Soul Boys of the Western World (2014)

Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)

Rejoice, Rejoice!: Britain in the 1980s by Alwyn Turner (Aurum Press 2008)

With a few exceptions – the anonymous narrator of Raymond’s Factory novels, Rankin’s John Rebus exploring the seedier side of Edinburgh with ‘its crooks and bandits, its whore and gamblers, its perpetual losers and winners’ – these characters primarily inhabited the small towns and middle-class world that had characterized the golden age. Even in Taggart, firmly located in Glasgow, the murderers whose stories were told in the first three series included a couple of small businessmen, a guest-house owner, a doctor, a philosophy student, a dentist and an ex-probation worker, as well as a group of bereaved parents meting out justice to the drug dealer responsible for their children’s deaths. Despite the urban setting, this is a world away from The Sweeney; there are no car chases, just Sgt Livingston running after teenagers and getting bitten by the occasional dog, and there is little suggestion of a criminal class separate from society: these are just ordinary, respectable people caught up in their own lives. And, at the other extreme of television detection, there was Jim Bergerac, investigating much smaller problems on Jersey and learning ‘to take the smooth with the smooth’.

Though the backdrop might have suggested a retreat from the city to the closed communities of Agatha Christie (encapsulated by Colin Watson as Mayhem Parva), there was an edge, to the literature at least, that was far removed from the cosiness of Miss Marple, an engagement with society, a desire to comment on contemporary mores. And although the likes of Morse and Dalgliesh spent much of their time behaving as though they were still autonomous detectives in the tradition of Holmes and Poirot, capable of solving any case through the exercise of their intellect, the central characters were still police officers, and couldn’t fail to notice the changing role of the force in the modern world. In one of Rendell’s novels, Inspector Burden initiates the putting of coloured lights in the tree outside the police station ‘in the interest of promoting jollier relations with the public’. His boss, Wexford, disapproves of the gesture, but it’s revealing that there was a perceived need for such a move: ‘surely you couldn’t go on feeling antagonistic towards or afraid of or suspicious about a friendly body that hung fairy-lights in a tree in its front garden?’ Elsewhere Peter Robinson’s character Inspector Banks was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the new role of the force: ‘he had many objections to the way the government seemed to look upon the police as a private army of paid bully boys to pit against people with genuine grievances and a constitutional right to air them.’ He consoles himself with the thought that he’s a detective ‘and he didn’t have to go on crowd control, bashing the bonces of the proletariat.’ But even detectives are affected by the rise of what Reginald Hill’s Andy Dalziel refers to as ‘porkism’, as his own sergeant concludes: ‘A man’s got to be mad to stay in a job where the public hates you and Maggie Thatcher loves you.’

Most political of all was Derek Raymond’s detective sergeant, who reflects on the police powers promised in a new piece of legislation (presumably inspired by the controversial Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984): ‘It was what I thought of as banana laws – the law of a society in the process of breaking down. Once properly tightened up, it would have meant that I could stop and arrest a man in the street simply because I didn’t like the look on his face, or the way his pockets bulged. It would have synchronized nicely with the plastic ID cards that every citizen would be required to carry by then, and before long we would have turned the country into a birdcage.’

The Human League - Fascination! (1983)

We Are the Best! (2013)

The Fuck-Up by Arthur Nersesian (MTV Pocket Books 1997)

Perhaps the price of comfort is that life passes more rapidly. But for anyone who has lived in uneasiness, even for a short, memorable duration, it’s a trade-off that will gladly be made. When I was in my teens, I made an appraisal of how comfortable my life could turn out when I became the age I am now. Because of a mechanical failure, the prediction was inexact. Things reversed. I ended up living somewhere I once avoided, with a woman whom I genuinely once disliked.

Recently we celebrated our seventh anniversary together with a decent dinner and a not dreadful film. I got out of work early that evening and took the F train to Forty-second Street. I crossed Fifth Avenue toward the Main Branch of the Public Library, but paused in the middle of the crosswalk. It was filling up with the evening rush hour crowd: men in trench coats, secretaries in tennis shoes, cabs in the crosswalk, cars honking, leviathan buses zooming inches, braking, zooming again, and bike messengers slicing through it all. The last time I was in that spot, seven years ago, there wasn’t a person in sight.

Seven years ago that day, as dawn rose, I remember standing in roughly the same spot watching as the traffic signals hanging over each intersection slowly turned yellow then red. Cars zoomed forward, headlights still on, staying ahead of the changing lights; at dusk they could make it all the way down without a single red light.

At rush hour, the entire avenue was gridlocked. But I could still faintly make out the small white crown of the Washington Square Arch at the very end. The anniversary of my relationship coincided with that dawning, and although that morning marked something that eluded celebration, it couldn’t be forgotten either.

Something honked at me, so I crossed the street, reboarded the packed F train, and returned to Brooklyn for the anniversary dinner.

Mad World: An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s by Lori Majewski and Jonathan Bernstein (Abrams Books 2014)

Lori Majewski: Not sure if you realize it, JB [Jonathan Bernstein], but The Lexicon of Love is the reason we became friends. When you told me it was your favorite album of all time—back in the early nineties, when we were the only people who’d admit to liking new wave while working at a grunge-obsessed Spin magazine—I thought: Now, here’s a guy I can hang with. While I love Spandau and Culture Club, neither ever released a flawless long-player like Lexicon. The talky bits were my favorite parts, like in “The Look of Love,” when Fry says to himself, “Martin, maybe one day you’ll find true love.” He always came across as such a hopeless romantic—it was the beautifully tailored suits, the way he referenced Cupid and Smokey Robinson in his songs, how he pined for a more chivalrous era. For an eighties teenager experiencing the thrill (and then heartache) of her first crush, ABC offered a vision of love that I could only hope the real thing would live up to.

