It was a beautiful day for a riot.
Granted, it was an exceedingly small riot, and not a very spontaneous
one. And I don't even support rioting as a tactic under most
circumstances. But they can still be a lot of fun, and I had been
looking forward to this one for several weeks.
I've been on this island that an
ever-dwindling number of people call Great Britain for close to a
month now, on another of my annual pilgrimages to Europe, otherwise
known as a concert tour. Sitting in the lovely back garden of the
pub known as the Duke of Wellington, the local pub of my good friend
Attila the Stockbroker, punk rock poet and organizer of tonight's
gig, the last of twenty or so gigs on the British leg of the tour.
Not sure how much it's helped, but I've
been mentioning this day at the end of all my gigs here, the day the
English Defense League celebrates England in their own special way.
St. George's Day. I don't know who St. George was, but this is his
Day, and it evidently has something to do with this
political-geographical entity full of the descendents of the Celtic
tribes, the Vikings, the Normans and people from all over what was
once the British Empire and beyond, known as England.
Every St. George's Day, the xenophobic
men of the EDL – there are virtually no women in the group as far
as I can tell – get pissed (drunk, in American) and have their
March For England. For some bizarre reason, they choose Brighton as
the location for their annual March. Brighton, the lovely little
city on the south coast of England, less than an hour's train ride
south of London, which has long been a vacation spot for Londoners
wishing to breath some clean air for a change, and in recent decades
has become the gay capital of Europe. It's also a big university
town and a huge magnet for tourists from around the world, what with
its quaint Old Town known as the Lanes, its seafront B&Bs, its
very colorful population, and of course its proximity to the even
bigger tourism magnet, the sprawling megalopolis known as London.
Every year, the ranks of the EDL keep
shrinking, and the ranks of the anti-EDL protesters and police
continually expand. When I arrived in town I parked on the outskirts
of the city, knowing how parking anywhere closer is virtually
impossible, even on a normal day, when the police haven't fenced off
half the city. The March had already started. I wasn't sure quite
where to find it, so I followed the helicopter, which I correctly
assumed was there for the occasion, circling above the proceedings.
If there had been no helicopter, it would have been easy enough to
find by the scores of police vehicles and hundreds of geared-up cops
lining the streets near the section of the seafront which had been
duly fenced off in preparation for the festivities.
Walking through the city, there were
two conversations that kept on repeating themselves every few seconds
all around me. One was people with southern English accents
complaining about the massive police presence, all to protect a
pathetic group of forty or so fascists, as they are popularly known.
The other was people with foreign accents of one kind or another
asking one of the many cops or someone nearby what was going on here.
The spectre of the sloshed, jeering
football hooligans who pass for ultranationalists, trying not to
notice that they owe their very survival to this tremendous police
operation, as they are constantly getting yelled at wherever they go
by people of all ages, ethnicities and sexual orientations, while
walking up and down the fenced-off seafront, much of the time in the
rain, was very sad. One expects a certain amount of military
discipline from fascists, but this lot had none of that. They did at
least have large flags on long wooden poles, approximately one flag
for every two fascists, which gave them at least a slight air of
respectability, or at least some kind of notion that they were making
some attempt at being an organized group. While the fascists – or
the “fash” -- were being unceremoniously shoved and kettled by
the police just as the anti-fascist protesters were, the fact that
many of them had their English crusader flags on long wooden poles
was somewhat conspicuous. If any of the black-clad youth had showed
up with any kind of flag on a long wooden pole, I'm fairly certain
the poles would have been confiscated by the police, for fear of them
being used as weapons.
The very small-scale rioting took place
near the train station, when the fash were trying to escape Brighton
and fuck off home, under police protection of course. On a couple of
occasions, protesters got close enough to them to nail one with a can
of beer, or in one case, to spill beer on their faces. The latter
event I personally witnessed, while sitting in a pub a block from the
station. A waste of good beer, someone nearby mumbled after the
event.
What I like best about protests is
running into friends, and this one was no exception. At the seafront
I spotted a couple who had once organized a gig for me, and attended
many others over the years. I hadn't seen them in quite a while,
though, and seeing the badges around their necks it became clear why.
Both of them had been elected to the Brighton City Council seven
years earlier, on the Green Party ticket. Standing amongst them were
a collection of other local Green Party politicians, including a
Member of the European Parliament, and the infamous Caroline Lucas,
the Green Party's one Member of Parliament at Westminster, who for
the past few years has seemed to be the sole voice of reason in the
British Parliament since Tony Benn retired from the House of Commons.
