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Oct 7, 2008 
One way in which this age of Google and Wikipedia is different from that of decades past is that even the most obscure names live on forever, remaining forever a mouseclick away. How many times haven’t you thought, “hey, I wonder whatever happened to..”: fill in the name of an old acquaintance, a long-forgotten band, a football star of yore? In previous eras, you’d spend that wistful thought on it, and then by necessity shrug it off. Who knows?
Well, now you too can know. That obscure new wave band? The singer writes songs for TV shows now; the bassist works as a market salesman. That ridiculous Eurovision Songfestival contestant? He’s online now, editing his own Wikipedia entry and touting the brilliancy of his performance on specialist web forums. And a surprising number of tragic endings… one moment you’re listening to a song by The Sound that happened to pass by on last.fm, the next you’re looking up their bio and find out that the singer committed suicide, and his band mate died of AIDS.
So who remembers the Redskins? They were a punk band in the early eighties, and they were as political as could be. Committed to the revolution, they played every benefit gig, in support of the miners’ strike, against racism, against apartheid, you name it. They were Billy Bragg’s little skinhead brothers. They threw in pop and soul too if that enabled them to reach a wider audience with their message: “think the Jam, the Clash, the Specials, Dexy’s, the Fall and the Supremes all rolled into one,” as a retrospective review put it.
Edit: there was a video here, but it’s no longer available :-(
Their second single, Lean On Me, was dubbed “a love song to workers solidarity” and “a modern soul classic” by the NME. They even had some minor top 50 hits. Keep On Keepin’ On! reached #43 in the UK charts in 1984; Bring It Down (This Insane Thing) reached #33 the year after. The Redskins, concludes fan Dave T. on the unofficial band website redskins.co.uk, “were the first band to bring revolutionary socialism to the dancefloor.”
But when you wonder whatever happened with them, the story you find is rather tragic, and something of an allegory for an entire political culture which they, in their way, represented.
Their songs sure were rousing. I taped an album of theirs when I was in high school – the only album they ever released, I learned just now thanks to Wikipedia. It had Unionise (“Stop! Strike! Unionise!”). It had Red Strikes the Blues. And the message was simple:
Well all this talk of fighting back
Is talk to be ignored
If we don’t know where our power lies
And utilize the tools we’ve got
The bosses have the money
And the workers have no rights
But our muscle is our labour
“Our muscle is our labour”? Yes, really. In their defense, it sounds better when sung.
Were they taken seriously? Well, as much as Billy was, I suppose, if less well known. They were instrumental in inspiring the red-skin movement – left-wing skinheads. No arty-farty intellectualism for them: workerism was the word, and singer Chris Dean “recognised [skinheads] as a genuinely proletarian youth cult”. Tracing the skinhead look back to the unemployed youth of the turn of the century, Drummer Paul Hookham identified it as “a symbol of frustrated, angry, disenfranchised youth,” which has “never … been solely a uniform of the right wing youth”.
Their short spell of cult fame coincided with the massive and traumatic miners’ strike of 1984-85 (see also these still fearsomely polarised personal recollections), for which it provided a soundtrack of sorts. The redskins.co.uk site, set up by fan “Bazza”, recounts how the band appeared on The Tube, only to stop playing their songs midway and instead hand the microphone to a striking miner to give a speech.
They were practical about it and organisationally involved: singer Chris Dean, Dave adds, “was instrumental in helping with the Wake Up miners benefit EP (offering, without the knowledge or consent of their record company, what was to be their last single [..]) and he helped set up contacts to make sure the money raised from the project was put to the best practical use.”
Their politics were radical. Bassist Martin Hewes also went under the names Martin Militant and Martin Leon. Dean and Hewes were members of the notorious Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the most powerful splinter force within far-left British politics.
Trots, then. Committed Trots, too. Their first single was called Lev Bronstein, no less – that’s Trotsky’s real name. The lyrics?
Russia is a man who turned into stone his is a sad history
There was another man who fought along and left a legacy
The lesson never learned the passion killed by state bureaucracy
The other man killed too & so fulfilled his tragic prophesy
No “I love you, yeah yeah yeahs” here, obviously: these were guys steeped in doctrinary ideology. They lambasted Neil Kinnock for gradually steering the British Labour Party to a more moderate course after the far-left 1983 election platform (“the longest suicide note in history”, as Gerald Kaufman famously dubbed it) resulted in electoral disaster. They ruffled feathers, notes the fansite:
Few bands have suffered so much critical flak and .. abuse as the Redskins. Their opponents came not just from the right but from the left too. The Redskins’ politics were not some rock ‘n’ roll pose; they Really Meant It Man, and many people from all political backgrounds found that unpalatable.