MARTIN FRY: Decades don’t always begin at zero. They begin a couple of years in, the mood and style. A couple of years into the eighties, when I was forming ABC, I realized no one could be more Sex Pistol–y than the Sex Pistols or more Clash than the Clash. I loved punk, but it never seemed to go as far as it could have. Maybe Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes or Tony Hadley and Gary Kemp might say something different, but for me and for a lot of my generation, it was really frustrating the Clash were never on Top of the Pops. I wasn’t going to try and be a proto-punk. I wanted to do the opposite.

That’s why I got so excited by disco, which was a really dirty word at the time. I wanted to make music that was funky and radical. The early ABC was the “Radical Dance Faction”—that’s what we called ourselves. I’d also grown up loving Motown, Stax, and Atlantic, along with Roxy Music—Roxy performing “Virginia Plain” on Top of the Pops in 1972 was my road to Damascus. So it made natural sense to try and fuse those worlds. When I think back, looking at stuff like the Pop Group, James Chance and the Contortions, Pigbag, and all the bands that came through just before and just after ABC—Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Depeche Mode—there was a whole generation itching to make dance music, populist music. I don’t think it was any accident that all those bands became internationally known.

I interviewed Vice Versa for my fanzine, Modern Drugs, in 1979. They were kind of a fledgling Human League, only younger and less revered. When I went to interview Steve Singleton and Mark White, they said, “We’re going on a train from Sheffield to Middlesbrough to open up for Cowboys International. We’ve not got a drummer, but we’ve got lots of synths in our holdalls. You can stand onstage with us.” We got bottled off by these skinheads who didn’t get us. We were mohair sweaters and post-punk and ironic, but I loved it. After that, they let me join the band.

Bedsit Disco Queen: How I grew up and tried to be a pop star by Tracey Thorn (Virago Press 2013)

I had never met anyone quite like Ben before. He was on the one hand simply posher than anyone I was used to, while at the same time less conventional and suburban through having grown up in a bohemian household. His dad had been a jazz musician and big-band leader, his mother an actress-turned-journalist and he was the fifth child in the house, the other four being half-brothers and a half-sister from his mother’s first marriage. Though three months younger than me, he had somehow managed to cram in a year off between school and university, during which time he had worked as a groundsman at a sports club, mowing lawns and marking out pitches. He seemed older than me, infinitely more self-confident and assured (which he wasn’t), and at first, after he interrupted a lecturer to correct a mistake the poor man had just made in his introduction to Beckett, I mistook him for an intellectual (which he certainly wasn’t). The displacement of the desk by the record player in his room should have alerted me to that fact, but it took me a while to realise that all he cared about was music, and it wasn’t until I noticed he was choosing his courses purely on the basis of which ones required the least reading that I finally let go of my initial misapprehension that he was cleverer than me.

So we would never share a passion for reading long Victorian novels, but at least he liked Vic Godard. As for the rest of his record collection, well, it reflected the fact that punk itself had largely passed him by. There were no Sex Pistols or Clash records. The band who really first inspired him was Joy Division, followed by other archetypal post-punks like Magazine, Wire, This Heat. Along with these bands Ben had records by people I had barely even heard of: Eno, Kevin Coyne, Robert Wyatt and Captain Beefheart. In 1977 Johnny Rotten had famously broadcast a show on Capital Radio where he played his eclectic record collection. Many of the records he had played were also in Ben’s collection, alongside Public Image Ltd’s Metal Box. Then there were things like Neil Young’s Decade, and John Martyn’s Island albums, Solid Air and One World, all records Ben loved for their emptiness and sonic open spaces. A sprinkling of soul – Stevie Wonder, George Benson, Chic, Earth Wind and Fire. And jazz, of course, via his dad – Roland Kirk, Bill Evans, Clifford Brown. Not much pop, though. No Undertones, Buzzcocks or Orange Juice. Ben had more albums than me, but fewer singles. I thought that might need addressing.

He had played guitar in a couple of bands during 1979 and 1980. First, the startlingly named Fléau Moderne (French, apparently, for ‘modern scourge’), who dressed in grey sweatshirts and digital watches to look like David Byrne, except for the lead singer who was allowed to get away with wearing make-up and red trousers. They played one triumphant gig in front of an audience of two hundred and fifty at a church hall in Twickenham, at the end of which the drummer performed the customary salute of throwing his drumsticks into the crowd, only to have one thrown back and catch him in the eye as he left the stage. The local rivalry inspired by this gig was such that another nearby school formed a band called Macabre.

In 1980 Ben met Mike Alway at Snoopy’s, the club in Richmond where Mike promoted gigs, and asked if he could do a solo slot there one night.

‘Sure,’ said Mike, ‘what do you sound like?’