And there at the pub down the street
from the train station was a table full of people with press badges
and fancy cameras, including my old friend Guy Smallman, who had
clearly had a satisfying afternoon of sticking his camera in the
faces of drunk fascists. Guy had only returned from covering the
elections in Afghanistan days before, and had some exciting (to him),
horrifying (to me) stories of near-death experiences to tell about
the trip, which included being way too close to an exchange of heavy
artillery between the Afghan Army and the Taleban. Speaking of the
Taleban, this was the one line of reason, if you can call it that,
that the EDL boys kept using against anyone who would criticize them.
“You like the Taleban?”, they kept asking. Evidently, anyone
who has a problem with racist homophobic idiots must be a Taleban
supporter.
This tour of Great Britain began where
it ends, in southern England. The plan was to start with a day to
recover from jet lag, but that was not to be, thanks to yet another
very delayed United Airlines flight which prevented me from getting
to Chicago, from where I was originally going to be taken to London.
So my first gig was on the day I landed. I was exhausted, and didn't
have much of a singing voice, but it was nonetheless another great
gig at what might be the best-run folk club in England, the Islington
Folk Club. Opening for me there, as they do there every Thursday for
whoever is the main act that week, was the house band, the Angel
Band, playing their familiar traditional folk music. The band has so
many members that they barely fit on the stage -- a collection of
accordian players, guitarists, and a fiddler player in his late
eighties, originally from the US, who played with the New Lost City
Ramblers once upon a time, back in the 1950's, when he and that
legendary outfit were a central part of the Greenwich Village folk
revival, before there officially was one.
After a gig at the much smaller Hove
Folk Club, formed only in recent years by one of the greatest
songwriters in the English language, Robb Johnson, soon after he
moved from London to Hove, the next stop was a small town near Milton
Keynes, northwest of London, where the Workers Music Association were
having a weekend gathering. Somewhat reminiscent of the New
York-based Peoples Music Network, the WMA is a collection of a few
dozen leftwingers, many of whom are members of leftwing choirs.
There's a folk music-oriented bias to the WMA these days, but its
roots are in the “workers music” tradition of the 1930's, when
folks like my father's mentor, Stefan Wolpe, and people like Bertoldt
Brecht and Hans Eisler were composing music that they hoped would
appeal to the working class, and thus do their part to use music as a
tool for moving society in a sensibly leftward direction. As with
most organizations with the word “workers” in its name, the
membership of the WMA is solidly on the older and more communist side
of the left. Nothing wrong with that in the least, as far as I'm
concerned, but as usual with ageing organizations, there was a lot of
talk about how to interest the youth in it. Always a tough question,
especially when you're starting out with an organization that is
completely lacking in youth. Helps to have some to start with, in
order to attract more of them...
Next stop was Wales. The organizer of
the show in the little town of Llandloes (don't ask me how to
pronounce that) was a transplant from Glasgow with many fine stories
of the chaotic scenes in that conflicted city that had prompted him
to take his family to a decidedly quieter place. His kids, who, on
their mother's side of the family, are the grandchildren of a great
promoter of the Welsh language, are being raised bilingual, in both
Welsh and English, like their mother was, long before that became
commonplace for kids living in Wales.
In Cardiff I shared the stage with the
great Cosmo, an English transplant to Wales and a fabulous songwriter
of a decidedly anarchist persuasion, recently back from a trip to
Palestine. Also back from Palestine there at the No NATO benefit gig
was Dee, a feisty little Irish woman who had been living in Wales for
a long time, who managed to get herself arrested by the IDF during
their visit to Palestine, for yelling at the soldiers who had just
randomly decided to teargas small children as they were attempting to
walk to school one morning.
In Birmingham I had the great pleasure
of sitting in on a meeting of folks involved with organizing a small
left-oriented festival, including a couple of folks who are members
of the venerable Banner Theater group, who have been on the forefront
of the class war in England since the early 1970's. I interviewed
Dave Rogers, who writes the songs for Banner, among other things.
One of what I hope will be many interviews with folks I meet in my
travels. (Stay tuned for more on that...)
The function room in the pub in
Liverpool was packed, as were most of the gigs, which was an
especially welcome surprise given that it had only been organized
with about four days' advance notice by one of the (younger) folks at
the WMA weekend, Phil Hargreaves, an extremely talented jazz musician
(whose daughter is also a great musician in a really good band that
has just recorded their first CD). Phil lives in the working class
neighborhood where John Lennon grew up, but I couldn't find John's
house. Had a nice walk, though, in making the attempt...
