I discovered two neo-nazi stickers on lamp-posts the other day whilst walking to work. I found them shocking more for the surprise value than their content. In the 80s (oh no, here he goes again) there used to be quite a lot of this stuff floating about in some areas – you’d even see the odd NF sticker on the tube.

These days it comes across as real fringe nutjob stuff, I think. You know it’s some lonely geezer in a dirty mac furtively going about in the early hours with a pocket full of fading nazi propaganda. Like a dog trying to mark its territory, or a flasher.

These two items were even more pathetic because they publicised two different organisations. “Oh blimey someone from the National Front has been stickering on the same morning as someone from the neo-nazi N*vember 9th S*ciety! What are the chances of that? Wow this area must be a real hotbed of far right activity!”

The pic, by the way, is Rudolf Hess. Apparently he was killed by those horrid rotters ZOG. It’s as good an insight as any into the intellect of the master race that they think:

a) Many people will recognise Hess from his picture

b) Many people will know what ZOG is.

c) Anyone will get worked up by the circumstances of Hess’ death.

My theory is it’s just a wind up, rather than a recruitment aid. “Let them hate us, as long as they fear” and all that. I suppose I do hate them, but mainly it just all seems a bit sad.

I ripped both stickers down easily and had a wander in my lunchtime to see if there were more, but fortunately other people had already removed the bulk of the two other offending items I found.

There used to be all sorts of rumours of fascists putting razor blades under their retarded propaganda but I’ve never met anyone who has actually seen this. Or in fact, many stickers these days – it’s a bit like “I Spy” for cynical lefties.

After reflecting on my teenage fandom of Death In June here, it felt quite good to finally purge this flat of their last remaining records.

Unfortunately it looks like it isn’t as straightforward as that:

	MC036 eBay Listing Removed: Hateful or Discriminatory ( 182548222)

Dear john-eden We appreciate that you chose eBay to list the following auction-style listing(s):230223972319 – DEATH IN JUNE: Brown Book LP ORIG with insert current93 However, your (s) breaches eBay’s Hateful or Discriminatory policy and has been removed. In accordance with our User Agreement, items prohibited by law or by eBay policy are not allowed on eBay. We notified members who placed bids on the item that the listing has been canceled. You’re not allowed to list items that promote or glorify hatred, violence or racial intolerance, or items that promote organisations with such views on eBay.

I had to laugh. It was nearly as funny as when William Bennett personally got ebay to remove my auction of a Whitehouse tribute record.

“On 13 August 1977, the far-right National Front attempted to march from New Cross to Lewisham in South East London. Local people and anti-racists from all over London and beyond mobilised to oppose them, and the NF were humiliated as their march was disrupted and banners seized.

To mark the 30th anniversary of the ‘Battle of Lewisham’ we are holding a half day event in New Cross on Saturday 10th November with speakers and films (1 pm start at Goldsmiths College, New Cross).”

Some time has passed since the event at Goldsmiths, so my memory may play tricks on me. That would be in keeping with the write up on the Lewisham 77 blog makes the point that history is itself a battlefield, with various agendas and versions struggling to be heard. For me that was one of the most interesting aspects of the day – better than amassing a tick list of “facts” about what happened.

I arrived in time to see my friend Neil giving an overview of the events which lead up to the big day, and then we were straight into the first panel discussion.

This section could loosely be described as “leftie hacks vs the people”. On the one hand speakers on the platform and contributors from the audience tried to outline the orthodox left’s history of the event. Parts of this were very interesting – for example the tactics which succeeded in Lewisham had been attempted during a similar march in Wood Green some months beforehand, but hadn’t quite worked. The catastrophic humiliation of the Front in Lewisham severely limited their ability to operate a “march and grow” strategy.