‘I sound like The Durutti Column with songs,’ said Ben, and on the strength of this Mike offered him a slot supporting the then unknown Thompson Twins, in ten days’ time. At this point Ben had never played a solo live set, or recorded anything, or in fact even written any songs. Surely this was audacity gone mad? But remember, the DIY ethos, still firmly entrenched, suggested that you could and should do anything you wanted, so he simply went home, wrote ten songs in ten days and did the gig. Performing under the name of The Low Countries (possibly to avoid identification, should it all go horribly wrong) he stood up with an electric guitar, a cassette player playing pre-recorded drum-machine patterns and sang desolate, atmospheric songs with titles like ‘Communion’, ‘A Darkness So Deep’, and ‘Ice’. It wasn’t hard to spot the Joy Division influence, and it all sounds about as far removed from the Marine Girls as you could possibly imagine. But the common strand came from the philosophy of the moment, which embraced more or less anything as long as it wasn’t hoary old rock music. Both of us were making quiet, minimalist music but within the context of rock-gig venues, where playing at low volume was in itself a confrontational thing to do. Music journalist Simon Reynolds quotes Stuart Moxham of Young Marble Giants replying to a heckler, who demanded some rock ’n’ roll, with the words: ‘Anyone can do that. They’re doing it all over town. But we want to do this.’

Wild Boy: My Life in Duran Duran by Andy Taylor (Grand Central Publishing 2008)

There was worse to come. "New Moon on Monday" was our least favourite video of all. Everybody in the band hates it, particularly the dreadful scene at the end where we all dance together. Even today, I cringe and leave the room if anyone plays the video. We shot it just outside Paris on the third of January 1984, and we were all miserable because we hadn't had a long enough Christmas holiday. Our management had convinced us to theme it on the French Revolution, and it also had historic references to the French Resistance - but, to be honest, it was just a load of gibberish. The set was dark and cold, and we spent most of the day drinking alcohol. By the time we were dancing at the end I was half cut. It is one of the few times I've seen Nick dance (watch his shoulders moving up and down if you ever get another chance to see it!). We were very uncomfortable with the whole thing. After "New Moon on Monday," we all thought, Bollocks - let's do something that's fundamental and solid.

The answer was a spectacular live video in the form of "The Reflex."

In the Pleasure Groove: Love, Death, and Duran Duran by John Taylor (with Tom Sykes) (Dutton 2012)

Steve Jones is open about the influence Thunders's playing style had on him. In the documentary The Filth and the Fury, there is a hilarious sequence where film of the two guitarists is intercut, showing quite clearly just how much of Thunders's attitude Steve knocked off.

Something similar could be done with me. I would learn to take Thunders's signature slurs and guitar runs and transpose them to bass, along with the accompanying sneers. The first time I saw the Thunders's magic was on-stage at Birmingham  University. The opening act was a band I had not heard  of before, The Police. At that time I would sneak a cassette recorder into every gig I went to, and I set the machine to record when they began to play, even though I had no idea who they were. It was quite possible a band you had never heard of yesterday could become your favourite band tomorrow.

The singer with The Police also played bass, which struck me as quite clever and quite "un-punk." After the second number, he struck up a rapport with the audience of mostly students. A little too familiar, I remember thinking at the time, not knowing then that Sting had been a teacher and spoke "student" way better than he would ever speak "punk."

Sting: We've got the Heartbreakers coming on next.
(Cheer from me and one or two others)
Sting: They can't play, you know.
Me: Fuck off!
Sting: Who said "Fuck off'?
Me: I did. (all of this going down onto the cassette tape)
Sting: It's true. They're great guys but they can't play.
Me: Fuck off, you wanker!
Sting: You'll see. This next song is called "Fall Out"! 1 2 3 4 . . .

He was wrong about the Heartbreakers. They were awesome that night. At the BBC in 1993, filming "Ordinary World" for Top of the Pops, I was standing next to Sting watching a playback of our performance on a monitor. I thought to myself, I've got to tell him about that night, but before I opened my mouth he half-turned to me and said, "I wish I'd written that song."

Let's leave it at that then, I thought.

Adventureland (2009)

Pet Shop Boys, Literally by Chris Heath (Da Capo Press 1990)

Someone mentions the reviews. Neil says it was stupid to invite the press to an added, unsold-out show. 'They all had to gleefully mention it wasn't full, but no matter. It was a major PR mistake but to be honest,' he laughs, 'tough bananas.'

'A lot of people went home very happy and that's what counts,' says Carroll. 'It's very expensive. They make a choice sometimes between buying the tickets and paying their bills. It's a great honour.'

This is said with such honesty and feeling that you can sense everyone present drawing breath, taking stock, storing this away.

Neil reflects on the Daily Telegraph's comments. 'It was written from Olympian heights. It was so patronizing. They're jealous. And of course the reason is because I'm a journalist . . .'

'Tossbag,' mutters Danny, succinctly.

Carroll begins once more. She says that these people are stupid, that they've no idea why people do these things. They're always looking for stupid motives. 'They think you do it for the money or something. The reasons are obvious,' she declares. 'You do it for entertainment and self-expression.'

This statement, casually tossed out to a half-drunk, back-of-the-bus rabble, makes a lasting impression.

The people's PR by Ian Walker (New Society 14 May 1981)

Today's Ian Walker article dates from May '81 and is a report from the TUC's People March for Jobs, which was a march from Liverpool to London in protest against then rising unemployment in Britain. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, I guess. I was hoping a google search would reveal some good links that would provide more info and history on the march and its background, but to no avail. However, I did find some marvelous pictures of the march instead. Check them out here, here and here. The first link leads you to a selection of Martin Jenkinson pictures, who was the official photographer of the march. Sadly, my internet search reveals that he just passed away this past month. More info on this interesting man is provided at the following link.

