In the first of a series of articles on the troubled relationship between the left and culture, Maciej Zurowski investigates reactionary musical counterculture and looks at the anti-fascist response
Warning! Attention, everybody! It looks like for the first time since the 80s, London’s ethnic communities must fear for their safety when certain rock bands come to town. As the Love Music, Hate Racism website warns us in bold letters, the Slimelight club in Islington, North London has booked a “set of acts with fascist ties” for October 2011. These include Peter Sotos, who “has written tributes to Joseph Mengele (also known as the Angel of Death in Auschwitz) and whose self-produced fanzine contains references to ‘Nazi triumphs’, with frequent and lurid references to the abuse of children and women.”[i] Scary stuff.
But that is not all. Despite protests by Love Music, Hate Racism and other anti-fascist groups, the Slimelight club has already hosted a fascist concert on June 25. According to LMHR, the artists on the bill all had “a long association with fascism and racism” and “seek to attack our celebrated multicultural society”. Did neo-Nazis go on a violent rampage through Islington’s Upper Street? Did they abuse women and children? After all, “the well-known Nazi organisation Stormfront stated on their website that “their members will be attending the event”, and a report in the Islington Gazettequoted Unite Against Fascism joint secretary Weyman Bennett as finding the prospect of such a concert “worrying”. Even Labour MP Emily Thornberry got in on the act, saying that “these peddlers of poison” had no place in Islington.
Truth be told, LMHR could have been a bit more thorough with its research. Stormfront, for instance, is not actually a “well-known Nazi organisation”, but a far-right internet discussion forum with headquarters in West Palm Beach, Florida. As such, it provides an illusion of community to ‘racially aware’ misfits the world over, but it would be wrong to say that it has “members” who might collectively goosestep to the concert. “I was a bit tempted to go to the gig just to see what would happen,” a London-based Stormfront user nicknamed ‘Saxon Assassin’ admitted, “but after actually looking up the bands involved I think I’ll skip it”. Then the damning verdict fell: apparently, the musical programme on offer was “no more racially conscious than Springtime for Hitler”.
The original post that ‘The Falcon’ published on Stormfront on May 28 looked as if it had been inspired by an April 13 article from the anti-fascist website Who makes the Nazis, to which it linked. “I wouldn’t have heard about the gig were it not for the economic migrant lobby [ie, the left],” a surprised forum user crudely commented. Somewhat better informed, a different contributor suggested that it “must be a slow news week over at Love Music, Hate Racism … Slimelight have been putting on gigs for years that could all in some tenuous way be ‘linked’ to fascism”. If the ‘well-known Nazi organisation’, Stormfront, is anything to go by, then London’s far right would have barely registered the concert had it not been for the anti-fascist coverage.
In the end, absolutely nothing happened – and perhaps, nothing was going to. Leaving aside that Islington’s yuppie mile, Upper Street, is hardly a prime target for white racist assault, it is difficult to imagine the goths that pranced towards Slimelight that night chasing anybody down the road – the opposite scenario seems a more plausible proposition. The bands playing at Slimelight were no violent Nazi skinhead combos, but acts from the neofolk milieu. An outgrowth of industrial music and post-punk, neofolk blends traditional European folk influences with experimental arrangements and electronic textures to varying degrees. Because of its fondness for the apocalyptic and the irrational, it is mainly consumed by darkwave and goth audiences.
Totalitarian
Slimelight regulars vented their anger at LMHR’s “totalitarian” campaign at None so deaf as those who will not listen, a Facebook discussion group set up by Slimelight owner Mayuan Mak when LMHR continued to delete his comments from its website.[ii] Most posters displayed a convincing political inarticulacy and a conventionally liberal rather than fascist mindset. The extreme left is just as bad as the far right – that was the predictable tenor. The ensuing furore gave Mak the opportunity to present himself as a patron saint of London’s alternative community, and in a readers’ letter to the Islington Gazette he posed as a law-abiding model citizen. Challenging anti-fascists to document any actual incitement to racial hatred promoted by the targeted bands, he demanded that the hate laws which “many people have suffered and died for” be used against those deserving punishment – such as Islamist nut-job Abu Hamza, for example, whose prison sentence Mak was quick to cite as “the way forward”.
In fairness, Love Music, Hate Racism misquoted him as saying that “fascism is an art form as well”. In truth, he said that “art can be fascist too”[iii] – not at all the same statement. But let us turn our attention to the artists on the bill. The openers were named Joy of Life, though you would not come up with that name if all you had to go on was their dreary 1980s indie rock. What tied them to the other acts – Sol Invictus, Freya Aswynn and 6 Comm – was their linkage to the pioneering neofolk band Death In June, on whose record label they had debuted.
Tony Wakeford, a founding member of Death In June and front man of Sol Invictus, may have been taken aback with nostalgia when well-meaning socialists picketed his concert outside Slimelight. Once upon a time, he was one of them: Wakeford’s status as a card-carrying member of the Socialist Workers Party secured his punk group Crisis numerous performances for Rock against Racism, the 1970s predecessor of Love Music, Hate Racism. Crisis vocalist Doug Pierce, meanwhile, was a member of Tariq Ali’s Trotskyist outfit, the International Marxist Group – a connection that allowed Crisis to play at IMG events such as Workers Against Racism.
In contrast to the visceral socialism of The Clash, Crisis songs featured immortally literal lines, such as “urban terrorism is no substitute for building the revolutionary working class party”. In theory, the band members’ respective central committees could not have been more thrilled. But, as Pierce remarked in hindsight, “there is no pleasing some people”.[iv] By 1980, Crisis routinely complained how the leftwing organisations still distrusted the band and their unruly punk fans: “We feel more alienated playing at their events than at normal gigs,” Pierce lamented. Cheques they had been promised never arrived, and funds raised by Crisis through gigs were not donated in the band’s name. According to Wakeford, the group felt thoroughly “used and patronised” – a familiar feeling to anyone who has ever been an obedient foot soldier to an arrogating party leadership.
Some may wonder what revolutionary would attach such importance to being name-checked when making a donation. But even so a range of interviews give the impression that Crisis were as sincerely committed to the party line as their teenage hearts allowed them to be. And just as many apparatchiks, in their heart of hearts, imagine themselves as a future Trotsky or Lenin, Crisis envisioned themselves as official soundtrack composers for the great revolutionary crisis, which is, of course, always just around the corner. To the extent that they are not politically controlled, the self-seeking modes of social interaction that characterise capitalist societies are bound to be carried over into relationships between revolutionaries; Pierce and Wakeford, it appears, used the left to gain exposure no less than the left used Crisis to advance its respective sect interests. The bureaucrats, however, were made of baser wood than the young punks: Crisis became disillusioned and left the building.
[ii]. The Facebook blurb stated among other things: “We are not best informed at the Slime office to verify truth, authors’ bias or ulterior motives in order for us to assess the information that they have passed to us. In response we have requested publicly online for any negative and positive information, verifiable against a published, reliable source, not just rumour or hearsay, to assist us, the local authorities and lovemusichateracism.com to come to an informed decision on whether this concert should be held. We have now been told by lovemusichateracism.com they have no interest in reading any information that we gather from Slimelight members/regulars [or any other source, it would appear].”
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