The 2025 London anarchist bookfair crossed the river into South London for the first time since it started in the early 1980s and having been to many of them I have to say this was a very good one. Location was the Leake Street railway tunnel by Waterloo station, famous for its graffiti so aesthetically appropriate. Lots of stalls lining both side of the tunnel, and a busy crowd.
Kae Tempest
Some amazing live performances - I saw the mighty Kae Tempest doing a pop up spoken word only set in the tunnel, including 'These are the Days' and 'Hyperdistillation' from the new album ('Self Titled') with its observations of contemporary London:
'I watch it flow, the old riverEmpty penthousesBut still the lone figure slept out the whole winterAnd died before springPassersby saw, but felt sureThey were not like himLife by numbersLooking for the punchlinesOnly getting punchesCrunches in the morningLunches in the boardroomNumbness in the courtroom'
Later at the after party in 26 Leake Street anarcho punk band The Mob played a rare gig followed up by Roni Size (Paul Simenon from The Clash was also supposed to be doing a DJ set in the afternoon, did that happen? I also missed Kildren and Anarchistwood).
The Mob's 'Let the Tribe Increase' (1983) is one of my favourite albums from the 80s anarcho-punk scene and I regret never seeing them at the time. Mark Wilson still sounds great and sadly the lyrics are still too topical. 'No Doves Fly Here', a 1982 single on Crass Records, seemed to imagine the aftermath of the nuclear war we all feared. But with the ongoing massacre in Gaza we don't have to imagine terrible scenes of devastation, they are happening in front of our eyes:
'The buildings are empty and the countryside is wastelandIt never was beforeAnd we never asked for warThe playgrounds are empty and the children limbless corpsesThey never were beforeAnd they never asked for warNo-one is moving and no doves fly here'
As for 'Witch Hunt', 40+ years later we are most definitely still living with the English fear. A week before and just round the corner I had found myself stuck in a crowd of far right nationalists swarming over the area on their Tommy Robinson/Elon Musk rally and sadly they don't seem to be going away any time soon.
'Stubbing out progress where seeds are sownKilling off anything that's not quite knownSitting around in a nice safe homeWaiting for the witch hunt
Still living with the English fearWaiting for the witch hunt, dear'
With the Mob's Mark Wilson now heavily involved with Bristol area space Rockaway Park, it felt like a bit of a Bristol takeover with Roni Size finishing off the night. I last saw him in 1999 in a tent at Reading Festival, still riding high after winning the Mercury Prize for the New Forms album. He dropped plenty of that in Leake Street and it still sounds fresh. Could have done with a bit more low end on the sound system, but hey I can never get enough bass. Great drum and bass set anyway.
Roni Size
Banners from Black Lodge Press:
'Everything for Everyone'
Oh yes and I did pick up usual collection of printed material and tote bags, including this book from the Minor Compositions stall - Brian Massumi's 'Toward a Theory of Fascism for Anti-Fascist Life. A Process Vocabulary'
According to Socialst Action around 20,000 people took part in the march, with up to 60,000 in the park ('60,000 rock the bomb, 13 May 1983). I must have been near the front of the march because I remember seeing The Damned play (including Smash it Up and Love Song) and I know that a lot of people missed them as the march was still coming into the park. That left a lot of disgruntled punks moaning and throwing mud at other acts.
The festival also featured Clint Eastwood and General Saint, Hazel O'Connor, Madness and the Style Council. I was excited by the latter as I had been to the Jam's last London gig at Wembley in the previous December, and this was the first London outing for Weller's new band. They played two numbers, which were to be their first two singles - 'Speak Like a Child' and 'Money go Round'.