The people's PR

It is a protest march 1981-style, a PR procession with the thematic logo on the green banner up front repeated on the green anoraks of the marchers behind.

We are waiting for the late-risers, still shifting their rucksacks from the gym of Salford technical college to the two trucks loading up outside. We move off towards Manchester at just gone eleven, after the march leader, who looks like a scoutmaster in his army surplus jumper, has offered up three cheers for the overnight hosts.

Four hundred symbols of the two and a half million unemployed walk out, on day five of the march, past squares of rubble and medium-rise council blocks and a building labelled Co-op Funeral Services.

"What's that?" says one of the marchers.

"Don't know. Socialist burials I suppose."

Two old women standing by a zebra crossing put down their shopping to clap the marchers, who return the compliment. A punk behind me in the march says he hopes there's a riot or something, sometime, to liven things up.

The sun is out. Paul has tied his anorak round his waist. He is 16, from Halewood, and was in town with his mother when he saw the march come through on May Day. His mother said how nice it would have been if Paul could have been on it. When he got home, he started packing. "She nearly died," Paul says. But she couldn't stop him.

He arrived without credentials, without sponsorship from a union, but somehow managed to join up - got given the papers and the T-shirt and the anorak. Paul only left school six weeks ago. "My feet are killing me. New boots. Apart from that, it's been great."

A small crowd has gathered on the edge of Salford. Showing above the well-wishers is a red banner which says that 6,553 are unemployed in the borough. More ritual chants of "Maggie, Maggie, Maggie (out, out, out)" as the march stops for a quickie speech from Stan Orme, the MP for Salford West. Paul is telling me that the marchers are given ten or 20 fags a day.

" . . . And a return to full employment. Thank you very much." Stan Orme has finished. The march crosses the border into Manchester. Phil, who finally got sponsored by NALGO, is one of the Socialist Workers' Party contingent here. He says that a short time before the march was due to start, the TUC had still had only 70 applications. And so they came to the SWP, veterans of the Right to Work marches, for help. The march has, it seems, depended on the local contacts of the SWP, the Workers' Revolutionary Party and the Labour Party Young Socialists.

Phil studied philosophy for three years at the North London poly, then dropped out before taking his finals. He thinks Nietzsche is under-rated.

Because the march is ahead of time, it stops at a T-junction, over the road from a pub called the Jollies, for 20 minutes. A couple of marchers fall asleep on the pavement. A Scouser, an electrician who works in the Barbican during the week and goes home at weekends, says his union sent him up because they thought the employed should be solid with the unemployed. He stays at the Barbican YMCA.

"You can only get digs in the Barbican YMCA if you work in the City," he says. "And you can only work in the City if you're in the upper classes. So I said I was a dentist. My mate said he was an electrician. He didn't get in."

First reception in Manchester is in a pedestrian precinct. A delegation of old age pensioners hold up a DIGNITY IN RETIREMENT banner. The marchers, as always, return the applause and recite a few more Maggie chants. Local worthies queue up to speak into a megaphone which isn't powerful enough to reach more than 50 or so marchers clustered round the front of the steps in this square, which is planted with young trees.

"Some of you may well belong to churches," begins the Bishop of Manchester, hopefully.

Walking to Manchester town hall, I talk to a young woman who also did a stint (two years) at a polytechnic before jacking it in. She thinks the stewards, many of them Communist Party members, are sexist and authoritarian. She has thrown away her green anorak in disgust. There are only 30 women officially on this march, and they aren't allowed to walk at the front. The final straw for her was this morning when she was told that she could only wear her black PVC armband, in honour of Bobby Sands, underneath her anorak.

The right to lurk

Up the street named after John Dalton, the man who defined colour blindness, past Rational House, the march shuffles up the steps of Manchester town hall.

"We're marching for the right to lurk," says a punk in dirty red jeans, dog collar round his neck. "Brilliant place to lurk," he adds, taking in his gothic surrounds: the high arches and the stained-glass windows, the tableaux celebrating famous Mancunians.

More speeches and more statistics: there is 14.5 per cent unemployment in Manchester, and 40 per cent of the workless are under 25. A rep for the Bishop (who had to go catch a train) says, to loud applause, that he was on the Jarrow march. He then spoils it a bit by saying he wasn't on it for that long, and he didn't walk that far.

I sit on a table watching the marchers eating their pork pies and baps. A man who used to work at Dunlop in Speke, before it closed down, sits down beside me. He's been on the dole two years, hasn't been able to take his wife and two children away on holiday for three years.

At 3 pm, the march moves off to the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, where everyone is being put up in the building named after Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb. I talk to a pensioner, who went to live in Llangollen after he retired. He used to be a building worker. Why did he come on the march?

"Because I recollect the thirties and those terrible things," he says.

There is a vigil for Bobby Sands in the town at 4.30, and a delegation is going down. About 30 of us troop out, checked at the revolving doors by a steward who makes sure no one is wearing their People's March anorak.

I walk down to Piccadilly Gardens with a man in a brown donkey jacket. From Liverpool, he says he's self-educated working class. "Least I was working class. Now I'm one of the outs. If you know what I mean."

Standing in the rain outside Chelsea Girl, the black PVC armband protesters chant, "Bobby Sands was murdered. Political status now,"and hand out yellow roneo'd leaflets to the people rushing for buses. Some passers-by look angry. Most just look confused. The rain gets harder and, after an hour, the protesters file back to UMIST.

