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Beating the Fascists: The authorised history of Anti-Fascist Action

imposs1904 said:
Ta, I vaguely remember him. I think I was still a Record Mirror devotee when he was in his heyday at the nme.
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He was great, he was often wrong but he was great when he was wrong - there's no way that such journalism can happen now - or have an effect, even tits laughing at it - because it' all spread out - democracy has a price.

edit: such journalism can happen, not just be magnified by monopoly positions.
 
Even back in the late 80s early 90s when I read the NME, swells was a bit of a one off. Standing out amongst a crowded field of "journo by numbers".

He simply couldn't exist these days.
 
chilango said:
Even back in the late 80s early 90s when I read the NME, swells was a bit of a one off. Standing out amongst a crowded field of "journo by numbers".

He simply couldn't exist these days.
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I think that period was anything but "journo by numbers" - and still he stood out. I've recently been looking at classic rock journo stuff from the 70s and early 80s - it's hideous. So people like swells were normal for lots of people. People on MM. Enough to keep them publishing it.

edit: which is a long winded of saying that he could. Not on that platform.
 
butchersapron said:
I think that period was anything but "journo by numbers" - and still he stood out. I've recently been looking at classic rock journo stuff from the 70s and early 80s - it's hideous. So people like swells were normal for lots of people. People on MM. Enough to keep them publishing it.

edit: which is a long winded of saying that he could. Not on that platform.
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I dunno, maybe I'm remembering later stuff, (Madchester to Britpop basically), but Swells really leapt from the page as "different" from the indistinguishable writing that seemed to increasingly dominate.

But it was a long time ago, my memory is undoubtedly hazy.

But becoming a journo now? As we all know from the commentariat epic there is background spec and predictable path to follow.

Ah well.

Journalism by all or none at all! or something....
 
chilango said:
I dunno, maybe I'm remembering later stuff, (Madchester to Britpop basically), but Swells really leapt from the page as "different" from the indistinguishable writing that seemed to increasingly dominate.

But it was a long time ago, my memory is undoubtedly hazy.

But becoming a journo now? As we all know from the commentariat epic there is background spec and predictable path to follow.

Ah well.

Journalism by all or none at all! or something....
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Yep, but the winnowing process of the IPC was excellent.
 
butchersapron said:
I think that period was anything but "journo by numbers" - and still he stood out. I've recently been looking at classic rock journo stuff from the 70s and early 80s - it's hideous. So people like swells were normal for lots of people. People on MM. Enough to keep them publishing it.

edit: which is a long winded of saying that he could. Not on that platform.
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This is what he ended up doing in the states. Worth reading, if you have time:

http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/n...ient-38416404.html?page=1&comments=1&showAll=

I'm writing these notes in the ER blitzed off my tits on Vicodin and synthetic heroin. Outside in the corridor some poor bastard who got crushed by a bowling ball stacking machine is screaming like a baby with Tourette's.
"Aaaaargh! Ah fuck! Ah! Jesus fuck! Oh God! Aaaaaaaaaaaaargh!"

I should be experiencing compassion but instead I'm feeling disappointed. I've been brought up by American TV to expect the stabbed, the gut-shot and the Mafia-kneecapped to be fistfighting with the gangbangers, the crack addicts and the self-mutilating anorexic Goth chicks in ER waiting rooms. Instead there's just lots of very fat people feeding McDonald's to even fatter children.

Maybe we should start the story here.

This is the tale of a smartarse Brit getting lost in the Philadelphia health system. The highlights--edited for shock value--include cockroaches, urine-drenched bathrooms, a crazed geriatric chip-sucker, a frenzied attempt to masturbate into a specimen jar while the chap in the next bed watches Patton at a libido-shattering 128 decibels, and nurses hiding their name badges while my wife screams, "My husband's got cancer. Get off your arse and get him his fucking painkillers now !"


Read more: http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/n...html?page=1&comments=1&showAll=#ixzz2ruDQIVSw
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Re Swells/anti fascism - I didn't realise that Swells was in the SWP (actually, I may have read up on that years ago, but totally forgot about it). it's mentioned in this Graun obit here: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/jun/29/obituary-steven-wells

The paragraph in question is this:

Defining Steven's legacy is hard; his energy, intelligence and wit were a huge influence on me, certainly. His generosity to people he liked - other writers, bands, friends - belied his (self-created) image as a rude, aggressive ranter. As a freelance journalist and a Socialist Workers party member, Swells was always on the side of the underdog, which, at the NME in the 1980s, took the form of some very confused, lost and talented young men and women.
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I found someone on the Punk 77 forum having a bit of a go at Swells re SWP/ANL business (have omitted the unpleasantries toward Swells at the end):

I hated the way he always used to bang on about the SWP doing this and that when it came to anti-fascism in the early 90's when they were doing anything but.

