BRIT BABYLONIA

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

BRIT BABYLONIA

Penny Valentin

On Tuesday we heard the news that Bob Marley had died. The only television program to examine Marley’s place in the black community and his effect on British West Indians’ black pride told of the reaction m Brixton where “It hasn’t sunk in yet... but you pan see it,” as the owner of a reggae store said. You can see it on the faces, just disbelief, man, that Bob is gone.”

Bob isgone.

On Friday night Bruce Springsteen sang I his Land Is Your Land” and added the line: “from the streets of Brixton”...

Last month the streets of Brixton were on every front page as they exploded into street fighting. Years of police harassment, stop and search, and dawn swoops in the community were exacerbated by months of unemployment and the feeling of years of no future. On the Frontline of Railton Road black (and white) youth battled with the representatives of state oppression. In turn the police donned riot helmets, brought out the plastic shields and entered in force. For three days and nights Brixton burned.

Unemployment is reaching the' three million mark. On Saturday in Brockwell Park, the only open ground in Brixton, the reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson is reciting “All We’re Doin’ Is Defendin.’” Reggae drummer and singer Barry Ford re-constitutes, in a moment of supreme irony, Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm.” At this concert for over two thousand, Aswaad and Richie Havens rub shoulders with Pete Townshend and Jim Capaldi and Tom Robinson. Bruce Springsteen comes to “check it out” and, rumor has it later, would have got up on stage to play, too, had things not run with their usual open air efficiency and ended too late, and the local authorities refused to let it run over its alloted time.

The concert was to celebrate The People’s March For Jobs. During the Depression here jobless starving men marched from Northern England to the South to protest to the government. The Jarrow March went down in history as a unique protest by the workers against a system that left the rich untouched by economic hardship while the poor became victims of malnutrition and a thousand related diseases. The People’s March moved from Liverpool to London repeating that crusade by staying in towns and villages along the way and ending up with a protest rally in Trafalgar Square. The Saturday concert was on the penultimate day and we — collecting money, ironically, for journalists sacked by the owners of London’s “trendy” magazine Time Out—stood in the mud of Brockewell Park as Aswaad drove Meir Grimme across the stage, their music revving through the loudspeakers and across the park while the original handful of people who had left Liverpool months previously came into the park followed by thousands of supporters, their arms above their heads, to cheers.

At the main gate, amongst the paper sellers and the various political movements selling their wares, was a small contingent of Irish protesters for the “H” Block camapign. Later Tom Robinson was, we heard, harangued by one of them about why he hadn’t mentioned the prisoners in Ireland. Ireland is our Vietnam. Brixton our Watts. The Quads, a Birmingham group, had accompanied the marchers over the 3,000mile route. The Au Pairs are a Birmingham group and although the connections may seem tenuous, their best track from their new album Playing With A Different Sex is one titled “Armagh”:

We don’t torture/We’re a civilized nation

We’re not fighting a confrontation.

32 Women in Armagh jail/The British

State got nothing to lose...

The track is a protest against British involvment in Northern Ireland. The women in Armagh jail have undergone severe physical, mental and emotional deprivation. Some are anorexic, some are refused sanitation, one has had her baby taken away from her. The Au Pairs are one of the few bands around to comment on Northern Ireland. The subject is seen almost as too hot to handle. Northern Ireland does not feature much in music here as Vietnam finally did in America. The Au Pairs are an interesting band not just because they’ve stuck their neck out over Ireland, but because they’re generally uncompromising and yet are enjoying considerable success. Two women and two men; they produce a sound that’s taut punk/new wave/experimental with Paul’s tinny guitar urgently twanging against Jane’s dark rock bass. Sometimes it’s Clash meet dub; more often Lesley’s vocal confronts like a combination of Johnny Rotten and Chrissie Hynde. The results are not relaxing. Nor are they meant to be. Their songs deal with subject matter not normally grist for the popular mill: wifebattering on “Repetition” (“I guess the bruises won’t show if she wears long sleeves”), or the contradictions of non-monogamy in relationships. Irony and invention are unusual bedfellows in music, even these days. Selling out three nights at the Marquee on the strength of it even stranger.

The British press promotes the government line on Northern Ireland, ignoring the fact that a recent survey on the world’s press showed that the British were generally condemned—much the same as America was over Vietnam—on their current policies of intransigence over the H-Block protesters and in not trying to come up with a solution to what is really a continual war zone. The British press promotes the government’s view on unemployment too: very sorry but if only people would be reasonable, if only they didn’t want more money, it’s really all their fault, we’ve all got to tighten our belts blah blah. As The Quads told Melody Maker they couldn’t get over the malice of the Right: “Everything we did was wrong. It wasn’t a patch on Jarrow. We were too well looked after, too political, too everything for the press. We should’ve crawled here on our hands and knees.”

On Monday night, finally, exhausted by a week of emotional trauma, we went to see Bruce Springsteen at Wembley. Maybe it was the week, maybe we needed a hero, maybe we needed to let.of steam but 8,000 of us sang along to “Jungleland” and that one line seemed to be especially poignant:

And the poets down here

Don’t write nothing at all

They just stand back and let it all be...