If it was going to happen at all they thought it would happen in Brixton where the clubs being raided all the time sent the black youth to set up their sound systems and I Roy pounded through the open windows, the streets turned to dub. Or even maybe again down the Grove, like it did in the 60’s and where each year the Carnival gets policed more heavily (they call it “low profile”) than before. Bristol came as a shock to a white community of liberals whose eyes were elsewhere and didn’t consider that the divide—their comprehension of institutionalized racism only on paper—had turned into a chasm.

In April the Bristol cops raided the Black and White cafe in St. Pauls in the middle of the afternoon, Black youth, toff the streets, were accused of illegal drinking and smoking weed. The police turned up in spme force, with dogs; they took out the club owner. Reports after that gotv expectedly muzzy given a white press presence in a black culture. Harrassment. For the next nine-hours—into the night and to the next dawn—a bank and a printing works were set on fire, over 100 blacks were arrested, cars—some of them patrol cars—were burned, there were ' reports of widespread looting, stones were hurled, explosions set off. St. Pauls, an area of black and white urban decay, was a no-go area with the police closing ranks, attacking with dogs, re-grouping. It was the Bristol riot.

In his room in Brixton, Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Western, smoking weed, drinking beer, listening to ‘the mighty poet I Roy on the wire’ and dancing easy, is having a good evening with his friends. Johnson builds up the scenario of “charcoal light, a fine sight” and the Rastafarian colors sprinkle his lyrics. A room of laughter, stoned fine, the conversation turns to the police, how if they turn up in the neighborhood tonight, this group of friends would give them big trouble. More laughter, more music then...“all of a sudden/bam bam bam-ra knocking upon the door/Who’s that? Asks Western feeling right/Open up, it’s the police, c’mon open up/What address do you want?/Number 66—come on open up/Western, feeling high/Yes this is Street 66/Step right in and take some licks.”

Linton Kwesi Johnson remains, three albums in, the one effective voice raised in popular music as an expression of the black British experience. Bass Culture takes him off the street to the interior, off the streets from righteous war but not from confrontation: Western’s room, black and red, the Rasta colors coming in through the window—reflections from the traffic lights outside—the older black here for years struggling as a worker on the underground, grown old and

tired and bitter in that "Inglan Is A. Bitch"; the relationship between black working class and those desperate to emulate the white culture, keeping their noses clean, attacking the violence of their youth, a cynical condemnation "The Black Petty Booshwah": "they side with the aggressor when the going gets tough."

The final avant-garde track. Johnson, having stretched his music with Dennis Bovell into deceptively warm reggae, is now back as declaiming poet, tense, growling a contained anger: “How can there be calm when the storm is yet to come?”

On television a 2V2 hour program on the police in Britain centers its first half on Hackney , live here. Six months ago they brought in a new police chief, Mitchell. He ordered in the notorious Special Patrol Group for a three week clean-up operation (un-announced raids on houses, people hassled, stopped and searched on the streets). Mitchell drew up the battle lines in \ the black community. He belived the “Sus” law (the law brought in by whites against black youth that allows the police to stop and pull anyone loitering on the streets under “suspicion to commit an offence”) was the greatest antidote to crime ever in vented. He believed it was a waste of time talking to race relations officials in the community, or to listen to the black leaders in the

community because there were so many extremists amongst them. The Hackney police tore up the High Street in their patrol cars on my TV screen. Inside an SPG van (dark blue, no identification) the police crew fell about laughing on my screen. They arrested a black guy who phoned them about the attacks—just to be on the safe side. They treated him like shit: “Yes we’ll just go off and you can have a moan_” Later a policeman pointed out grievously that if only everyone would keep off the streets in the evening it would make their life so much more simple.

“Send them all back.” shouted a white man into the camera when an old woman had had her handbag stolen. A passerby said, well he had seen a couple of black kids running round the building. Well, no, he hadn’t seen them take the bag, but they were running.. .the police put out a RC3 call OQ their radios (Racial coding 3 means black in police jargon) right away. The trouble is, said another cop, his head through the car window, they never can get a good description because when it came to the white people describing blacks they had real problems. “They all look-the same to them.”

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The gentle but firmly laconic, black community \ leader at his stall in the local market said the way things were going he could see parts of Hackney with large black populations turning into “no-go” J areas the way Mitchell and his gang were carrying on. And then? Well the black community would surely have to stand and fight. Simple.