Style Council on stage in Brockwell Park, May 1983
'Let Europe Dance. Our Future in Nuclear-Free'
The festival was sponsored by the left wing and soon to be abolished Greater London Council, who put on some great festivals in London parks in that period
More details at https://www.ukrockfestivals.com/glc-peace-festivals.html
Aaron Trinder's 'Free Party: a folk history' is a documentary telling the story - or at least some of the stories - of the 1980s/90s free party scene. There is a particular focus on the crossover with the earlier free festival /traveller movement, cross pollinated at Glastonbury and giving rise to Castlemorton in 1992 and much more besides. Interesting interviews feature with people involved at the time with sound systems including Spiral Tribe, Circus Warp, Bedlam and Nottingham's DiY. These help us to see free parties in a longer term historical context - for instance people involved with DiY had previously been involved in hunt sabbing and anarchist activism; Steve Bedlam remains active today with Refugee Community Kitchen.
A recent online fundraiser for the film, with the aim of securing a wider release, featured some additional material including a discussion between Aaron and artist Jeremy Deller. The latter mentions going to Reclaim the Streets parties and reflects on the wider politics of free parties and raves:
'that's what's dangerous when things get joined up. Which never really happened with punk, punk was burnt out so quickly, like two years - gone. Then it was just like bands with Top of the Pops. Dance music affected the whole country, it linked up with other people, so it was massively political. The songs weren't necessarily but it was the context of what you were doing, and who you were meeting and how you got there. In a way they were more scary, they weren't protest songs but protest behaviour... it's what the state really really fears, it's people meeting up, forming groups, then those people form bigger groups, it's something you can't really control',
Luton Henge Festival last month (29 July 2025) marked the opening of Luton Henge, a landscaped space featuring a circle of eight chalk stones that will serve as an outdoor venue for social and cultural events. The festival included music and dance, with Laura Misch playing her saxophone in the sunset. While I was there Bird Rave were doing their thing, dancing in feathered headdresses to classic rave tunes like 'Voodoo Ray' in bird inspired moves that they call 'dancefloor ornithology'. Anyway it was great fun.
Capoeira display
The location by Marsh House at the Leagrave end of town is significant, located as it is near to the source of the River Lea and the ancient earthwork of Waulud's Bank. It is also a place linked to Luton's subcultural history. The green barn just about still stands where Crass, Poison Girls and Luton punk band UK Decay played in 1979, and where people also put on jazz funk dances in that period (as recalled by Fahim Qureshi, see below).
I missed Crass, but it was here around the same time that I saw my first punk gig. From 1977 to at least 1984 there was an annual late summer one day Marsh House Festival. 16 year old me cycled over in 1979 and saw UK Decay and Pneu Mania, as well as 'Stevie's band', a scratch band made up of members of both bands who did a version of YMCA. Also on the bill were local rock band Toad the Wet Sprocket, Arcadaz (jazz/funk band), and acoustic singers Clive Pig and Heinrich Steiner.
'About 1500 people were entertained at the peak of the six hour concert which featured six local bands, solo singers and the White Dwarf Disco' all 'on a stage provided by Vauxhall Motors' (Luton News, 30 August 1979)
'yes, finally in the whole of desolate/boring Luton, people have finally done something positive'. A review of the 1979 Marsh House UK Decay/Pneu Mania gig from Stevenage based fanzine 'Cobalt Hate' no.1)
I know I was there in 1983 with The Pits, Click Click (post punk electronica) and Passchendale, kind of Houghton Regis Killing Joke. In the following year my friends Luton anarcho-punk band Karma Sutra played along with their St Albans counterpart Black Mass, Harlow punk leftists the Newtown Neurotics, Snatch and Nick the Poet. It poured with rain towards the end and loads of us got up on the stage for shelter and joined in singing with Attila the Stockbroker.
1984 Marsh House Festival flyer
Marsh House was originally a farm house for Marsh Farm - the land on which the Marsh Farm council estate was built in the 1960s. In the 1990s, Luton free party collective Exodus started off on this estate and Glenn Jenkins and other people who had been involved in Exodus helped save Marsh House after it was boarded up and threatened with demolition in the 2000s. It now acts as a hub for various community projects, including a music studio.
For me, Marsh House was primarily a place where I went to summer holiday open access playschemes as a kid, charging around the ramshackle adventure playground (getting temporarily banned for stone throwing), bouncing on inflatables and playing softball by the river. I now know that some of the people who ran those playschemes were part of the local radical/alternative art scene some of whom had previously been involved with Luton Arts Lab and Reflex collective and went on to found the 33 arts centre which gave me a later education in experimental film and theatre- but that's another story.