Over at the New Century Hall in the CWS building, there is a People's March entertainment organised by War on Want. The Houghton Weavers do a medley of protest numbers, including We shall overcome and Blowing in the wind, followed by a song written specially for the march, entitled, We want work. Gerald Kaufman, MP for Manchester Ardwick, joins in the conga round a huge dance-floor.

"All the way from Moss Side," says the compere, with just a soupcon of racism, introducing the steel band, Tropical Heatwave. When they've finished their set the bass guitarist, Ken, walks to the back of the hall to talk to a girlfriend. She says that he wasn't up there for long.

"Yeah. Get it over nice and quick," says Ken. "Then you don't have so much work to do. Who wants work?  . . .  Well, this lot do."

Next morning at nine, some people are still fast asleep in their bags at Barnes Wallis. Plates of beans and fried-eggs lie around half-eaten.

Today is a rest day. Most are taking it easy. But the politicos are splitting up into delegations, taking their message to the factory gates. I join a group of twelve going out to an occupation at Holman Michell lead works in St Helens.

Men stand above the barbed wire they have stretched across the blue gates of Holman Michell. The marchers, all wearing their anoraks on this expedition, are let through the door and invited into the canteen for a cup of tea.

Ron Dickson, pouring out the tea, says they occupied the factory on 22 April, after management announced they were making 15 redundancies. And now all 28 of the occupation force have been sacked. Ron says they've got nothing to lose. He adds that he has had 18 weeks off sick in the last nine months because of high lead levels in his blood.

Ray Harper, a fitter, says he thinks it's good that the marchers have come along this morning. "Great. It gives you a lift. Been a fortnight now. You tend to flag a bit." The men here do 16 hours a day, on average, at the occupation. A bell rings. Ray looks at his watch. It's 11.45. "That's for dinner-time."

One of Ray's son is leaving school at Whitsun. "There's nothing for him," he says. "He's applied for at least 15 jobs that I know of. He's studying now for his exams and that. I tell him they're important. But he says to me, "What's the point, when there's nothing when I leave?'"

An unemployed boilermaker on the march, Dave Huyton, joins in our conversation. He says that the idea of the march is to stir people from their television sets. Ray says he is a Tony Benn supporter. Dave is in the middle of the usual spiel about the People's March being above politics, when we're all summoned outside for the pictures.

The four photographers want the workers and marchers lined up by the blue gates, underneath the barbed wire. "Can we get a couple of placards?" one of the photographers asks. The placards are fetched. One says: "Fighting to save jobs. Fighting to save St Helens." Another" "Enter here and walk back in time/" They get propped up. A few fists point skywards.

The pictures done, the marchers file out the gates towards their orange Transit. One more routine Maggie-out chant, and it is on to the picket line at nearby United Glass. Everyone says goodbye with clenched fists.

14 May 1981

Before the dancing by Ian Walker (New Society 4 September 1980)

An Ian Walker New Society article from 1980, which is an impressionistic account of his attendance at The Beyond The Fragments Conference in Leeds.

Sometimes I wish I had access to the full archive of the New Society magazine, because I'd be intrigued to read the letters page of the New Society in response to the piece. I'm sure it generated a heated response from readers and attendees alike because at times it does read a bit like a 1980s updating of Orwell's famous 1936 passage of "One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words "Socialism" and "Communism" draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, "Nature Cure" quack, pacifist, and feminist in England." 

I've read enough of Walker's writings to know that he wasn't just a journalist standing on the outside mocking the left. He was part of the left heart and soul . . . even if he was all too well aware of its foibles. And the foibles are all too apparent to anyone who's ever attended such a conference: it reads like every 'unity' conference I've ever attended, where you're supposed to leave your sectarianism at the door but everyone spends half the day muttering under their breath about 'that sectarian opportunistic reformist wanker over there' and the Sparts - or the ICC - don't get the conference memo and the only unity achieved is the rolling of eyes at the mock outrage and pre-prepared impromptu intervention from the cadres with the steely gazes and the humourless personas.

It (almost) makes this SPGBer seem like a fully-rounded human being. For that I salute them.

Before the dancing

Standing room only in second class on the 7.45 from Kings Cross last Saturday morning. The steward serving out coffee and sandwiches wants to know what's ging on? "Usually it's a quiet run," he says, flicking some sweat from his brow. Bad luck for him that his train, due to arrive in Leeds at 10.01, is perfectly timed for the start of a day event billed as "a non-sectarian gathering of socialists from different campaigns and organisations," and entitled Beyond the Fragments. The conference of the book after an original pamphlet by Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright.

Are the leninists willing to learn from the women's movement? Can local campaigns be drawn together? What chance of a broad-based movement supplying a new opposition to unemployment, the cuts, the cold war? These questions travel as far as Leeds on the high-speed train. A newsagent near the station wants to know if it's raining in London? Pouring. "Then there'll be no play in't Test."

Outside the refectory at Leeds University, a long queue waiting to pay the £2 registration fee, for which you get a red card and a green folder full of duplicated sheets. Read it later. After some 1,500 delegates have shuffled along the corridor into the main hall, the plenary opens with a warning that some local fascists may show up after lunch when the pubs shut. Volunteers needed for stewarding. "Don't worry. You won't be asked to give your life for the Fragments."

An organiser, Amanda Baird, names some of the feminist, eco, community and revolutionary groups involved in setting up this event. "She doesn't include the Communist Party," says a woman behind me. "Fucking shitbag. How's that for non-sectarianism?"

