8:30am, City of London.
The suits are back on, but the shops are still boarded up.
Commuters emerge blinking from Bank tube station, greeted by the smell of hardening horse manure. And graffitti:
“Freedom”
“All Cops Are Cunts”
Circled A’s, Hearts, slogans of varying triteness.
There are police standing where the private security guards were yesterday morning.
I can’t stop a big smile spreading across my face.
5:30pm, City of London.
Quiet. No traffic, no noise. There is your actual reduction of carbon emissions.
Leave your car and suit at home, maybe stay there yourself. It could be like a little holiday.
Two blokes with plummy voices discuss capitalism on the way home, no way of knowing if they are dressed down bankers or protestors.
Gresham Street is streaked with horse manure, just like old times.
The police have blocked off the roads to Bank. Small groups of workers and punks hang about, waiting for something to happen. One guy just stands up and walks determinedly towards the police line and is arrested. Sits down in the road and is dragged off.
I head down the labyrinth of back alleys.
Laughing: “They were the worst kind of social reprobates, the dregs”
Angry: “They were just thugs basically, I hope they…”
They’ll be talking about this day for years.
8:30am, City of London.
Lots of blue denim on show, but nobody seems particularly relaxed.
The shops are boarded up, the offices have extra security guards outside – telling people off with video cameras.
There is a 10 foot of layer of metal barriers around the Royal Exchange.
“The truth is there, for those with eyes to see.”
I walk away from The City, along the river to work. I haven’t “dressed down”.
Full transcript of interview with Graham Smith of HCDA undertaken for the film Injustice about deaths in custody.
Found here, where you can also find Benjamin Zephaniah’s thoughts on the Colin Roach case.
I find this sort of community work is inspiring for a whole heap of reaons, not least because it provides a practical way forward beyond the usual “ACAB” rhetoric.
A spectacularly grim bit of social history from The Independent in 1993.
Olaf is a reggae writer and fan outta Cologne. We previously interviewed each other for the Audio Poverty programme.
We also played some tunes to close the festival. They laid on a great soundsystem for us. We were preceded by Quarta 330, a really cool Japanese guy who fiddled with a load of gameboys to produce this whacked out wall of digi noise that I really liked. He gets lumped in with dubstep because he’s had a record out on Hyperdub, but (as with Hyperdub artists in general) he has a load of different stuff going on and has obviously been influenced by a bunch of different stuff.
My set was the usual combination of UK MC classics and JA bizness, with the odd bit of dodgy mixing I am afraid. Only 45 minutes too because I wanted to stop hogging the stage (out of everyone at the festival I was the only person with 3 slots, heh heh). The plan was for me to return and do a second set later but Olaf was doing pretty great, so the free beer beckoned…
Also see this page on the Audio Poverty site for mp3 sets from DJ Rupture, Awesometapesfromafrica and Quarta 330 alongside a lot of even stranger sonic and spoken word material. Get stuck in!
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My arm is proper fucked up, so consider this something of an intermission.
While I figure out what to do about that, some short posts with audio will be the order of the day.
I did a talk at the Audio Poverty conference about blogging, fanzines, music journalism and occulture:
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It’s sans powerpoint but I think it works pretty great.
You can also download the audio file from here.
EDIT: here is the text from the programme which includes the questions I asked myself at the end…
Misadventures in music blogging: dub journalism or amateur ranting?
I have been running my uncarved.org/blog since January 2003, which generally covers topics such as reggae soundsystems, the UK MC tradition (from fast chat to grime), life in the London Borough of Hackney and whatever is on my mind.
In this presentation I will trace the origins of his blogging style in the fanzine and mail art networks of the 1980s and 90s (and in a poem about a mouse he wrote at school which he is still slightly embarrassed about). I will contrast this with the established styles of formal music journalism and attempt to show the advantages and disadvantages of being a 39 year old balding white guy writing about reggae and grime.
The trajectory of a particular corner of the music blogosphere will also be examined.
Questions posed and answered will include:
Whilst doing this I will also unveil the occult secrets of good blogging and explain why bloggers have the power to save or destroy the music industry.
42 Reggae Album Cover Designs: The Art & Culture of Jamaica | Crestock.com Blog.
Quite a nice rundown from a designer who has an impressive lack of knowledge about the music.