Marsh House today
Revoluton Arts who put on the Henge festival and are based at Marsh House are a descendent of these multi-faceted efforts to make things happen in my home town. They have done some interviews with people involved in some of these past projects, interesting to hear Fahim Qureshi (who I remember from the anti-racist movement of that time), Glenn Jenkins and Linda 'Muddie' Farrell (who worked on playschemes and helped set up 33) talk about the River Lea and its wildlife. Guess I followed that river down to London but never stop Luton.
Bird Rave
As for the stone circle, I used to be cynical about contemporary efforts to recreate ancient looking monuments but I have seen the Brockley stone circle on Hilly Fields near where I live now become a focus in the south london park where it dates back only to 2000. At the end of the day the combination of stone, sky and people is as real today as it ever was. Build it they will come.
More Luton stuff:
How it all began (for me): a School Kid against the Nazis in Luton 1979/80
Luton Nuclear Disarmament Campaign go to Greenham Common 1980The Luton Riots of 1981 - 'Brixton comes to Bedfordshire'
The Hunger Strike, the Irish War and an English Town
Partisan Books: a Luton 1970s radical bookshop
Crass, Poison Girls, UK Decay in Luton, 1979
Karma Sutra, Luton anarcho-punk and hunt sabbing
Clubbing in Luton 1984-6
Dole Days in Luton: unemployed protests, 1985
Luton Punk Squat Party 1985 - with Karma Sutra
We are Luton - opposing the English Defence League in 2012
'Angry White People' book review (in Datacide magazine)
Brooklyn-based producer Michael Claus produces sounds at the intersection of tech house, dub techno, and glitchy rave. Previous tapes on 100% Silk mined moodier, lush dub
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Field Records continue their run of essential archival vinyl reissues with a beautifully remastered edition of Stephen Hitchell's 2009 ambient dub techno masterpiece under his Variant
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Inverted Audio Record Store has been invited by Rinse FM to take part in Counter Culture, the station's ongoing radio series spotlighting specialist record stores. The
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Friday 6 February, Paris bass collective WizZ links up with Inverted Audio for a full-spectrum night of future-facing club pressure - moving through bass weight, dub
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Swiss producer Ben Kaczor returns with 'Peace In Mind', a deep and driving four-track EP on Berlin-based label Stólar, featuring a remix from Spanish producer Tibi
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Following up on our news announcement last year, today we are proud to premiere 'Signals from a Distant Afterglow', the third movement from Rafael Anton Irisarri's
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Berlin-based techno producer Peryl lands on German record label Augmented Research later this month to deliver his latest album Phase Alterations, an exploration in the highly
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To mark the 20th anniversary of Layering Buddha, Astral Industries have announced a newly remastered 2LP 180g black vinyl gatefold edition of Robert Henke's pivotal ambient
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Following their October session with Bell Towers, Felix Dickinson and MoMa Ready, Brooklyn-based party Aionia return to H0l0 on Saturday 17 January with the latest edition
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Composer and pianist David Moore has announced Graze the Bell, a new album of solo piano works set for release on 30 January via RVNG Intl.
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At the event in North London for Rip It Up and Start Again in 2005, I remember a voice in the audience piping up - apropos of absolutely nothing that the panel were discussing - to cry out:
"ABBA were better than the Velvet Underground!"
A poptimist, obviously - responding to an uncontrollable contrarian urge from within.
At the time I thought that - alongside its Tourettic quality and irrelevance to what we were talking about at that moment - that this was a really silly opposition to make. As if you had to choose, or to rank one above the other. Isn't Poptimism supposed to have freed itself, and all of us, from such binaries and hierarchies, rather than simply inverted them?
(Some years later I watched a doc on ABBA and concluded that they operated just like any other "artistically autonomous unit" from the mid-Sixties onwards. They were a proper band, writing their own material and producing it themselves, aspiring to superhuman levels of craft and musicianship, with lyrics that grew increasingly adult and emotionally sophisticated. Structurally, then, ABBA were "rockist" - operating very much not like a boyband or girl group (bossed around by producers, singing words written by professional others). So ABBA's true peers at that time would be Fleetwood Mac, as opposed to The Jacksons.).
