From Anarcho-Punk to Fascism

aka. NAZI PUNKS FUCK OFF!

Gary Smith / Decadent Few

I've spoken in a previous post of Gary Smith's involvement in Above the Ruins and Sol Invictus (Tony Wakeford's bands after leaving Death in June). Smith was simultaneously a Combat 18 and BNP supporter as well as a member of hardcore Nazi skinhead group No Remorse.

One aspect of the situation that deserves having more light thrown on it is the extent of overlap or continuity between the anarcho-punk and Fascist milieus in the early 80s. On the left is a picture of Gary Smith around the time that he was a member of his first band The Decadent Few. According to their mySpace pages; "Formed in East London,1984 by Kaya, Mike, Bernie and Mark of YOUTH IN ASIA, plus Steph of HAGAR THE WOMB briefly, Decadent Few’s first gig was at Studio One in Slough, June 1984. Mark and Steph had stepped out by this point and a friend, Gary, was taught Bass by Mike in vintage Paul Simenon-style, i.e. coloured stickers on the frets to denote where to play which note which song. Luckily, Gary learnt fast and this line up played regularly across London with bands like FLOWERS IN THE DUSTBIN, TOM’S MIDNIGHT GARDEN, STIGMA, ANDY LOVEBUG & THE TENDERHEARTS and the WET PAINT THEATRE, a Punk Theatre Company".

The t-shirt he's wearing here is a bit of a giveaway, of course, since it features the Celtic Cross symbol beloved by Nazi skinheads and others. While anarcho-punks could be extremely militant against, and were often in the forefront of, physical opposition to, racism, Fascism, etc., at the same time there was an ambivalence in their ideas that could also make (some of) them in some circumstances susceptible to accepting Fascists in their midst. In his autobiography Crass founder Penny Rimbaud talks about how the group initially had a sizeable contingent of NF / British Movement (BM) supporters among their fans, and first adopted the anarchist symbol merely as a way of keeping both the NF and SWP at bay by taking up a position that was neither Fascist nor Socialist but independent of both (the SWP and RCP apparently had the cheek to ask Crass to play anti-Nazi gigs). This, of course, is to duck the issues rather than taking a clear anti-fascist stance. There are even rumors that Steve Ignorant (Crass vocalist) may have played on some Above the Ruins recordings alongside active Fascists such as Ian Read and Smith.

One of the interesting things about the list of bands The Decadent Few played with is the way that it overlaps with groups associated with pro-Fascist fan Dev, of While Angels Watch. According to Dev; "During the early 1980's I also played in: PERSONS UNKNOWN (Guitar and Vocals), YOUTH IN ASIA (Drums), FLOWERS IN THE DUSTBIN (first Drums then Guitar), TOMS MIDNIGHT GARDEN (Vocals and Guitar), HYPERACTIVE (Guitar and Vocas) and SIXTH COMM (Guitar)." This raises the idea that some parts of the anarcho-squat-punk scene overlapped and co-mingled with various Fascist and pro-Nazi ideologues. The mySpace pages for Tom's Midnight Garden explicitly mention Smith and Patrick Leagas (of Death in June) as members, and of course Sixth Comm was Leagas's band after leaving Death in June. All of which is further evidence of the many threads that tie Death in June to Fascism and Fascist musicians. But it also raises the question of to what extent Fascists were able to operate on the fringes of the anarcho milieu. No doubt we'll talk more of Dev in future, but for now I just want to register this issue and say that if you have more information about this murky territory I'd be happy to hear about it.

Gary Smith on Manoeuvres

No Remorse
Smith on left, Browning second from right

While the facts are hard to come by, given the conspiracy of silence that surrounds the issue, it seems that Gary Smith played bass on the album Songs of the Wolf by Above the Ruins, the band Wakeford formed on leaving Death in June in 1986, and also on the 1987 debut Sol Invictus album, Against the Modern World. One curious connection between the groups, other than personnel (thought to be Smith, Ian Read and the mysterious Liz Grey), is the choice of names and titles: Above the Ruins was named after the book Man Against the Ruins, by Italian traditionalist and 'super-fascist' Julius Evola, while the album Against the Modern World can similarly be assumed to be named for his book Revolt Against the Modern World. Evola was a major influence on the faction of the National Front (NF) Wakeford associated with during his time as an open fascist. In any case, clearly there was a strong ideological continuity between the two groups to parallel the continuity of personnel.

