By the time the Sex Pistols split up in early 1978, many in the music press declared punk — and its assault on popular culture — to be officially over. For many young people outside the cities who had only just cut up their flares and chopped off their hair, the news of punk’s demise seemed premature to say the least. After all, hadn’t punk only just arrived? In 1978 a social movement would begin to coalesce. Its mission? To ignore the denunciations of the music press and to take the Pistol’s call for Anarchy in the UK seriously. Its methods? Self-organised culture and direct action. Central to this new movement was the anarchist band CRASS.
In an era of immediate online connection, it’s easy to forget the role that travel can play in establishing social bonds and coordinating action. CRASS’ self organised tours took in venues that fell well outside the established ‘Rock n’ Roll’ circuit — including squatted houses, community centres and scout huts — reaching parts of the country ignored by punk acts assimilated into the mainstream music industry.
Through an array of self-produced cassette tapes and records that were distributed at their gigs — alongside home-made leaflets denouncing the horrors of war, the meat industry, patriarchy, and capitalism — CRASS introduced radical ideas to a generation who were hungry for social change. Thousands were turned on to their blend of anti-authoritarianism and their ‘Do-It-Yourself’ sensibilities.
Inspired, within a few short years, 100s of new ‘anarcho’ acts would proliferate across Britain (and further afield), constituting an alternative society based on experiments in collective living (taking the form of urban squatting, ‘back to the land’ communes and shared housing), work resistance (the dole, theft), agitational propaganda (punk bands, theatre troupes, poetry collectives, print shops and distribution nodes) and through support for militant direct action (in particular anti-nuclear protest, animal liberation, hunt-sabbing and anti-fascist activity and the large ‘Stop the City’ mobilisations that laid siege to financial districts and shopping centres across the country).
The movement’s social ties were forged in friendships created through gig attendance: a network of local, national and eventually international contacts. At most gigs you could find a campaign stall supporting a wide range of radical causes from local anti-fascist groups, to solidarity drives for striking miners. The movement was coordinated through letter writing: ‘pen pals’ advertising local gigs, coordinating national tours, exchanging information, offering places to sleep and shared lifts to either concerts or direct actions. Many of the bands in the movement borrowed heavily from CRASS’ aesthetics, producing agit-prop banners that hung behind them while they played, even producing short agit-prop films — a la CRASS — that would accompany their sets.
Zine production was central to the growing anarcho-punk scene. The first anarchist bookfair held at the Wapping Autonomy Centre (an important early venue for anarcho-punk) was populated by stalls distributing zines, tapes, self produced leaflets and pamphlets. As such, Anarcho-Punk played a significant role in revitalising the fortunes of the domestic anarchist movement at the start of the 1980s, breathing new life into feminist, anti-militarist, squatting and radical ecological networks and inspiring the look and tone of the propaganda of many of the decades new organisations, most notably Class War. The practices, tactics, politics and friendships developed in this period would leave a lasting imprint on domestic radical culture, providing the groundwork for later militant initiatives, in particular those belonging to the alter-globalisation movement of the mid to late 90s.
Despite a growing interest in its aesthetics and its musical directions, little work has been undertaken to map and catalogue the literature belonging to the movement that can help us shed light onto the relationship between anarcho-punk and political group formation and anarcho-punks’ intersection with a vast array of contentious social movements. As such, this project is concerned with accumulating ephemera relating to anarcho-punk — in particular its bulletins, campaign leaflets, posters, zines and discussion documents — allowing contemporary militants and researchers to explore this history, its cultures and its legacy.
To find out more, or to get involved in this project- please contact Seth Wheeler on research@maydayrooms.org