People look both expectant and suspicious, while Lynne Segal talks about the problems of moulding the Fragments into a movement for socialism. The problem seems even more acute while the next speaker, Mike Fleetwood of the South Wales association of tenants, is bitterly parodying leninism: "One, two, three. Stop the Jubilee, right? . . . The main point of production where the contradictions of capitalism are found in their most characteristic form, right?" The heckling gets too loud for him to continue. Fragments have sharp edges.

Now standing under the red-and-yellow NUCLEAR POWER? NO THANKS sticker is Mike Cooley from Lucas Aerospace, which has pioneered work in socially useful technology. "It's often said," he bigins, "that socialists are fuddy-duddy middle class, or nutty feminists. You can't say that about the 15,000 workers at Lucas." Sheila Rowbotham looks horrified. Hundreds groan.

The plenary over, people disperse to workshops. Like a rolling stone, by Dylan, plays over the public address system. That single entered the charts on 28 August 1965. The great majority of people here look to be between 25 and 40 and a lot of those who identified with Dylan, against their parents, must be parents themselves now. It will be a common enough observation during the day that the Fragments are white and middle class. But do they also need a transfusion of younger blood? Do slumps keep the campuses quiet at night-time?

This campus, for today, will house the spirit, as well as the personnel, of '68. Meeting before lunch are 23 different workshops, catering for most political currents and interests. I choose the one on socialism and culture. "No one sang at Grunwicks," laments the folk singer, Leon Rosselson. A more heated exchange is going on up in the balcony, at the workshop on collectives.

A bit too much to get through in one day: that's the consensus at the queue for lunch (brown rice, salad, cheese, an apple), which costs 60p. A bloke who has just arrived stands shaking the rain from his anorak. "So you missed the workshops?" someone asks him.

"Well, I've just got back from France. I couldn't possibly face sitting around in a workshop."

With the Liberation Films crew, who are making a video of today's events, I take a ride up to the over-fives creche at the Adult Education Centre. In one room, four kids are watching Enchantment, starring David Niven, on BBC2. In another, ten children stand in a circle listening to a woman holding a rubber ball. "My name's Barbara," she says. "I thought we'd just start off by playing a few games."

"Do you know how to play killer? Can we play killer?" asks a Geordie lad. Paul. "Later on, perhaps," replies Barbara, who goes round, asking everyone their name. Paul mocks the boy and girl called, respectively, Finnegan and Priscilla; then proceeds to ruin the game by hurling the ball hard round the room.

This afternoon the adults' workshops are all addressing the questions: how to help each other? what is there in common? what to do after today? In a seminar room, round the corner from the creche, eight men and eight women sit chatting. A portrait of the madonna and child hangs over a stone fireplace.

"What drives us together," tentatively begins one man, "is a sense of growing desperation about what his happening, knowing we can't afford to go on disputing things when we know the only effective resistance is by acting together. What brings us here is a shared sense of discontent and that's all. There aren't many common threads to it at all." Everyone nods.

"Let's perhaps hear something from those who haven't yet spoken." Silence. A woman says she'll only talk when the camera has gone. The crew pack up.

Back at the refectory, women in overalls are preparing the tea and biscuits to be served up at 4.30. In the bar, closed for another hour, the caretaker is carting away empty barrels of beer.

"I think it's gone very well," he says. "It's all business. The beer and orange juice in particular: we've sold pints and pints of orange juice."

Does he know what is meant by all this Beyond the Fragments? "Well," he shuffles around a bit. "I think they're more to the right than they are to the left. They're spread all over the country and they've decided to get together. I think it's a good idea, like."

One of today's themes which has brought people together, it seems, is Poland and there is an expectant hush now as Wiktor Mosczynski, in daily contact with the KOR dissidents in Warsaw, we are told, takes the microphone. "Last night, ten members of the KOR were arrested. The government is attempting to split the intellectuals and the dissidents from the working class."

A toddler is lifted high in the air by his mother, so he can see the speaker, who has the bit between his teeth, "All the different fights of the different groups in Poland. Intellectuals who can't get books published. Peasants forced to give land back to the state. Catholics who can't find work. Young married couples who will spend 15 years on the waiting list for a flat." The Fragments are to send a message of solidarity. "That text will get to the striking workers at Gdansk and to the imprisoned members of the KOR."

Events in Poland are inspirational but, in truth, international solidarity has always been more painless. An official from the Right to Work march thanks everyone for raising £35. "The one thing," he says, "that can unite us, is the Tories."

"I've sat through this movie before," says a bloke next to me. From this point on, perhaps people are tired, the Fragments seem to start falling away from each other under a crescendo of heckling and accusations. One group of women feel that this whole event was premature, and that feminists have been forced to surrender the initiative to socialists.

It takes about 15 minutes for Hilary Wainwright (whose father, the Liberal MP, is letting the Fragments camp in his garden), struggling against the noise, to propose the simple motion, that conference agrees in principle to do it again sometime.

Behind Hilary, a man in a black leather jacket clenches a fist at everyone around him. He spits on the floor in front of a man carrying a baby. A few more men in black leather sidle over to join their comrade. Hilary Wainwright finally manages to get the conference to vote on her proposal, which is overwhelmingly carried.

The plenary ends in confusion with people from the floor shouting, "Off, off, off," football crowd-style, at the leather-clad anarchist causing the disruption. He in turn screams, "The real enemy is the Communist Party, the Labour Party, the trade unions and the rest of the state. It has to be smashed." He waves a fist in the air, then pulls on black leather gloves.

