LETTER FROM BRITAIN
By Friday morning, July 3rd, UB40’s second album Present Arms was number one; by Friday night Southall was on fire. “We’re closer to the West Indians than ever. The fascists are attacking black people. In Brixton they are West Indians, in Southall they’re Asians, but there is no difference anymore.”
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LETTER FROM BRITAIN
Three Days In July
Penny Valentine
By Friday morning, July 3rd, UB40’s second album Present Arms was number one; by Friday night Southall was on fire.
“We’re closer to the West Indians than ever. The fascists are attacking black people. In Brixton they are West Indians, in Southall they’re Asians, but there is no difference anymore.” (an Asian youth, talking about Friday night’s riots.)
“The power is in your hand/Stop waiting to be taken to the promised land/There ain’t no heaven and there ain’t no hell/ Except the one we’re in that you know too well.” (UB40, “Don’t Let It Pass You By.”)
In less than a year UB40 have become Britain’s leading reggae band. They’re a potent mix of deceptively indolent brass riffs, weaving rocksteady and the hard edge of syn-cussion, bongos and bass. Over it all Ali Campbell’s instantly recognizable high nasal moan insists on being heard: “Be your mother’s pride and joy/The nation’s golden boy/To protect what isn’t yours.” (“Present Arms.”)
Tightly slurring, shifting ground, raising their horns to stab and all the time keeping things dangerously tight, the Birmingham band that called themselves after the British unemployment card number have shifted imperceptibly to using more dub, a more up front sound system. The whole is now such a sophisticated weave that some critics, when Present Arms was released, attacked the band for having sold out what they saw as their garage raw edge. For all that harping, it’s still potent stuff for potent days. The background to which London’s burning.
This week the government announced new tax increases; a working class budget. More tax on cigarettes, more on fruit machines, on bingo. They showed an awful arrogance in making no bones about this one; it would hit a specific class where it hurt. Three million unemployed? Well, you won’t be able to afford to smoke, or have any other tedious leisure pursuits.
“My arms enfold the dole queue! Malnutrition dulls my hair/My eyes are black and lifeless/With an underprivileged stare/I am one in ten/A number on a list/I am the one in ten/Even though I don’t i exist.” (UB40, “One In Ten.”)
1 On Friday night the skinheads invaded ^Southall, an 80% Asian community. They came by coach waving leaflets that proclaimed some god-given right to keep this land of ours for “Englishmen’5 (which makes about as much sense as New York saying it will contain only “Americans”; we have been a multicultural society since the invasion of the Romans). They came to a local pub that was featuring a concert by three skin bands topped by the appropriately named “4-Skins,” leading exponents of “Oi Oi Oi” music (You jump up and down, give the Nazi salute and yell “Oi Oi Oi ”).
The pub was on the edge of the black community, a neighborhood which had already suffered an increase in racial attacks over the last year. The skinheads threw bricks through windows, attacked a shopkeeper and were in turn attacked by Asian youths who chased them into the pub and were then incensed to see a white police force, riot shields at the ready, forcing them back down the street, closely followed by the skinheads throwing bricks and—for all intents and purposes—being protected by the forces of law and order.
It’s the kind of “policing” that brought about Brixton and now Southall. The police are seen by the black communities as being on the side of the invading fascists (most of the arrests on Friday night were of Asian youths). The only outcome of such riots is for the police to demand—and soon get—better protection (more riot gear, more arms).
On Friday night the Asian youths forced both police and skins back, then set fire to the pub. Unlike the West Indian youths, young Asians do not have a history of selforganization, or of antagonism towards state control.
On Saturday night we went to another pub to watch Fusion. It was jazz funk in the raw; hard liquid jazz guitar, Latin percussion, a funky bass line, performed in front of a highly critical audience of smooth young West Indians come up to the West End and quietly rolling, dancing alone in a single spot, in appreciation. Fusion are mainly white; not young, but the music they play, like UB40, contains its own form of protest. The audience was a mix of West Indians and young white girls with pallid hair and sub-New Romantic white clothes: white pedal pusher trousers, white frilled shirts. Jazz funk, with its nod back to black America, has created a strong slipstream, beginning to equal reggae in popularity with a few young blacks like Lynx in the forefront. Different kinds of tensions.
On Friday night in Southall the line between two cultures, West Indian and Asian, melted as surely as that skinhead pub did. “We’re closer to the West Indians than ever.,.” By Sunday the streets of Liverpool were on fire.
“Don’t let it pass you by/You’re gonna wake up and wonder why/Rightful justice must be done.” (UB40)