And of course it is very heart warming to see that peoples’ sincerely held beliefs have endured over the 30 years since the day. However these contributions were marred for me by an emphasis on the bureaucracy of organising – the committee structure, lots of meetings, etc. And grandstanding, which was gloriously personified by an audience member from one sect beginning his “question” by trying to undermine the credibility of one of the speakers: “when I saw the poster I had no idea who you are, but now I see you I think I can remember you from back then”.

It’s undeniable that, like ‘em or loathe ‘em, groups like the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) et al played a huge role in the day’s events (as did local church groups). But they are often completely fucking boring to listen to.

In stark contrast, the other speakers in this first section were much more lively. Martin Lux gave an account of rucking with the NF and the cops from a working class anarchist perspective which was as uncompromising as it was entertaining.

Dr William Lez Henry (aka Lez Lyrix) told us of his experiences growing up in the area and the racism he encountered on a daily basis. His talk was very instructive and went some way to break down the mythologising of the other contributors. For example he and his friends had been told by more senior members of the local black community to let the white anti-racists converging on the area from outside fight the white fascists doing the same. The role of black youth on the day was initially to defend the few black owned businesses in the area, but then of course events overtook them and many opportunities to confront the overt racism of the NF and the not-so covert racism of the cops were exploited to the full.

Lez’s comments are fleshed out in his new book Whiteness Made Simple: Stepping Into The Grey Zone (NuBeyond, 2007) , with a particular emphasis on the need for black autonomy and self-education as ways of combating institutional racism.

I can’t remember much about the q&a section. It was probably better than the questions later on, but that isn’t saying very much. At all.

The first panel session was followed by a series of films which varied in quality. One was positively avant-garde, combining a soundtrack of harsh traffic noise alongside some indistinct commentary by people being interviewed about their involvement in the great day.

The second panel discussion was chaired by Dr Henry (which I thought was a good sign, because he doesn’t put up with any nonsense!). It was more questioning in nature – which was very welcome.

There were a number of contributions throughout the day from people involved with current struggles, for example against the BNP in Barking, the No-Borders campaign, etc. I didn’t get the impression that there was anywhere near as much energy or creativity involved with these projects as in 1977, but then we live in different times.

It was, however, quite depressing to hear from a representative from Unite Against Fascism that their main tactic is to campaign for people to vote for anyone other than the British National Party. This seems to be singularly unsuccessful and perhaps the reason for this is that the BNP are positioning themselves as a radical alternative to all of the other parties – parties who many people feel have nothing to offer them. UAF’s position only serves to reinforce this divide. If people are pissed off with their New Labour council, there is little point in trying to get people to vote Labour just to keep the BNP out. If this tactic is the best the orthodox left have to offer then it is no wonder that the BNP are currently competing with the Greens to become the 4th major political party in the UK – or indeed the 2nd or 3rd in some areas.

On a more positive note, Paul Gilroy (yes, him!) gave a great talk on his experiences of the riot, which essentially were of abject fear. He used this as a tool to open up a discussion about mythologising the past and how attempts to produce one coherent story should be resisted.

One profound example of this is that the orthodox left remembers an old woman leaning out of a window on Clifton Rise and questioning some of those present on the counter demo. According to that story she then put her speakers out of her window and played Bob Marley’s “Get Up Stand Up” which electrified the crowd. Non-aligned people remember it as Junior Murvin’s “Police and Thieves” however.

I find that very interesting for a whole number of reasons – not least that it reinforces Dr Henry’s comments that local black youth experienced far more oppression from the police than they did from swastika wielding NF members.

Gilroy was followed by Les Back whose contribution was similarly questioning and lacking in dogmatic certainties. He raised a number of issues around the changing face of British fascism. His questioning of the validity of the usefulness of referring to the BNP in the 21st Century as “Nazis” caused quite a stir amongst those involved in doing just that as part of the SWP-backed Anti-Nazi League, but to my mind he is bang on. His analysis extended into an interrogation of the idea of an English/British identity and how this is used by the right wing press as well as organised fascist groups, and of course by mainstream politicians.