Smith was also a member of No Remorse,  one of the most extreme and explicit of the White Power / Blood and Honour skinhead groups. No Remorse also featured Will 'The Beast' Browning, leader (alongside Charlie Sargent) of the ultra-violent Nazi street-fighting group Combat 18. No Remorse subsequently gained a degree of notoriety for their recording Barbecue in Rostock, which celebrated the 1992 riots and  arson attack on an apartment block housing asylum seekers in that city. Above the Ruins, on the other hand, revealed similar allegiances when they contributed a track to the National Front benefit album No Surrender vol 1 alongside the Nazi groups Skrewdriver and Brutal Attack. Clearly Above the Ruins were part of the same general movement as those Blood and Honour groups even if their music was just as clearly aimed at a different audience (ie. not the usual Nazi boneheads but those who prefer their racist claptrap served up with a drum machine and some moody synthesiser on the side).

The following two images are stills taken from a 1991 Panorama TV report entitled 'Race Hate UK', an expose of the racist British National Party (BNP). A person who appears to be Gary Smith is filmed marching on a BNP demo through through the East End of London chanting 'Rights for Whites' and giving the Nazi salute to bystanders.

Gary Smith with the BNP

Sieg Heil

As the commentator says, the BNP at that time were an openly racist party concerned explicitly not with nationality but race. In the course of the film barking, swivel-eyed BNP spokesman Richard Edmonds calls for "a final solution to the racial problems in this country". Gary Smith is precisely the kind of person Wakeford worked with and befriended when he was an open fascist.

These days Wakeford claims to have broken with the ideas he held at that time, but refuses to say exactly what those ideas were. In particular he refuses to say whether they included notions, taken in part from Evola, about 'metapolitical fascism', in which openly fascist politics are abandoned in favour of cultural / artistic work aimed at expanding the influence of anti-democratic, traditionalist and fascist ideas, preparing the ground for a future fascist resurgence - and these are the sort of ideas associated with the neo-folk scene and groups such as Wakeford's own Sol Invictus. He certainly seems to have been thinking in that direction at the time, saying at one point that "In the end economics, even politics, doesn't matter and only a living culture can guarantee a people's, a nation's future."¹ While I am quite prepared to believe that Wakeford has long ago dropped active membership of the NF (forerunner to the BNP as the party of choice for Britain's racists) the cultural themes he learned during his time with them, as aspects of their ideology ('Eurocentrism', Paganism, etc.) remain central to his work as a musician. 

Another member of Above the Ruins and the original Sol Invictus was Ian Read, a Nazi Odinist who continues to be active with his band Fire + Ice, and who we'll no doubt talk about in future. As Stewart Home has already discussed this period of Wakeford's life at some length, I'll say no more for now other than to comment, first and most obviously, that these images and the film they are taken from offer a close-up view of the kind of world Wakeford immersed himself in before going all 'metapolitical' and obtuse on everyone. The other point concerns the dishonest nature of Wakeford's halting and half-hearted repudiation of his own past. First he denied making music as a fascist at all, then details of his involvement in Above the Ruins began to emerge. He has been known to say that the first incarnation of Sol Invictus was after his association with fascism, but then the evidence emerged that the first Sol Invictus line-up was in fact the same line-up as Above the Ruins, who were clearly identified with the NF through the No Surrender release mentioned above. Not only that but, according to the official version of the story, Wakeford was jettisoned from Death in June when he became a hardcore NF activist, yet a photograph we recently unearthed would seem to suggest that he'd been active for some years in both Death in June and the NF simultaneously before the parting of the ways. Other questions remain: was Wakeford working with David Tibet on the Current 93 album Imperium² at the same time as he was working with Read and Smith? What role, if any, did Mark Sutherland (Skrewdriver drummer) play in these early bands?

The story keeps on changing. No wonder Wakeford says that he no longer wants to talk about that period: every time he's done so in the past it has turned out later either that he'd lied or had left gaping holes in his story to cover up the extent of his (and other people's?) active involvement in fascist politics. It looks very much as though there may be a lot more to be discovered about the history of Tony Wakeford's fascism and his political relations with other players in the neo-folk 'scene'.

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1. Tony Wakeford, Scorpion # 9, Spring 1986, p 31
2. whose title, incidentally, is probably taken from Francis Parker Yockey or (more likely in my opinion) Evola again