I had my first gig ever in the town of
Wigan, probably best known for its rugby team (for those who are into
sport) or by George Orwell's book about it (for those who are into
literature). I'm completely uninterested in sport and have never
read the book, but it's a nice little town, like most towns in
England are. The great actor and singer Tayo Aluko sat in the front
row. Always exciting and slightly unsettling when someone of his
stature is paying so much attention to me, so of course I completely
botched at least one song, but otherwise it went OK. (For those of
you in Britain and Ireland, Tayo is touring with his one-man musical
about Paul Robeson for much of the month of May, and more in the
fall...)
Most of the other shows in England were
in what they call the North. Exactly what defines the North seems to
be open to debate, but Northerners will tell you if you're in the
North, or just near it... It includes the counties of Lancashire
and Yorkshire, I think I can say definitively. The North-South
divide in England goes way back. Of course there are people of all
sorts in both regions of the country, but some of the characteristics
that people tend to think of when they think of this divide are
things like, well, class, primarily. The South has more money,
overall, and also a lot more people. The stereotypical bias of
Southerners toward the North can be characterized by a Tory MP (and a
Southerner) who said recently that while he didn't approve of
fracking in the south of England, he thought that fracking was a good
idea in the northeast of England, which he characterized as “barren.”
When challenged about this characterization of the northeast, he
corrected himself, and said that he had meant the northwest. So he
managed to insert his foot even deeper down his throat, and offend
everybody in the North all at once, not for the first time.
I'm always really happy to get up to
the north of England. The atmosphere is more relaxed than in the
parts of England that are anywhere near the great international
financial capital and teeming metropolis that is London. The air is
clean up north, especially since Thatcher destroyed the manufacturing
base of the country long ago, which was once largely based there, in
cities like Manchester. In the countryside there are lots of sheep,
and beautiful rolling hills on which the sheep are grazing. In
spring, there are lots of baby sheep frolicking about, looking
impossibly adorable. Most of the population is what you might call
leftwing. Or at least in the South they might call them leftwing.
In the North they'd more tend to just consider themselves
Northerners, where the term “left” or even “working class”
might just seem redundant as a descriptor.
The gig in Lancaster was an
exceptionally well-attended anti-fracking benefit that featured a
bunch of other great acts, and many audience members who had recently
been arrested for locking down to fracking equipment. When I arrived
at the venue, I learned that the police had called in to the publican
to express their concern, because they had heard there was going to
be a riot after the gig. The cops were wondering if they should post
a riot squad outside the building. Thankfully, the owner of the pub
declined their generous offer. I was not the only person at the gig
to think that if the police had had a riot squad outside the pub,
this in itself could have caused a riot, but that with no riot squad,
a riot was unlikely to happen, despite the fact that probably half of
the anarchist punks in Lancaster were at the gig, one of whom recited
poetry from the stage that definitely glorified violence against cops
and fascists alike. (He also really didn't like meat-eaters, but
luckily for me, he apparently didn't think they should be beaten up.
Either that or he assumed I was a fellow vegan.)
From the moment I arrived in Scotland
until the moment I left, there was talk of the upcoming Independence
vote. I lost count of the number of people who told me, “next time
I see you it will be in an independent Scotland.” The vote is in
the fall, and for the most part they know I usually make it to
Scotland and elsewhere in Europe in the spring. Occasionally I met
someone who quietly said they didn't care whether it was a Scottish
government or a British government as long as it was a socialist one,
but most people there, at least among the
possibly-not-very-representative self-selected group of leftists that
I tend to attract, were convinced that independence would be a good
thing, and many of them were actively campaigning for it.
I stayed with a friend in a
neighborhood of Glasgow that's mostly populated by people with very
recent South Asian or Middle Eastern ancestry.
The neighborhood was well-known locally for the successful struggle
for the Govanhill Baths. The government closed them down, and the
people occupied them for several months, got arrested a lot, and
mobilized the community to defend the venerable and much-loved
institution. My friend and host, Fatima Uygun, and her late partner,
my old touring companion Alistair Hulett, were central to this
struggle. Alistair even wrote a whole album's worth of songs about
the struggle to keep the baths open.
