Yeah, I know that the Rolling Stones double album is the event of the season but I’m still fixated on the B side of their single. If ‘Sweet Black Angel’ means what I think it means (and I admit I can’t make out half the words) then Mick Jagger has finally blown it. ‘Brown Sugar’ was ambiguous, ‘Sweet Black Angel’ isn’t:

Gotta sweet black angel, got a pin-up girl. Gotta sweet black angel, up upon my wall.

For angel read Angela; this is the Stones’ political song (their “George Jackson,” natch). One evening Mick looked at the poster on his wall and wrote:

She’s a sweet black angel, Not a gun-toting teacher, Not a red-loving school marm.

and I’ve been upset ever since. Cos if I hear aright these lines deny, very neatly and economically (and it’s a good song) that Angela Davis is a revolutionary, that she’s a communist, that she’s a ■ teacher, that she’s an intellectual. Turns out she’s just a good lay after all, just a good old black chick, loved by the good and oppressed by the bad. Wow-ee. Where has Mick Jagger been for the last five years? Or is this a super-sarcy song?

I’ve been looking at my poster of Angela Davis and I’ve been thinking too.

The rock books say that English kids discovered black American music and passed the message on to white American kids, who had been deaf to what was going on around them. They don’t explore the kbnies of this situation. Like you may have imperialist ambitions; we have colonialist blood deep in our veins. For us, blacks are savages whom we graciously civilised until they bit the hand that fed them. At school we studied atlases that coloured all the bits Britain owned red. Later we went to the cinema to watch the Duke of Edinburgh on Pathe news kindly giving chunks of the commonwealth to smiling Africans with fly whisks and gold beds. Later still we noticed that the streets were being swept by West Indians, the mills kept going through the night by Pakistanis Coloured people had become immigrants, flooding the country, sponging off the welfare state, shitting through white letter boxes. Enoch Powell knew what was happening even if no-one else did, and Rod Stewart agreed with him: send them all home Where they belong. Fucking wogs.

And ail the time we were ‘discovering’ black music. The blues. Rhythm and blues. Soul. Dancing to Martha Reeves and Wilson Pickett and Desmond Dekker. We didn’t stop to make connections.

Thete are strange things in the relationship of English rock and English racism.

Item: The Netting Hill teddy boys of the kte fifties stomped West Indians to the strains ©f Little Richard. The skinheads of the late sixties went pakibashing to a reggae beat.

Item: There’s no red-neck music in England but there are plenty of red-necks. So the working men’s clubs combine racist comedians with black entertainers (Motown groups go down well). How would you explain Lovelace Watkins, the top attraction of them all, a black American with dyed white hak who does a passing fak imitation of Tom Jones? Or the top comic, Charlie Williams, a West Indian Yorkshkeman who specialises in Paki-jokes?

Item: Reggae made the transition from West Indian folk music to white entertainment under the guidance of Chris Blackwell, the son of an honest-to-god sugar plantation owner. The profits of reggae financed that nice white label, Island. We’re still the masters of the colonialist rip-off.

Item: Every English blues group and their brother will sing you songs of black exploitation in Alabama. Have they been to Brixton? For the Pakistanis who live around us life is a matter of surviving with dignity, of making it through the endless hustles and hassles and insults. Does George Harrison know? We’re left with the story of Desmond and Molly Jones. Ob-la-di-lada.

Item: The history of the English drug scene would make someone an interesting thesis. It has had one constant factor. It’s always been hip to go to West Indian clubs, dance West Indian dances, smoke West Indian dope. It’s always been unhip to mention the savage jail sentences West Indians get for turning on thek white brothers. For more details read Cohn Maclnnes’ novel City of Spades.

British rock has been based on two racial attitudes: black as stud, black as sufferer. Eric Clapton summed up the fkst attitude: “English people have.a very big thing towards a spade. Everybody in England still sort of thinks that spades have big dicks.?’ This fantasy reached its fruition in the image that Chas Chandler and Mike Jeffery lovingly constructed for Jimi Hendrix.

The fantasy of black as sufferer is the one I grew up with. I knew that all blacks experienced a profound and mystical suffering that enabled them to sing the blues. I wasn’t sure what blacks suffered, or why, but I was full of pity and sympathy for them. When I eventually went to America it took me a long time to realise that, walking down the street, I was just another white man. I thought my genuine English identity with blacks, my real English soul would somehow shine through. I guess Eric Burdon is the ultimate expression of this delusion.

And this brings me back to the Marin County Shootout. We’ve been great observers in England. Watching American race relations like they were some sort of football match — cheering on the blacks of course. Marin changed the name of the game. How do we treat someone like Jonathen Jackson who chooses action (not suffering), uses a gun (not his dick)?

Continued on page 79.

“Sweet Black Angel” provides one sort of answer. Stick Angela Davis on the wall, a pin-up next to Che. It could be that the song is an ironic comment (though Jagger’s never shown such subtlety before); it’s certainly true that I’m no longer happy with my posters. I’ve been feeling very white since Marin (and not an English black-by-proxy) and against all my instincts I’ve been turning to the old folkies for help. It’s Bob Dylan who makes the point — ‘some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards’ — and the English singer, Ralph McTell:

And Friday evening finds me stacked up drunk against the wall, Will you hold on John for I’m feeling bad and if you slip we both fall.

For John is as white as I am and we both love everyone, I thought everybody must have known that by now but they have all gone home.*

(‘Claudia* from the album You Well-' Meaning Brought Me Here)

TIT—BITS (or English news that no-one but me is excited about)

Weepie of the Month: Robert Wyatt’s ‘O Caroline’ on the Matching Mole album — irresistible.

Curio of the Month: ‘Nobody’s Fool,’ a single by Cold Turkey — is it Ray Davies singing his sweetest London ballad since ‘Waterloo Sunset’?

Superteam of the Century: Leeds United Football Club, and now they’ve reached the top ten. To quote the local walls: Leeds Rule OK?

*© Essex Music Int.