Perhaps the outcry was based on a sense of historical injustice, ABBA having not been given their fair due?
Well, they are the first entry in the Spin Guide to Alternative Music, so some respect had been granted in the 1990s.
And in fact, if you go back to the music press of the time, you will see a fair amount of positive commentary on ABBA's pop genius.
And it came from musicians too: Elvis Costello famously described them as a big influence on Armed Forces (the dramatic piano cascades of "Oliver's Army", the sleek bright tightness of the sound throughout).
Okay the Richard Cook review is a little retrospective,and after the event, coming out in 1982, but hey look here's Dave McCullough raving about them in their "imperial phase" real time.
And then a few years later you have Paul Morley describing Human League as the new ABBA.
My ABfav ABBA tune
What a strange, super-sophisticated song structure! So many hook-full phases, such great playing.
Number 2 would be "S.O.S.", jostling hard - equal probably - with "Dancing Queen".
Saddened to hear of the death of Jack Barron - who wrote for Sounds and then NME among other places - after a long illness.
I didn't know Jack well but I really enjoyed the couple of encounters we had.
The first was when we were both sent as representatives of our respective music papers (Sounds then still, for him) to Warsaw to cover the first ever East-meets-West festival of alternative music in March 1987- the Carrot Festival, aka Marchewka. (You can read my report on it in this RIP post about David Thomas, who performed there).
Jack looked then almost exactly the same as in the much later photograph above, minus the eyepatch (which gives him a bit of a salty sea dog look)
Jack was already a seasoned veteran of visits to the Eastern Bloc countries and he had come prepared. His suitcase appeared to be entirely full of cassettes - advance copies of albums he'd been sent as a journo but that as released records would be extremely hard to get hold of behind the Iron Curtain. He told me that these advance tapes, once gifted, would then be copied, and that copy would be recopied, and so on.... ultimately circulating throughout Communist Europe.
I was very impressed by this act of munificence and the following year, when there was a second Carrot Festival, in Budapest (my report can be found in the same David Thomas tribute post), I came prepared myself, with a large cache of advance tapes of recent alternative releases.
However I could get no takers for them - and ended taking them all back home with me.
Hungary then was one of the most liberal and permissive of Soviet-aligned nations - I remember being struck by a billboard of a glamorous, made-up female TV presenter, whereas Warsaw had been completely devoid of advertising, apart from the odd propaganda poster, a fabulously desolate and grey place. And because of that relative freedom and the country's proximity to Austria, Hungarian hipsters could get hold of all the music they wanted. Indeed they all seemed quite blasé about the festival and the weirdo-rock visitors from the U.K, whereas the first Carrot was treated as an enormously significant event by the Polish media (Jack and I were both interviewed by TV reporters) and by all the Poles we met.
Jack had a dry, low-key manner with just a gruff hint of baleful - which he possibly deliberately developed. At one point he mentioned having studied (I think in college - doing linguistics?) how speech patterns and conversational cadence could be deployed to exert an almost hypnotic control over people. Something to do with speaking slowly and quietly and with pauses of a certain length - this compelled attention, the listener would be forced to lean in and couldn't break away.
Which was not unlike the way he spoke when telling me this...
The second time we met was when I was researching Energy Flash and I interviewed him along with his partner Helen Mead (both of them working for NME) and Barry Ashworth from Dub Pistols. These three friends were veterans of acid house from its early days.
Jack had some extraordinary tales about his adventures with MDMA. Let's just say that he plunged into the scene with great commitment and intensity and took it as far as almost anyone at that time. He seemed none the worse for wear, though - his characteristic dry wit intact.
A fine writer and one of those unusual characters who found a place in the menagerie that was the UK weekly music press.
Here's an early-ish singles review in which swipes amusingly at Paul Morley while acknowledging the greatness of Art of Noise.