Who polices the police? We found out that with surveillance and computers electronically numbered as possible troublemakers. We who go on demonstrations against the government, against the government forces, the police—come the crunch we won’t be watching TV for a long time.

“Everywhere you go it’s the talk of the day/everywhere you go you hear people say/That the Special Patrol they’re murderers; murderers/We can’t let them go no further/’Cos they killed Blair Peach the teacher/They kill Blair

Peach the dirty bleeders/.Blair Peach was an

ordinary man/Blair Peach took a simple stand/Against the fascists and the wicked plan/So they beat him till his life was done’ (“Reggae Fi Peach,” from Bass Culture)\

The success of 2-Tone is on the wane, Madness are pulling in more and more skinheads and seeming to fill the vacuum' left by Sham 69—more young white National Front and British Movement followers. The contradictions set up by jyrics that reflect white street culture, no matter that two black guys are in the band, are becoming apparent. It’s not enough to say that the white1 and black molding of .musicians is (politically) enough unless you make a stand through the songs. The Specials don’t do it, and the ska/punk combination is being command-eered by the white youth who se^ no future as a

directed effect of black presence in Britain, as their own music.

The Beat, from Birmingham, try harder. They sound more like the Selecter than the Specials or Madness, with an overlaying of sax to give them urgency and spike out a certain paranoia about the way things are becoming. On their first album Just Can’t Stop It they at least have their focus right: “Stand Down Margaret” they cry out on a track which stands out as closest to original/ska than any of the other black/white bands. They hope for “love and unity” but instead they “see no joy, only sorrow/See no bright tomorrow/What a short sharp lesson/ What a 3rd World War/I said stand down Margaret”

On stage at Stratford East, a theatre tucked away in what looks like the middle of a bomb site and surrounded by those towering blocks that offer no hope to their occupants, we are faced with the interior of Margaret Thatcher’s England in “A Short, Sharp, Shock.” Her cabinet are shown to be at best fools, at worst insane. Sir Keith Joseph nails himself to a tank. A workingclass white who voted Tory in the last election crashes to his knees on stage, his attempt at being a small businessman (a class so beloved by Thatcher), a failure bn account of not being able to pay his VAT. Thatcher looks at the carnage all about her: “1 am not afraid of unemployment. I am not afraid of the unemployed.” She pats her hair into place.

Unemployment is racing up to the two million mark in Britain. It is almost too easy to attack a nationalistic, monetarist, neo-facist government, caricature the horror and hope that a Labor government or even the so called Tory “wets” might win instead. It runs deeper than thatt “They vote,” says Margaret Thatcher from the stage. “Then they go to sleep for five years.”

“Oh ye people of England/Great injustices are committed upon this land/How long will ye permit them to carry on?” On “Reggae Fi Peach” Linton Kwesi Johnson moves tp the side of the st$ge as a dramatic chorus, his voice comes out as a poet rather than a singer deliberately reverting back to patterns of speech used in those first colonial times of Elizabethean England. “Is England become a fascist state?/The answer lies at your own gate/And in the answer lies your own fate”

Three months after the Bristol riots a reporter from The Observer goes back to write a piece about “the aftermath”:

'“Deep down I detect real despair: it is as if the riot had stripped aside all pretense and illusions. At one end of our society there is profound alienation amongst a small number [sic] of young blacks who are finding it increasingly difficult to live in harmony with their fellow citizens. There are those in Bristol who can no longer kid themselves.. .otherwise liberal whites hint gloomily about pulling out of race relations...”

“They point also to the failure of a. white society to recognize the full nature of racism, what it is to grow up in a society where the color of your skin makes you different from the word go, where respect for your culture and origins is almost non-existent.”

A -few weeks ago a factory in London was swooped on by the police—they hauled in a number of Asians working there as illegal immigrants. The factory owners hacUnot been tpld the police were on their way, or apprbached about their workers. These days, when Asians go to collect their doje money, they’re often asked to produce their passports.

On June 30 a report in the Guardian: “Black people should no longer cooperate with the police, a conference in London decided yesterday.” The Conference, which turned away white reporters, was called by 100 black organizations in Britain to “lay plans for the defense of a community that felt itself to be under attack.”