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band. Who ate whose dinner? Well the serpent just bit its own tail and I'm hovering right up here ready to swoop, this time the phoenixing bird is coming down, fast. Pund is a voice of revolt, the music is incidental to the message, the message is
DO IT!
Right. Aiter twenty five minutes of tortuous noise the management of the Roxy switch us off and reggae blasts across the dance floor. It seems to me that the blacks had their turn at Notting Hill and if the disc jockey at the Roxy thinks he's going to drown my anguish with theirs, he's very wrong. This is my riot, fuck it. I have'nt done,I'm not spent. I know that, I know, I fucking know. Some smarmy green-back points a gold- ringed finger at his digital watch to tell me my time's up and imagines that I'm going to row in on his pleasure boat. No way. I don't recall having had a number emblazoned on my side.
"Come in number forty nine, your time is.............."
"Up it. Right? Right up it."
He can fuck off. This is my time ain't it? Ain't it?

Britain is suffering the effects of severe recession, an econimic slump that means the poor get poorer all the rich get richer, it's always been the same story, only this time round a larger number amongst the poor know it.

Released from the restraint of our set numbers, I lob into a fast jungle type rhythym, the rest of the band has climbed down from the stage, but as they hear the drums, they climb back again. Pip, the lead guitarist, argues with the sound engineers who won't switch us back on. He starts to demolish a speaker stack with his elbow and almost instantly we get our sound, albeit at half-volume, barely audible over the disco hat still pumps out reggae.

Back Britain? Fuck Britain. Too many times have the working population of Britain been asked to make an effort on behalf of their country. Their country? What is that country of theirs? Effectively, it is the sum total of years of inneffective government, a cock up, a hypocritical, complacent and dangerous lie. Government kills; right?
Ireland. Right?
Vietnam. Right?
Democracy is a lie. Two-party totalitarianism. The realities stay the same. Democracy is a many-headed feudal war lord, his horse is the head of the prick that blocks my throat. A gag.
Tomorrow we eat better. Today we always wait. The begging bowl is a crucifix. Who ate my dinner?
Who's hanging where?

It deos'nt matter, we're fighting. It doesn't matter. Who the fuck cares if they can't hear us? They can see us can't they? Can't they? It doesn't matter a shit if the sounds aren't right vbecause right now we're in a battle-field and that's never too tasteful. I start screaming and screaming, searching out faces in the audience that might understand what it is that we are trying to do. This is our fuckng time and no grease arse manager is going to start cutting it about.

At last the man in the street is finding a voice. It has taken a homeless, jobless, futureless reality for the message to became clear, and right now it's getting clearer and clearer.
Government is economics not people. Dollar democracy and fuck the people. Jobs? What jobs? If there are jobs they are ior mindless fodder.
The factory floor kills.
Homes? What homes? If there are homes they're twenty floors up where the industrial pollution kills faster than the rising damp.
There ain't no future in England's green and pleasant land, at least not that any government can offer.

Slowly, little bubbles of response burst out on the floor and a number of people move up to the stage-front, raising their fists into the noise filled air. For as long as we are physicaly able we build up as much energy as we can. The group of fist wavers snells. Bigger and bigger. It's theirs and they're getting to know it.

Ultimately it's up to us, the peole, it took the only successiul revolution that Britain has ever known to create democracy, but it slipped back to the elite, it had to-- democracy is a system and systems kill. Us, the peole. Not Marx, he sucks, Not Moa, he sucks. Not Carter, Callaghan, Thatcher, Freud, Stalin, Hitler, Jesus, Buddha. NO ONE. JUST YOU. JUST ME. PEOPLE. RIGHT?

I'm done for, wiped-out. I fall from the drum stool, maggot to the moving soil. It's enough though. Just enough. Enough to unlocK some of those crazy doors and let in some clean light, it ain't fresh air, but it feels pure. For the rest of the evening the Roxy hosts a near riot. Beer cans fly through sprays of alcohol, bodies fly, surfing on waves of grape and hop. Wild dances that drag body on body, down, down to the filthy floor. Parodies of our father's violence, touch on touch. Parodies of the awful coldness that ripped us from our mothers body. We heave away at the adopted umbilical. We share this moment at birth. The reality al the surgeon is always near, scissors raised, he is beaten off by the pulsing body of bodies. THE VIOLENCE IS PARODY. WE LOVE AND NURSE EACH OTHER'S BRUISES.

But where are the women?

Because society trains it's men to be heroes, fools who die in the mud of the trenches, and treats it's

continued on the next page (page 9)

This website was originally produced by Southern Records in the 2000s. It has been reconstructed as part of http://theartofcrass.uk