Tag: London

The underground history of UK dance music

I’ve watching another history of dance music in the UK and the same frustrations are rising up. Every single one tells the same story – interesting stuff was happening in the US – in particular DJ Frankie Knuckles in the Warehouse Club in Chicago in 1979 where House Music was born, and then it appeared in the UK – nearly a decade later.

In 1987, four DJs (Paul Oakenfold, Danny Rampling, Johnny Walker and Nicky Holloway) went to Ibiza and brought their holiday home – in particular with Rampling’s legendary Shoom club.

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Blame the anarchists – this time the Olympics

I wrote this last week and sent it to the Independent as a right to reply piece. I got no answer. Of course, since I wrote it, the Project Griffin “report anarchists to the police” stuff has come out – more on that later.

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And so the fight-back starts…

Demonstrators on the roof above Tory HQ
Student atop Millbank ©Donnacha DeLong

The fight-back against the Tory* government finally started in London yesterday. A large group of people finally recognised that walking down the road and listening to some speeches is no longer enough.

Condemnation has predictably started to flow, not just from the right-wing press, but hand-wringing liberals and many parts of the “leadership” of the student movement. That’s “leadership” in the sense of “people who want to go into politics when they finish” and is about as connected to their membership as the Labour Party was to theirs before they lost most of them.

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Meeting: Bringing syndicalism back into the mainstream

Public meeting on syndicalism - 20 May, 2010Last year at the Anarchist Conference, there was general consensus that a proposal to do something big to mark 2012 was a good idea. No, not because of the Olympics, but because it’s the centenary of the Jewish tailor’s strike in London’s East End that was the high point of anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker’s influence in the UK.

As I thought about it, I looked into the period between 1910 and 1914, known as the Great Unrest, when syndicalism was a major force for change in the UK. I realised how ignored this part of the history of these islands (Ireland, at the time, still being part of the UK) has become.

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