Holding up copies of Spartacist Britain to the people streaming for the exits is another dogmatist with no time for the Fragments. "Just another roadblock," she says. "A lot of people turning up just to see old friends. Tired, disillusioned ex-leftists." Like all the Spartacists, she supports the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, "We hail them, the Red Army. We didn't ask them to go in. But once they arrive, yes, we hail them."

The Fragments have, for all the final chaos, been in friendly collision. It used to be fashionable on the left to look angry, hard-bitten, depressed. Now the thing is to be nice and warm, wear your personal politics on your smile. And still there's the dancing to come.

4 September 1980

Cowboys and Indians by Joseph O'Connor (Sinclair-Stevenson 1991)

Underneath him Eddie felt the churn of the sea, far below the car deck. He imagined the cast cold hulk of the mailboat ploughing through the water in the darkness, an explosion of white metal and froth. He could almost see it, rearing into the air, smashing down into the waves, hammering the water like a weapon. And for some reason that brought a hot tingle to Eddie's face.

It was a good-looking face, there was no doubt about that. Eddie's face looked like something out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, or so Jennifer had once told him, the fucking pseud. First-year History of Art in UCD and Jennifer thought she was Melvyn sodding Bragg or something. Still, no matter what she said, Eddie knew he was a looker. He said looks weren't important. He said it every morning when he preened himself in the mirror and every night too, when he brushed his gleaming teeth. He said it at every available opportunity, to anybody who'd listen. But extremely good-looking people always says that, and they usually look particularly good when they're saying it. Eddie was a head turner. He always had been, he was now, and with just a fraction of the good fortune that always goes with good looks, he reckoned he would probably would be till he dropped. And even then, like his hero Sid Vicious, Eddie'd be a good-looking corpse.

The Mind and Body Shop by Frank Parkin (Atheneum 1986)

Hedda Hagstrom picked up a soggy black banana and flung it angrily across the room. It landed with a soft smack at the feet of Herbert Spencer who picked it up, sniffed it, and tossed it back.

'The whole experiment is completely ruined,' she shouted. 'Six weeks' work and thousands of pounds down the drain.' She paced about the room like a caged animal. Darwin and Huxley cowered together in the corner as far from her wrath as possible.

'It was just to break the monotony,' Baxi said defensively. 'Everyone was fed up with playing the same old game, especially with Herbert Spencer winning all the time.'

The unblemished skin on Hedda Hagstrom's face tightened visibly over the fine bone structure beneath. 'It was not merely an innocent variation on the rules of play,' she hissed. 'It was a deliberate subversion of their basic principles.' She pointed to the video camera above the door. 'I've been studying the tapes. They show that you openly encouraged Darwin to requisition all Herbert Spencer's hotels without compensation. You also made everyone pay Capital Gains Tax whenever they passed Go. And, what's more, you taught them all to respect squatters' rights.' SDhe flung her arms in the air in a gesture of incredulity. 'On top of everything, you even connived in Huxley's attempt to escape from Gaol.'

Baxi traced a circle in the damp straw with his redundant walking stick. Bits of straw were intertwined in his shoulder-length hair, the result of darwin's effort to make him look more presentable. Darwin now shuffled across and put a comforting arm around his waist.

'Worst of all, ' continued Hedda Hagstrom shrilly, 'you let them nationalize the railways and the bank. You've totally corrupted the. They're now sharing out their bananas on an egalitarian basis. Even Herbert Spencer's doing it.' Her pale blue eyes became two metallic points. You've failed Psychology 301. I'm giving you gamma triple minus, the lowest mark you can get. That means you can't retake the course unless you agree to become a Friend of the University.'

Baxi contemplated the holes in his shoes. Friends of the University had to endow a Chair or give their organs to the Medical School whenever they were needed. e took off his waterproof apron and handed it to Huxley who liked to use it as a hammock.

'You're a disgrace to Experimental Psychology, Mr Baxi. I never want to see you in or near my lab again. Is that understood?' She snatched the Maoist paper hat off Herbert Spencer's head, screwed it in a ball, and threw it at the Monopoly board. It struck one of the coloured matchboxes which had been painted to represent council flates placed on Mayfair and Park Lane. Matchstick pickets had been placed around the Gas Company and a sign on the Community Chest indicated that it had now been converted into a hardship fund for hotel kitchen staff. Hedda Hagstrom planted her feet on either side of the board as though about to trample it. 'What am I supposed to tell the Employers' Federation? she cried out in despair. 'That they've spent a small fortune to be told that even the apes are in favour of the peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism?'