To their credit, they stood tall for their ideals. They were attacked by white power skinheads, Wikipedia notes (wielding bike chains, Bazza adds), when they performed at the free Greater London Council-sponsored Jobs for a Change festival.
Now there’s a sentence that just radiates retro. Skinheads. The GLC, then locked in a battle with Thatcher, under the leadership of “Red Ken” Livingstone. (When London finally got a unitary administration again a decade and a half later and Ken was promptly elected mayor, his opening words on election night were, “As I was saying, before I was so rudely interrupted fourteen years ago..”). A local authority that would organise free festivals under a banner like “Jobs for a Change”. The unemployment of those days. The lengthening dole lines, Thatcher’s first years. Alexei Sayle’s bitter humor about it on the telly. As an old punk on able2know.com reminisced about the olden days in Manchester, “back then the city seemed to match the punk scene (grey, gritty and urban)”.
It was a different time. A time in which releasing an album called “Neither Washington Nor Moscow” did not seem weird. A time of a vibrant counterculture spanning, if never quite uniting, punks and squatters, aging intellectuals and the last, shrinking generation of militant dock and steel workers and miners. Where a hundred splintering sectarian groups of socialists, communists and anarchists each hawked their own stenciled newspapers.
Were they misled, misguided? Maybe. Did they do harm? Not much, being firmly entrenched into marginal opposition. But what they did bring was a thoroughly ideological analysis of what was wrong with the world and what should be done about it. Debates raged about variations of ideology, and dogmatism made many meetings hell, and stifled much activist creativity. The smoke-filled halls were hotbeds of contention and machine politics; in equally smoky evening meetings, party members trumped each other on points of ideological doctrine. And yet it’s easy to feel nostalgic for the width and depth of leftist politics that existed then, and the way leftists were still able to frame their criticism of rightwing politics as part of a comprehensive alternative ideology.
In comparison, today’s leftwingers seem innovative and creative on the one hand, but on the other also shallow and a little hapless. They know what they’re against, and they have a hundred individual little ideas for a policy here, a new project there. But they no longer have a structured, cohesive alternative to present against the dominant market ideology, and they are thus forever just tinkering with the status quo. There doesn’t seem to hardly be any belief anymore that things can be fundamentally different from how they are now. The economic principles of neoliberalism have become “laws of economics”, givens, which at best you can manoeuvre around and correct.
Twentieth century socialism lacks answers to many of the economic features of today’s globalised world. Not to even talk about the horrific consequences of the communist delusion, the greatest or second greatest of all twentieth century miscreations. (The burden of which Trots like the Redskins slipped out from purely thanks to Trotsky’s early death: there’s good reason to assume that a Soviet Union led by Trotsky rather than Stalin would have resulted in mass murder all the same.)
But conversely, it’s easy to feel a stifling hopelessness today, when the flaws of the free market ideology are as clear as they’ve ever been the last fifty years, with escalating inequality and dismantled safety nets, and yet there is no fundamental, comprehensive alternative anymore to build your hopes or dreams around. Social-democrats have long embraced Blairite neoliberal recipes. Greens are middle class interest groups that care more about bicycle paths than cheap housing. Smaller socialist parties like the German Linke, the Dutch Socialist Party or the British Respect engage in hybrid populisms, ad hoc responses on a purely national basis. Lacking an overarching ideological world view, there’s forever a drift, which frees the left from stifling dogma but reduces it to a purely reactive force, a collection of one-issue causes.
Which invokes the question, whatever happened to the Redskins, since those days of rock-ribbed socialist conviction? How did they fare, as times changed?
