White power music: flush it down the toilet

I've been reading White Noise, Nick Lowles and Steve Silver's depressing and quite chilling Searchlight book from 1998. It's a fairly wide-ranging survey of the neo-Nazi skinhead/Oi music scene, from its late-60s UK roots in the skins and suede-heads with their faux-Jamaican rude boy styles and music, through the pop/punk-skins like Sham 69, to the seriously-sinister outfits like Skrewdriver and No Remorse (both British fascist bands) who in turn helped "inspire" dozens of 80s and 90s neo-Nazi bands in the USA, Germany, Sweden, France, Poland and elsewhere.

White riot: not just music

There's a lot of genuinely scary stuff in White Noise. Some of the people involved were (are?) frighteningly committed racists and even Hitler admirers. In some cases band members were quite consciously using music as a vehicle for mobilising "soldiers" for what they saw as a race war. Skrewdriver's singer Ian Stuart Donaldson looms large, turning his first-wave punk band into a "white power" outfit, describing himself as a "British National Socialist", and constantly being cited by people in other countries as an "inspiration". In fact, one of the most dispiriting things about this sordid history is the way that Britain seems to have basically invented and exported this fusion of rock music and race-hate propaganda, igniting countless copycat outfits in small towns in eastern Europe and the US mid-West. The book looks in detail at the inter-communications between the scenes in different countries, fuelled by "charismatic" figures with a lot of energy (ie hatred). So, for example, in 1991:

"Skrewdriver had travelled to Germany to take part in a Nazi rock concert organised to celebrate German reunification on 3 October, and were part of a mob of sieg-heiling Nazis who went on the rampage armed with clubs and tear gas. After attacking foreigners and then turning their attention to a youth club, the Nazis attacked a German youth for the sole reason that he had long hair, leaving him in a critical condition in hospital."

Elsewhere there are stabbings, baseball bat attacks, people arming themselves with small arsenals of stolen guns, bombings, arsons and murder. Some of it planned in one country and carried out in another. Although White Noise has a chapter on the use of the internet to promote and share neo-Nazi music in the mid/late 90s, the book (published in 1998) is mostly about the pre-internet age of fanzines/newsletters, mail-order catalogues and face-to-face encounters. "Blood and Honour" is a key publication of the late 80s/early 90s - the fanzine started in 1987 by Donaldson and notorious fellow skinhead Nicky Crane. B&H - both a publication and effectively an unofficial political party - was a sort of rallying cry for the Nazi-inclining skins of this period. Skinheads from around the UK as well as visiting skins from continental Europe would, for example, congregate around a cluster of shops and bars in Carnaby Street in central London, where they'd browse for Doc Martens, pick up copies of B&H, buy Third Reich military regalia and generally immerse themselves in the scene. It's only 89 pages long, but there's a lot more to White Noise than I'm indicating here. It's actually a detail-heavy account (by various chapter specialists) of a complex network of musicians and music distributors who - to varying degrees - held white supremacist views and were, very often, prepared to incite - and themselves use - violence to try to put those views into action. All this brings me, a person who likes music and has generally tolerated (and often championed) stuff which is "aggressive" or "confrontational", to that difficult point where I realise that in some cases the importance of the music is totally secondary to the deeply horrible politics. It's similar to the recent situation with Jamaican "murder music", the violently homophobic stuff that a minority of Jamaican reggae artists have put out which people like Peter Tatchell have rightly campaigned against. Yes, some of this music might have some decent riddims or whatever, but it's basically inciting people to kill gay people. How "musical" is that? So yeah, Nazi punks fuck off - and that goes for murderous anti-gay dancehall types as well. When Oi music first appeared I recall being reasonably well disposed because it was punk-like rock music. I remember, for example, making a fairly big effort to get hold of Sham 69's If The Kid Are United single, ordering it from local record shop because it had been and gone in the charts and they hadn't got any left. Why did I bother, a 15-year-old who hardly yet knew much about music? God knows! But I think the crashing (Sex Pistols-like) guitars and the rabble-rousing, football-terrace chorus was an irresistible combination to an impressionable teenager.

So yes, dear reader, I was a teenage Sham 69 fan. But thankfully Jimmy Pursey had the good sense to reject the NF types who starting coming to their gigs, and I too wasn't overly impressed (even as a shy kid) by racist big-mouths of my acquaintance talking about "Pakis" and how they should be "sent back". As I recall, back then I went to just one out-and-out Oi gig - in Nuneaton in (I think) 1981, taken along by an ex-punk-turned-skin friend who did indeed later - by the early noughties - turn out to be an openly racist BNP supporter. (This racist friend, needless to say, is no friend of mine these days). Aside from the music - not bad - my main memory of this gig is of going to the toilets, standing at the urinal and having a hulking older skinhead guy lean over and saying "The band are alright, ain't they, but I wish it was the Upstarts. Don't you?". "Er, yeah, yeah", I muttered, hastily zipping up my bleached Levi's and scuttling away as fast as I could ...