, and took the opportunity to ask her what the crack was:

“it was a mythical track, in my mind some total concoction of Thurston [Moore, Sonic Youth] and Byron’s [Coley, music critic best known for his writing in Forced Exposure, now writes for The Wire amongst others]…since they had a hand in it getting on the soundtrack.”

That’s the only reason for me to be falsely given writing credit. ‘Just send ALL the money directly to us’ was Free Kitten’s publishing company…they even got that wrong.

The track must be a total joke. Having spent my entire childhood traveling to Jamaica every year, there were definitely some gay rastas on the down low…but none with such a keen sense of humor in such a homophobic culture.”

Sure enough Byron Coley bigs up the record in this piece for Vice Magazine:

“Sex Boots Dread” – Rinka – worth $1,000
I have the only copy of this 12” you’re ever going to see outside of Jamaica. It’s from the early 80s and it’s about Rinka coming out of the closet and and getting into heavy toasting about the pleasures of anal sex. Larry Clark used it for a club scene in the movie Bully.

So there you have it, a cracking record with quite a story behind it. I guess all of this might explain why Lily Allen, Keith’s daughter, has so much of a reggae influence in her work…