A beginning of sorts ?

Kill Your Pet Puppy

So where to begin?   Hell, I don’t know. Faced with the same blank page  problem two years ago, I  said:

“In the beginning there was punk. It was the summer of 76, the summer the earth stood still and burnt…”

Which became the first entry – 01 March 2005 – on my  http://greengalloway.blogspot.com/ blog site. To my surprise it got six positive comments, which encouraged me to persevere with the blog, although it has yet to become the record of Green (as in eco- social politics) Galloway that inspired the title. The idea for doing a blog came from  reading Mogg Morgan’s one.  Mogg being a Thelemic (as in Aleister Crowley,  Kenneth Grant and Maggie Ingalls) magickian and publisher – Madrake of Oxford.

A year  later I got a scanner and started pasting images with the text. I posted  some scans of  Kill Your Pet Puppy as a way to illustrate that  ‘anarcho-punk’ was not all black and white, but a colourful and creative chaos  which gave birth to a still expanding universe of  revolutionary possibilities.

Having written that sentence, I can either let it stand  or  put a bit of meat on its bones.  The punk in me says ‘let it stand’ – either you get it or you don’t; but the historian in me says ‘go for the meat’. [Or veggie option if you prefer].   

Punk was once an answer to years of crap
A way of saying no when you’d always said yep

Well was it? Yes it was, but … there is a big difference between ‘punk’ as it has been  recuperated by observers and ‘punk’ as it was/ is/will be for participants.  The punk of Kill Your Pet Puppy  was punk as a totality of lived experience. This was not the   punk  of  (un)popular music – as in the Sex Pistols  God Save the Queen which reached No. 2 in the UK charts in 1977 – it was the punk  of the few thousand teenagers  who flocked to London from around the English speaking world in response to the (un)popularisation of punk. [This movement of young people to the  perceived centre of a popular music based  counterculture was similar to that which occurred in San Francisco in 1967.]

The teenage  punks who moved to London from 1976/7 onwards  were effectively ‘homeless  persons’ and so gravitated to squatting as a  practical way to  survive. Squatting – the  occupation of unused land/ empty houses and other  properties  – already existed as part of  London’s  pre-punk counterculture and had a previous history stretching back several hundred years to the 17th century Diggers  and medieval occupiers of  commons,  forests and wastelands.  At the same time, the UK benefit/welfare system still reflected the post – world war two consensus  that  unemployment  was a crime and so it was just  about possible for punks to get paid a pittance by the state.

Squatting was not an easy option though. Few managed to stick it out.  Punks were also, thanks to the UK’s tabloid press, figures of hate. Punks were folk devils at the centre of a moral panic, liable to be beaten up on the street, raped or have their squats fire-bombed. [These  all did happen – see the Gay Punx page in KYPP 4].  And the drugs didn’t help much either. Since many of these  teenage punks were escaping intolerable/abusive  family situations,  personality  disorders ranging  from the mild to the extreme were common.  Far from their spectacular image as anarchist folk devils hell bent on destroying the state, these teenage punks were psychically disturbed  street kids for whom even the most disgusting squat  offered  temporary respite from their actual status as victims of society.

To read most accounts, even that  of Jon Savage [ England‘s Dreaming : 1986], the most perceptive and sympathetic (=participant) historian of punk; by 1979  punk was dead. The mass media circus had long since moved  on  and the tabloid press were urging the newly elected Conservative government  to begin  their assault on  the post-war consensus (=  start  a class war). The pop media, the music papers, had got bored with punk and were busy promoting ‘post-punk’ [ See Simon Reynolds : Rip it Up and Start Again: 2005].

But  what such retrospective accounts  miss is the reach and depth of the punk explosion. Like the shock wave of a nuclear blast, the events of 76/7 spread out  well beyond London as ground zero. The  do it your self ethic of punk  continued to inspire, infecting a next generation. This generation began creating  their own  version of punk, starting bands, making music, putting on gigs in village halls  or urban pubs up and down the land, churning out  cheap photocopied fanzines, dying their hair and adopting the punk attitude as their own. This phenomenon has never been documented, but  from Cornwall to  Cumbria, from  Suffolk to Somerset, across  Wales, Ireland and  Scotland where ever three or four  youths gathered together, there was a punk scene.

It was this underground punk scene which Crass tapped into from 1978 onwards, playing in community centres and village halls up and down the land. What drove Crass towards this DIY punk community was their  ideological commitment to ‘anarchy and peace’ – a commitment and attitude closer to that of the pre-punk  counterculture of underground groups like Hawkwind, the Pink Fairies and the Edgar Broughton Group, but delivered as a hardcore punk package. What this package delivered was a total assault on the senses, a sonic and visual attack  equivalent in its way to that of Hawkwind’s  acid  rock  Space Ritual.

But what worked outside of London  was less easily achieved in the city itself. By 1979, London’s punks existed as survivors, politicised by the necessity of survival in their squats and on the streets.  Here a harsher reality prevailed and Crass’ pacifist stance was challenged [specifically in relation to conflict at a Crass event at the Conway Hall] in the pages of Kill Your Pet Puppy. Simultaneously,  punk’s anarchist credentials were being challenged by the Persons Unknown anarchist conspiracy trial. This was not about ‘Anarchy in the UK ’ as mouthed mindlessly by many punks. It was an attack on real anarchists who were part of  a political tradition stretching back  a hundred years or more. It was a defining moment. Could punk engage with actual anarchists, or would the moment pass?

The Poison Girls and Crass chose engagement, as did the Kill Your Pet Puppy collective. The Poison Girls and Crass released a record – Persons Unknown/ Bloody Revolutions. The profits from this record allowed Iris Mills and Ronan Bennett (two of the ‘Persons Unknown’ accused) to set up an anarchist social centre in Wapping.  As such, the venture was a failure. But out of failure came success. Taken over by punks (who  senior anarchist Albert Meltzer later described as destroying it), the Wapping Autonomy Centre spawned  a mutant child – anarcho-punk. And the Kill Your Pet Puppy collective were there at the birth.  The Wapping Autonomy Centre scarcely survived into 1982, but found a new home at the Centro Iberico [ an abandoned school  already squatted by  Spanish  anarchist refugees]  in west London.

This home did not last very long, but the idea  did.