And here's an interesting take on the Cocteau Twins
Early on, Jack was one of Sounds's main writers about reggae and dancehall. Jamaican music, as I noted here, received sustained and serious coverage by the paper, far more than you'd imagine given its reputation as an oracle for Oi! and NWBHM. You'll find many pieces by Jack in that post.
As I also noted in an earlier post here, his pen name is possibly an alias taken from the science fiction novel Bug Jack Barron.
Looking at the Rock Back Pages bio, I see Jack actually wrote for a while for Melody Maker, in 1998, a good while after my time there was up. This makes him one of those rare examples of the "inkie clean sweep" - someone who wrote for all three leading UK weeklies. (Another would be Vivien Goldman).
(Sorry - I don't count Record Mirror as "leading". Mind you, there are even-rarer examples of people who wrote for all four, I believe).
As a counterbalance to the recent Japan-love posts, here is Jonh Wilde both befuddled by and scornful of the veneration for David Sylvian (including his usually closely aesthetically aligned comrade Chris Roberts, whose viewpoint is incorporated into the review)
I do find bracing these Radically Other takes on bands you love - and I've never forgotten the voice like hair lacquer line.
"Musicians", loosely understood, although Malcolm had broken out as a performing artist by the time he wrote this for the NME Christmas look-back on '82 / look-forward to '83.
The Stooges: Side Two
By Jonathan Richman
Fusion Magazine, Oct. 16, 1970
It happened to The Doors. They were loved in '66 for their new approach, hated in '68 for their pretensions, and are right at this minute being courted again 'cause Morrison is so funny and after all they really can play.
Meanwhile another segment of the audience had never heard of them in '66, bought all their albums from July '67 to mid '69 and now is losing interest.
Now it's The Stooges.
Among others, I've changed my opinion because they've changed some ways, and because I've changed my mind specifically about Iggy's stage show.
In mid '69 a few local critics and I thought they were a powerful band with a tough sound who made the Ten Years After crowd puke, knew what a song was and had a sense of humor. But the main thing we were interested in, and what most viewers talked about, was Iggy.
The Stooges ' "Phenomenon" = The Actions of Iggy
A pleasant change from the style of Joe Cocker, Robert Plant, and many schmucky stage performers, Iggy looked exciting on stage, could talk intelligently off stage, seemed a powerful person and one with beautiful ideas and taste. These 'old' Stooges were beautiful because they were so honest, I love their first album. It is unlike much else, exciting, really sexy and funny. "No Fun" and "Not Right" lead a list of songs which don't wear thin after lots of listening...
Terrific Ron Asheton
The main thing I liked about the first album (at first without realizing it, and the group's artistic standout both live and recorded) was guitarist Ron Asheton. I now think that most of what is good in The Stooges' sound and image is his responsibility. The reason I like their live shows better than recordings is that you can hear Ron at ear-splitting volume.
Asheton is most exciting on stage where Marshall amplifiers with volume on full, and treble, bass middle and prescence controls on approximately half (plus Vox fuzz, Vox wah-wah, a newly added Binson echorec and a red Fender Stratocaster enable him to produce stunning guitar sound.
These all contribute to Ron's near-perfect image. That guitar, used by most of the surf groups, "Buddy Holly" and others, symbolized white rock and roll. Of course it's red, symbolically a violent color often favored by kids who like to act tough. Perhaps, back in Michigan, Ron has a red & white full dress Harley Davidson cycle; maybe a black 50's Lincoln Continental or Chrysler Imperial or a 1957 Thunderbird.
You see Marshall amps look tough. So do his wide stance, sober but child-like expression, sunglasses and the Nazi symbols he attaches to his belongings. I always wonder if he plans these things.
Their second album, to keep you up to date on their artistic slide, features songs with less staying power than those of the first. These songs have little to say other that how "loose" Iggy is and how we'd all better look out. The first was also better 'cause one heard more Ron Asheton. He plays some nice savage parts ("On the Street," Loose", "1970") and one patrician pretty one ("Dirt"). Outside of his contributions I don't see anything interesting on it.