He was part of that wee crew in the music press in the late 80's/ early 90's who indulged in the revisionism that the ANL/SWP routinely did.

Claiming that they smashed Blood and Honour at Waterloo Station etc when they protested'peacefully'(and safely)behind a police corden.
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My opnion? I always thought Swell's anti-fascism to be genuine (even if he was a Swappie)...maybe there's stuff online that counters this? (Will have a look online later on this one).
 
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I can't find his piece on the Bradford Riots but lots and lots of great stuff turns up.

There's a band here in Philly called Mischief Brew who are undoubtedly fantastic human beings because they sing about how Jesus was a commie and how Nazis and capitalists are bastards. But they sound like Death Cab for Cutie being pulled on a giant shit chariot by a pack of worm-ridden, three-legged dogs wearing disgustingly stained dung-coloured dog dungarees and the obligatory red-coloured bandanas around their necks. And stupid hand-knitted Tibetan-style hippy twat-hats with earflaps. So tell me, why do so many righteous and right-on bands look and sound like a dung baguette?
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Have we gone soft on football's fascists?
Take FourFourTwo magazine's December 2006 one-on-one interview with Paolo Di Canio, where the Mussolini-worshipping, straight arm salute-throwing, self-described fascist was asked to answer questions sent in by readers. According to the version of the article published on the FourFourTwo website, not a single reader wanted Di Canio to explain his oft expressed affection for Benito Mussolini - the fascist dictator of Italy, whose support of Adolf Hitler led to the extermination of an estimated 8,000 Italian Jews.

Instead Di Canio was asked: "In your autobiography you talk about making the ultimate tiramisu. What's the secret?" (This is the same biography in which Di Canio described Mussolini as "basically a very principled, ethical individual" who was "deeply misunderstood").

Gone from the FourFourTwo website is the quote "Yes, I am fascist. So what? We are in 2006; the racial laws no longer exist, thanks to God. I do not see why the idea of a social radical right cannot be expressed in a democratic manner."

And on this very website a gushing Russell Brand wrote up a meeting with Di Canio that somehow failed to mention the footballer's oft-declared fascist sympathies, his two fascist tattoos, his on-pitch salutes and his coded Holocaust revisionism.

"I've listened to the stories but I still have my ideas," said Di Canio after meeting Italian Holocaust survivors in 2006. "My thoughts remain the same, but I don't want it to sound as if I believe in violence."
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Amelia Fletcher OBE is a little bit class enemy tbf.

In 1993, Fletcher completed a D.Phil. in economics at the University of Oxford titled 'Theories of Self-Regulation'. In 2001, she was appointed Chief Economist and Senior Director of Mergers at the Office of Fair Trading and in 2008 took on the additional role of head of mergers. She left in April 2013, to become Professor of Competition Policy at the University of East Anglia.

Fletcher was appointed OBE in the 2014 New Years Honours list for services to Competition and Consumer Economics.
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Her dad was an 'advertising guru' so he can fuck off and all.
 
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ian penman is still doing good writing
At the end of a numb day spent with Weight’s snap-happy Lego of statistics, I put on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue in an attempt to really hear it again, to catch the original lure through all the intervening time-fuzz. I say ‘original’, but by the time I came to it Kind of Blue was already 15 years old – it’s harder still to imagine how it signified in 1959. How can something so feathery and frosty and rapt still cause such deep shock? It may be hard to believe, now that it’s become an everywhere gastropub soundtrack, but hearing music like this for the first time could be a dizzying, even upsetting experience. Yes, it contains a sense of hard-won joy – but also sharp overtones of siege and fear, loss and regret. If Kind of Blue was a specifically modern achievement, it’s in part because the players were unafraid of the deafening silence at the edge of their sound. There were darker, more jagged emotions under the elegant façade, something beyond hot trends and cool shades. I instinctively distrust any over-reliance on the word ‘soul’ in music criticism, but it’s the only word that comes to mind here, a code word for all sorts of dreams and difficulties. For anyone back then, 1959 or 1974, raised in a UK household where neither introspection nor exuberance were madly encouraged, where home life was a cramped, stifling affair, and where you didn’t have a readymade language for certain unruly feelings, music like this could really melt the inherited chip of ice in the heart. It still can.
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phildwyer said:
Really excellent stuff, even if it's not quite clear which are Penman's ideas and which are from the book he's reviewing.

"Are You Being Served? was as much social realism as ribald sitcom." LOL.

Also, this is good news: "He is working on a novel about music and terror in 1970s Britain." I hope he actually is working on this one.
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i assume the novel 'about music and terror' deals with the awful shite of tales from topographic oceans and anything by genesis.
 
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