I was in London, England in the summer of 1980 only a few weeks after riots had ripped through the city. There were still store fronts in Portobello Road with fresh plywood where there once had been windows, and tension and tempers were still high. Most of the tension centered around mistrust of the police by the large black community in the city; unwarranted and over eager attention by the Bobbies towards London's blacks had been one of the causes of the riot.
One of the lead stories carried by the underground press while I was in town was of a black man, a Rastafarian, being picked up by the police on suspicion of planning arson because he was carrying a Jerry can filled with gasoline. The fact that the police hustled him to jail without doing anything to verify his claim that he'd run out of gas and was making his way back to his vehicle didn't do much for their credibility or their relationship with the black community.
It was Margaret Thatcher's England, and being poor or a minority, (and usually both) was tantamount to committing a crime. The train I took out of London passed through Brixton, where poor whites and immigrants lived stacked on top of each other; a powder keg of anger and resentment that had only needed the tiniest of sparks to blow the lid off. The rioting had started here and spread out across London with the beating up of of some South Asians by members of the neo-Nazi, skin head movement, The National Front.
Looking out my window at row after row of narrow streets crammed with row-housing, where the only relief offered was the occasional block of council flats, I could see how these neighbourhoods gave birth to [unk four years earlier in 1976. Punk was an expression of the anger and hopelessness felt by so many, as the "No Future" that the Sex Pistols sang about was a reality for most people under thirty living there. The Clash, Billy Bragg, and others worked to shape and direct the raw anger into resistance through songs like "Guns Of Brixton".
To me what always separated the real punks from the posers, were the ones who stayed true to those political roots. That didn't mean they had to be from the streets of Brixton, or even Brits, but they had to be working in the same spirit. I've known that bands are still out there, but I haven't seen anything that resembles the spirit of resistance that I remember from the 1980s until now with the Mental Records release of The T4 Project.
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