Novelty Factor
Two things about the Stooges wear thin with repetition:
1. Many of their songs.
2. Iggy's stage performance.
The latter becomes more like watching a magician from behind. Assumed spontaneity is revealed as calculation. The show became humorous, an amusing night out, until I realized the audience segment was fooled into fear by Iggy, fooled into regarding him as a daring, fearless man, sent by God to test your ego hangups. Then it started to stink, bringing us to the next section titled
The Obvious and Forgotten Devices used by Iggy or Iggy's "Charisma" Exposed and Analyzed
Since Iggy's exposure (artistically harmful, perhaps), to the Big City's bright lights and wordy critics there has been talk of Iggy's ability "to make anyone feel uptight."
He's so powerful people in the audience just can't stand up to him, we are told.
He's so charismatic, one doesn't want to, they say.
All right, now look. Charismatic or not, any stage performer has advantages about which any 11-year old bully instinctively knows, but which many rock critics, especially female, have forgotten.
First off, the things Iggy does which have caused admiration, wonderment and anger involve things like leaping into the audience, getting fresh with women, spilling drinks on people, dancing on tables, sitting on people's laps and occasionally pushing people out of chairs. We are led to believe that the "victims" in the audience are too "uptight" to do anything. Well, why shouldn't people be nervous?
When a stage performer leaves his stage, goes into the audience and singles out one person for anything, he will usually be nervous. Watch "The Tonight Show" when Carson plays "Stump the Band." It's obviously in fun, but still with all those eyes on them most people are relieved when through with the TV camera.
Throw in sexual aspects to the above and think of how tensions would obviously increase. You see, circus clowns have used this device for 100 years. They run through the crowd with custard pie and water pail in hand and stare out customers (except, having some good taste and some sense, only briefly) letting the customer toy with the idea that maybe the clown will do him in and letting him go just a bit edgy. Why then were these clowns not called charismatic geniuses? artists? stars? Because Iggy does this kind of thing but plays to the audience's biggest collective weakness, its sexual identity.
He's out to show how loose he is and how uptight you are and I don't think it's charming. I think it's bush league and sucks. Some people wonder why Iggy hasn't been attacked. How miraculous, they say Iggy is fearless we are told.
Be serious, out there! Who wants to hit a stage performer? In spite of Iggy's tactics there are people who have senses of humor. Well, this is part of the act, good luck to him say the better adjusted. By the third time I saw them I no longer saw humor nor did I see Iggy as a performer. I saw him as a man using little judgement or taste and tensely awaited a confrontation that didn't happen.
"Shit, one of these days some guy's gonna haul off and...."
I've heard that a few times. If that does happen it will be because someone has decided that Iggy Stooge has overstepped his bounds as a performer and is acting in such a manner as to offer us not entertainment but a severe imposition.
This geezer was fast approaching sixty years old (born 1909!) and a seasoned veteran of writing about Tin Pan Alley and American vernacular music forms (first book published 1945!), when he finished writing The Rock Revolution. It was one of the first of that spate of books about rock that came out in 1968-70. They must have all been commissioned by publishers in 1967 when they abruptly realized that rock was not just a teen fad but was going to stick around. It had an audience now that a/ liked to read b/ would also like the whole phenomenon they'd been caught up explained and historicized. Furthermore there might also be a market of elder outsiders who wanted to understand what their kids were into.
Younger critics of that time didn't reckon much on Arnold Shaw's effort - they thought he was an old, square, clueless interloper... a hack... and perhaps they were jealous of the fact that he'd got the book deal and not them.
But I must say I was surprised by how perceptive and well organized these opening chapters are as an argument.
I was also struck by the chapter sub title "The Recording Studio Is The Instrument".
Could this be the first iteration of the studio-as-instrument idea, years before the likes of Eno talked it up? Or was it just a commonplace idea by the late Sixties, in the wake of Sgt. Pepper's?
This extract is another example of the way that people then talked about "electronic rock", meaning not just the use of Moogs and synths, but the painting-with-sound enabled by multi-track recording, a.k.a. psychedelia. See this Lillian Roxon Rock Encylopedia entry.