I wanted this part of the day to be much more developed – how do you counteract the promotion of a “white identity” or a “national identity”? Do you:

a) take the piss out of it (by having a pop at middle-Englanders and morris dancing?).

But does this alienate people who have already bought into it to a greater or lesser degree? And do you replace it with anything else? – which brings us to:

b) Try to develop a more inclusive “English” identity – a la “curry and chips”, “reclaiming the Union Jack/Cross of St George”

– beaming faces looking up at you from the clip art produced by your press dept after having gone on their diversity training? Can you do this without appearing tokenistic (all these companies with black people splashed across their brochures, when their board of directors is all white guys in their fifties?). But isn’t an “inclusive” Englishness still basically an excuse for excluding people who are not “English” – i.e. the most recent waves of immigrants, but not those who have been here a while now?

c) Try to replace it with an identity based on class rather than race/nation…

Unfortunately that didn’t happen. What did happen was a series of mind-numbingly awful contributions from the floor, which consisted of the most heinous grandstanding I have ever had the misfortune to witness. Anyone who starts their “question” with “Right, I’ve just come from a meeting where we’ve been …” should be made to leave. The meeting degenerated into a thinly veiled competition to see who could justify their current political activity the best. Presumably this was meant to inspire people to join in or something. But as the “questions” got longer and longer my thoughts and energy began to evaporate. The British Left at play, fucking it all up as usual.

I fled the building with Martin after congratulating the organisers (because overall, I’d had a great time and it was very well organised), introducing myself to Dave Katz and saying hello to Lez.

The day raised so many questions it’s difficult to know where to begin. I learnt a lot about Lewisham 77 and realised how far we are away from anything like a successful mass movement against fascism 30 years later.

Further information is available at the great Lewisham 77 blog.

Stewart Home’s new material on Tony Wakeford et al seems to have generated a flurry of additional information which has now been incorporated into the article on his website.

The shitty politics of the post-industrial music scene AND revelations about the inability of some its “stars” to wipe their own fat arses.

Stewart Home has unearthed more unsavoury revelations from the sad life of stiff-right-arm fanatic Tony Wakeford. (See especially the right hand column, but it’s all worth a read if you haven’t seen it before).

Week 8: Red Sky at Night, Death In June

It was one of things you end up at, following links. From Psychic TV, to Coil, to Current 93 via little notes in fanzines, on record sleeves, even a couple of sentences in the NME.

20 years ago, at the ripe old age of 17, I asked the bloke behind the counter of Our Price if I could hear “The Brown Book”, an LP by a band called Death In June which I knew nothing about other than that there was some involvement by David Tibet, Rose McDowell and John Balance.

It sounded fantastic – nice and loud over the shop’s great system and headphones. Dark ballads, weird imagery and simple folky songs. The sleeve gave very little away – a skull and the title of the album. The inserts were seriously weird – some leaflets about occult supplies and some very sinister t-shirts.

The final track on side one was a dreamlike spoken word piece over a soundscape. When it finished I handed over my cash.

Death In June were one of the ultimate bands for fans who like a bit of a treasure hunt. Very few clues were ever given away. At 17, before google or discogs had even been thought of, this was quite exciting.

Putting the pieces of the jigsaw together became my new obsession, but when I saw the finished picture I was older and wiser and didn’t really like what I saw. The skull on the cover was a totenkopf and one of the songs on the album was an acapella of “Horst Wessel”. These were the first steps in the “are they dodgy or aren’t they?” tango that DIJ plays with all their fans. The consensus seems to be that everyone can get off on this elitist/faux-nazi imagery without actually being a fascist.

This flogging of “aesthetic fascism as pornography” is dealt with at length in Stewart Home’s definitive Death In June Not Mysterious.

But there were other things which set me on edge as well. Not least this, from one of the group’s newsletters: “1988 (HH) held such promise but, like the man (AH) has only proved to be treacherous”. The bands which followed in DIJ’s jackbooted footsteps took the uniforms, runes and nudge nudge nazi references several steps further without anyone raising an eyebrow.