Children of the Sun by Max Schaefer (Soft Skull Press 2010)

As he put his coat on Philip said, 'You know what you've done? Speaking of history: it's exactly what you've lost sight of. Nicky wasn't an Übermensch conjured up in a black mass on some moor. Skinheads were produced by socioeconomic circumstance, like every bloody thing else. The Blitz. The redevelopment of the East End, which dismantled old social networks. Post-war immigration. Teddy boys, mods and rockers, rude boys, hippies, punks. Unemployment. The collapse of the social contract.'
'I know that. It's why I was reading about the strikes. But it's not enough. It explains why people like Nicky existed but not what it was like to be Nicky.'
'Then focus on that. Not the bloody occult. Nicky's out with his mates and they start queer-bashing. What goes through his head? He's in a club and sees a black anda white man snogging. What does he think? No, fuck "think": what does he feel? Does he feel sick, does it turn him on? Both? What's it like to be Nicky in his body - fucking and fighting? But enough with the magick, because if one thing's obvious from that programme, Nicky was a very pedestrian kind of nazi.'
'What do you mean,' I said, '"was"?'
Philip stared at me.
'The Register Office can't find his death certificate.'
'Oh for God's sake.'
'Funny, though, isn't it? Look, all I'm saying is you can't separate ideas from reality that neatly. Ideas create reality. It's all connected.'
'Everything's fucking connected. We know that by now, surely? Chaos theory: you have a wank and there's an earthquake off Sumatra. Doesn't tell us anything, apart from maybe you should wank less. I think I'm drunk. Come on, darling,' he said to Tom. 'Let's go.'

pages 175-176

'All right Tony?'
'What are you doing here?'
'Coppers can't tell the difference can they?' says Glenn. 'All just skinheads to them.' He smiles. He has somehow got right next to Tony; he speaks quietly, but does not whisper.
Tony can't hack the look in his eyes and turns away. 'Wanker.'
'There's a few of us here, not just me. Well, we're on CCTV now aren't we, don't want to do nothing heavy. But the nice officers are going to walk us all outside for your safety and that. And there's no cameras out there.'
'You're a fucking race traitor Glenn.' Tony, because he doesn't know what would happen otherwise, collaborates in the conversational hush: they could be queuing at a supermarket checkout. 'You're worse than a fucking nigger.'
'If you like. I just wanted to tell you before it kicks off. There's a truce between us as far as I'm concerned. For old time's sake. But I can't speak for the other lads, so I'd run if I was you. When you get the chance. Is this bonehead wander a friend of yours?
He kicks both ankles of the man in front, who stiffens.
'Know him Tony do you?' mutters Glenn.
'No.'
'Good, because when we get out of here he's dead. Did you hear me you daft nazi count?' Glenn kicks him again. 'When we get outside I'm going to kill you.' The man is visibly shaking.
Slowly the police begin to move the group towards the far end of the concourse. Beyond the cordon, watching reds yell taunts and insults. Some get a chant going, 'Police protect - nazi scum!,' until the objects of their criticism set dogs on them. Near the driveway for postal vans two men in donkey jackets conduct - amazingly - a paper sale. 'Buy a copy, officer?' one calls as the tense formation troops past. 'Read about how workers pay for the government failures. One pound solidarity price.' He waves it after them : Workers' Power', it says on a red background, and on black, hands off iraq!
Glenn mutters: 'How's your love life then?'
'Fuck off all right.'
'Touchy aren't you? Don't they know you're a poof these mates of yours?'
Tony says nothing. They are nearly at the closed-off bit where the new station is being built. In two minutes they will be outside.
'Bound to be some likely shags in this lot Tony. You know what these Europeans are like.'
From behind, Tony watches the face of the man Glenn has threatened to kill. He is listening; his pupil trembles against the corner of his eye.
'I can big you up if you like,' Glenn offers. 'You always were good in bed.'
The subdued shuffle of the skins' boots as they are herded sounds like rain against the roof.
'Better than Nicky if I had to be honest. To my taste anyway. Probably because in your own way you were even more fucked up. Did you see him on telly the other week? Bet that upset a few people.

pages 333-335

True Believers by Joseph O'Connor (Sinclair Stevenson 1991)

I did meet one of his friends later on in the night. He saw her standing across the dance floor and beckoned her over. She mustn't have seen him. So he said he'd be back in a second and weaved through the gyrating bodies to where she was. They chatted for a few minutes, and then she came over and sat down. Shirley was a model. From Dublin too. Well, trying to make it as a model. She knew Bono really well. He was a great bloke, she said, really dead on. She'd known him and Ali for absolute yonks, and success hadn't changed them at all. 'Course, she hadn't seen them since Wembley last year. Backstage. They were working on the new album apparently. She'd heard the rough mixes and it was a total scorcher. This friend of hers played them to her. A really good friend of hers, actually, who went out with your man from The Hot House Flowers. The one with the hair. She kept forgetting his name. She said she was no good at all for Irish names. She really regretted it, actually, specially since she moved over here, but she couldn't speak a word of Irish. She let us buy her a drink each. I paid for Eddie's. Then she had to run. Early start tomorrow, had to be in the studio by eight-thirty.

'Ciao,' she said, when she went. 'Ciao, Eddie.'

from 'Last of the Mohicans'

Death By Analysis by Gillian Slovo (The Women's Press Crime 1986)

Sam gave a long sigh. He put his face in his hands and groaned.

'Nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. Unless you count the fact that one of my students asked me a penetrating question about the foliation of space which took me all of thirteen minutes to answer. I got five circulars, two of them identical and I had an argument in the canteen with a Spartacist while eating a soya-bean casserole.'

'You're in a bad way,' I said. 'Arguing with a Spart.'

'Yeah, well he tried to tell me that soya was a sop thrown at the working class to divert it from the struggle.'

'So how was it?'

The soya? Terrible. If that's a sop, then I think we're saved. Anyway, what time are we leaving?'

Don't Leave Me This Way Rain or Shine Thorn In My Side

Is it really 25 years to the month that the following two copies of the Socialist Standard - with a copy of the SPGB's 1978 pamphlet, Questions of the Day, thrown in for good measure - landed on the doormat?

What was I thinking buying that particular issue of the NME?