The neighborhood was also made famous
by the murder of a young white man by a group of Asian teenagers one
night some years ago, very near to Fatima's flat. So, just as
Brighton has become the preferred location for the EDL to have their
annual march, the neighborhood of Pollakshields has become the spot
for the pathetically small Scottish Defense League to have their
marches. Their last march consisted of seven racist twats, protected
by hundreds of riot police, who shut down the neighborhood so these
thugs could exercise their right to assemble in an immigrant
neighborhood, which apparently did not go down well among the locals.
One day several of us took a day trip
around Loch Lomond and to the beautiful Scottish Highlands. Other
than nearly getting run over by a lorrie, it was magnificent. Hills
and mountains, called glens there, with rivers running between them,
and deer grazing in the plentiful grass. There are almost no people
living there now, though. For just as England is a place divided by
huge regional differences and a gaping class divide, to say nothing
of the disintegrating collection of states that, for a few more
months, we may perhaps call Great Britain, Scotland is also a divided
place. The depopulated Highlands are an eloquent, silent testament
to this fact. Once they were filled with people, people who lived in
tribes called clans, who eeked out a living through small-scale
farming. But ownership of their land was claimed by absentee
landlords from England and the Scottish lowlands, who ultimately
decided to systematically burn down their villages house by house,
forcing the Highlanders to either freeze to death – as many did –
or flee to the refugee camps in the cities of Scotland and England
that awaited them, before being forced to emigrate to New Scotland –
Nova Scotia – or elsewhere in North America, Australia, or New
Zealand. Today there are far more descendents of the Highlanders in
these places than there are in Scotland itself, and the Highlands
remain land for grazing only, just as the landlords wanted it to be
when they began the Clearances a couple centuries ago.
Back in England, an event sponsored by
a Palestine solidarity group in the Lancashire town of Colne that
featured a really good leftwing choir in between my sets, and then
the next day, a long drive across England from north to south,
featuring more and more traffic the further south I got, the kind of
barely-moving traffic that roads like the M6 and M25 are well-known
for, though it was actually the first really bad traffic I had
encountered on the entire trip, aside from in London itself. The
last two gigs in southern England, aside from at the Duke, were in
Kingston and Hastings.
Kingston is at this point I suppose a
suburb of London. I believe it's represented in parliament by
Tories, but there is a leftwing punk rock underbelly to be sure. I
got to the venue in plenty of time anyway. A pub called the
Cricketers, it was presumably once for cricket players who would have
been playing cricket in the field across from it, which now looks
more like a typical park than a cricket field. I can imagine what
kind of food the kitchen used to serve there, but thankfully, now
there's a Lebanese chef, and a wonderful menu of Lebanese food, which
I was very ready for after all those hours behind the wheel, drinking
lots of espresso, but not eating a whole lot.
The gig was another wonderful
multi-bill event, which I always love, because I get to hear other
performers. (I don't get out much, aside from going to my own
shows...) Grace Petrie delivered a stellar set of songs, including a
few great new ones as well as somewhat older songs of hers. I knew
which ones were the older ones, because I had heard them before, as,
clearly, had at least half of the audience, who sang along loudly to
every word of those ones. For someone with such outspoken leftwing
politics, the fact that she's been getting regular airplay on
national radio shows on BBC is hard to believe, from the perspective
of this particular cynical American. (When, I often wonder, is
Venezuela going to start up that English-language satellite TV
channel, so I might have a chance of getting some media attention
before I die...)
The organizer of the show at the
Cricketers was also a fine performer of original music, Tim OT is the
name he goes by. Tim has apparently been listening to my music since
he was 14. He's now 22. I especially enjoy meeting people who “grew
up” listening to my music, which happens increasingly the longer I
do this.
In Hastings, a lovely coastal town, I
wandered around the Old Town and then went to the Jenny Lind, the pub
where the folk club in town happens, diligently organized every month
by local rabble-rousing historian and author, Tony Streeter. I
assume it was because he had a solidly leftwing performer on the bill
that he decided to feature six different five-minute (theoretically)
speeches by activists and organizers of all sorts, who spoke about
everything from stopping drone warfare to promoting African land
reform.
Attila tells me, and others gathered
around the bar in between my sets, that when he first met me thirteen
years ago I was a hippie, and played very folky music, which he
imitated with hand gestures and “plunk-plunk” noises. But the
longer we toured together, the blacker my clothing got, and the more
punk rock my songwriting got. It's all true, of course. However, he
says the iPad on the stage with me where I keep my lyrics these days
has got to go. It's not at all punk rock, he says. I'm sure that's
true, too.
Next stop: Hamburg Airport.