Musically, the strummy folkiness lost its appeal when I finally got to hear Nick Drake.

The totenkopf tango continues to this day, with Douglas P (DIJ’s only permanent member) doing very nicely out of the proceeds. Dull. I’ve even grown tired of misguided attempts by anti-fascists to get worked up by the band and its posturing. I take some comfort in the fact that I never felt the need to own a Death In June wristwatch.

I didn’t have enough 12″ envelopes to get rid of my vinyl, but I had managed to keep a book about the group written by a fan, some newsletters, fanzines, etc. I knew this stuff was rare and that there would be an eager audience for it. In some ways this entire ebay exercise felt like handing down this material to a younger generation who may or may not be like I was at 17. Needless to say I had very mixed feelings about this and it was all too easy to feel a bit paternal and worried about people who were buying up all this shit off ebay. But the twin realisations that I wouldn’t have listened to anyone else at 17, and that the 37 year old me wanted cash money, stopped me making an arse out of myself.

RESULT:

Sure enough the book was up to just under 20 quid 2 days into the auction. I also received a number of emails begging me to end the auctions early and sell multiple items off-ebay. The book ended up at £26.00, the newsletters at £16.00, the zines etc between £2 and £12.50. Once again, the majority of this stuff went to one person to the tune of about eighty quid. A good week, all in all.

Week 6: Esoterra and Answer Me

Esoterra began as a little zine covering occulty type stuff and industrial music and gradually became the definitive in-house journal of what they called “extreme culture”. It had excellent production values with loads of great photos and graphics in each copy. I ended up distributing it for a while and was rewarded by receiving one copy of each issue which had an extra silk-screened cover.

Esoterra’s development into a full-blown magazine covering all aspects of the “extreme” mirrored my own interest in it. And by ‘mirrored’ I mean that, step by step, we were moving away from each other.

One thing which this exercise of clearing out has impressed upon me is that I used to really get into the detail of belief in a way I don’t now. I think I was operating on the basis that anything extreme was worth a look simply because it was “forbidden”. As if I was trying to draw a gigantic map of human consciousness by walking around the outer reaches of the coastline.

I am sure that part of this was due to a reluctance on my part to actually amalgamate all of this contradictory (and in some cases ludicrous) stuff into a coherent whole. That would have meant rejecting some stuff out of hand and wondering about how to actually apply all this weirdness in the real world. I think there is something in the psyche of a lot of young men which is attracted to just collecting stuff, of knowing about things that not many people know about. It is probably a substitute for having an identity of your own. Mind you, there are aspects of all that material that I am still interested in, and the experience has obviously been part of a process of growing up and becoming the (cough) well-rounded person I am today.

It is also worth mentioning that it was almost impossible to find out about a lot of things prior to the internet. Now that everything seems to be available, I think these areas have lost their power.

My voyage into the extreme began to hit the buffers when it became clear that there were actually people pushing rigid ideologies under the guise of “information access”, or freedom of speech, or transgression for the sake of it. For example anarchists in the US who seemed to have no problem welcoming the paedo-apologists of NAMBLA under their “anti-authoritarian” banner. And then there were the fascists.

Industrial music and punk had often flirted with fascism and the fascist aesthetic. In the case of Throbbing Gristle the imagery was used to raise questions about conformity and authoritarianism. Some of the bands that followed took the imagery and just ran with that, missing the point entirely.

The mid 90s saw the emergence of a few populist occult/fascist groups and magazines, largely based in the US again. At first some of this stuff came across as refreshingly different, but it turned out to be the same old wine in new bottles. The “movement” began to solidify into a scene, with all the usual cliches and limitations. Just as punk bands were routinely asked about animals rights or Crass, everyone now had to have an opinion on the end of the world or Anton LaVey. There was a love affair with fascism going on but most people kept it at the aesthetic level or at least denied that they held any political beliefs (for example Boyd Rice’s absurd “When I say I am a fascist I don’t mean it in a political way”).

The breaking point came for me when Esoterra issue 6 landed on my doormat. The contents were by and large up to the usual excellent standard. But there was also a full page advert for a group called RAHOWA included. RAHOWA = Racial Holy War. Here was a group with actual connections to political fascism (in the form of the wacko Church of the Creator). Undeniably “extreme”, but a line had been crossed.

I ended up having an argument with the editor and not distributing that issue. He informed me that the group had offered him money for a whole lot more advertising if he published an interview with them, but he had declined. We remained on reasonably good terms after that and no similar adverts appeared.

The next issue featured my interview with Mother Destruction – a brilliant group who managed to avoid all the stiff-right-arm posturing which seemed to be becoming the norm.

After that I think it dawned on me that the music was beoming less interesting compared to other things. It was pointless hanging about and watching an entire scene go down the toilet musically and ideologically at such an exciting time for dance music and other things.

To his credit, the editor of Esoterra continued to send me copies. By issue 9 I could see the funny side. He remains good natured to this very day and even dropped me a message via ebay to say hello and wish me well with the auctions.

Answer Me! was possibly the definitive article in “extreme”. Unlike yer proto-neofolk goths, Jim and Debbie Goad were true outsiders who didn’t seem to give a fuck about anything. Whilst the satanists were busy building up a whole new rack of “off the peg” cliches, the Goads were pouring more ketchup on sacred cows.

Each issue of Answer Me! was tens of thousands of words long, nearly all written by the couple. Rants included “why I hate being a jew”. There were extended articles where the Goads would report on various drug and alcohol dependency meetings, or call suicide helplines. Whilst US anarchists were cosying up to NAMBLA (see above) the Goads conducted a piss-taking phone interview with them.

Within the great writing were a few observations of Jim Goad’s background which revealed that he’d managed to rise above more badness than the average twenty-something satanist could even imagine. He later wrote a book entitled “The Redneck Manifesto” which on the surface was all about race in the USA, but was actually much more about class – a concept completely absent from virtualy all of the counter-cultural posturing I had witnessed. Now, why would that be?

RESULT: Most of the Esoterras went for over a tenner a piece. Some of the earlier ones (including the ultra-limited silk screen covered ones) went for a mere £3.65. Bizarrely Answer Me went for a paltry £1.24, i.e. less than I paid for it in the first place. Weird.

Jah Shaka, nazis, hippies, gay animals and me.

All’s well that ends well, though!

Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2006 22:33:47 +0100

From: redbullmusicacademy

To: Eden

“We are shocked and appalled that such a link could appear on our website, and would like to be clear that it would never be the intention of Red Bull Music Academy to give any sort of platform to these kind of forces whatsoever. Our links try to give people unbiased and free information relating to music and the Academy, which in this instance has evidently been abused by a third party and gone awfully wrong. Please accept our apologies for not having noticed this sooner, and our thanks for bringing it to our attention.”

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: Why does redbullmusicacademy.com link to the National Front site?

Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2006 19:34:23 +0000

From: Eden

To: Red Bull Music Academy

Thank you for your great site, which was flagged up on the Blood & Fire discussion board earlier today.

I have very much enjoyed reading the lectures there by David Rodigan and Dennis Bovell – it is great to see reggae discussed in such a passionate and informed manner from people who are such luminaries in the UK.

I was however extremely disturbed when I noticed a hyperlink on this page of the Bovell lecture:
http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/LECTURES.95.0.html?act_session=153 which goes straight to the homepage of the neo-nazi National Front.

I do not think this is in keeping with the Red Bull Music Academy’s aims and I am sure that Dennis Bovell would not approve.

I am writing to you to request that you remove the link because I don’t think a platform should be given to the NF by your organisation. Indeed, I don’t think you providing their website with traffic does you any favours whatsoever.

It would be helpful if you could confirm you have received this email and let me know your thoughts on this matter. I will look forward to hearing from you.

John Eden