Well, things did not go well. Their story almost reads like a allegory of sorts. After Bring It Down’s Top 40 score, their single The Power Is Yours (“a despondent but undefeated look back in anger at the miners strike,” Bazza calls it) reached #59. Then, It Can Be Done stalled at #76. In a 1986 interview, Dean at times sounded demoralized:
We’ve had a bit of a crisis after the Miners’ Strike as we saw audiences dropping. Thousands during the strike and now 500-600. There were some rock’n’ roll problems with the label and promotion and so on. But a large part of it was the end of the strike. During the strike for a year I never thought, ‘what are we doing’. It was obvious, now that is different. [..]
We are now a pop band and it has limitations [..]. [Something] we’ve talked about with Socialist Worker [..] is that the contradictions are becoming more and more acute. It may well come to a point where we have to give it up. [..]
A lot of people have had grand ideas of Punk. People had a romantic idea that music could change the world and all sorts of farcical and ridiculous ideas, like music on its own is so powerful, but it is not. It is incredibly bloody weak. It is only when it is linked to political struggle like during the Miners’ Strike that it really starts to mean anything. [..]
[A]t our gigs [..] during the Miners’ Strike [you’d] have stalls by the Miner support groups, Women Against Pit closures would have a stall, Labour had stalls, the SWP had a stall, there were Socialist Worker sellers outside. The whole atmosphere was right and it worked, it was not an odd thing to do. You could do it now and it would seem like overkill. If we had people trying to recruit people for the SWP it’d be terrible, people would be turned away. [..]
At the moment, because working class people aren’t really fighting, the Redskins is very much abstract propaganda. It’s like firing shots in the dark.
The band split up the same year. It could not be done, Dean concluded: “It became harder and harder to be a member of the Socialist Workers Party and the Redskins. The group was out of time, out of date and out of step with the political reality of Britain in 1986”. The band did a last tour of Europe, playing a festival in Belgium, a concert in Munich and five gigs in Italy, two of which at festivals organised by the communist newspaper L’Unita. Then they split up, leaving behind, Bazza writes, “a debt of £136,000 and their unfulfilled fantasy of revolution intact.”
Hewes became a motorcycle courier, and later a music teacher. Dean “appeared in a student version of Trevor Griffiths’ play Oi! For England at London’s Central School of Speech & Drama”, Wikipedia notes — and then disappeared, “taking up a reclusive life in Paris starting in 1988”. Bazza again:
After the Redskins split Chris Dean put together a new band under the name of P-Mod. Not much is known about P-Mod but they did record some studio demos. After P-Mod Chris disappeared to France. Martin Hewes [..] played in the band Raj & The Magitones who released 1 track called “It’s A Funny Old World” [..]. Paul Hookham joined the electric folk group Barely Works. [..] As for Chris Dean there has been very few sightings of him since the late 80’s.
A tribute album was released in 2005 on the obscure Red Star Recordings label, with seventeen covers by bands significantly more obscure still than the Redskins ever were. A 2006 fanzine review pleaded for Dean to resurface:
After they disbanded rumour had it that they had recorded a follow-up [..] but whether this is true remains a mystery to this day. It was whispered that Dean had become a journalist in Paris and since then little has been seen or heard. If anyone who knows where he is happens to be reading this- tell Mr.Dean that his efforts were not in vain.
But the last punk poet Attila The Stockbroker heard, Dean’s now “back in York, living as a recluse with his mum”. Bazza’s Redskins website hasnt been updated since 2006 – the only thing that’s still added is the occasional comradely comment from around the world on the guestbook. The site’s tagline is “Memories of years gone by, dashed hopes and a dream that died.”
Earlier this year, Guardian journalist John Harris interviewed Tory MP Ed Vaizey. Vaizey was a self-described “ardent Thatcherite” in the eighties, who had initially “assumed that everyone in Britain admired Mrs Thatcher in much the same awestruck terms as he did”. That didnt stop him from getting into all the lefty protest bands:
Vaizey reels off an impressive list of his 80s leftwing favourites. As well as Bragg and his fellow Red Wedgers Madness, he recalls seeing the Redskins (“a fantastic band”), and the words “Fuck Geoffrey Howe” being bellowed from the stage; he still treasures a vinyl copy of their sole album Neither Washington Nor Moscow – strap-lined, in keeping with a Socialist Workers party slogan, “but international socialism”.
“I had to lead this double life,” he says. “[..] I thought Thatcher was fantastic, and I was listening to a lot of bands saying she was destroying the country. I suppose I like passion, in politics and music, and these were the passionate bands who were around.”
“Trying to get to the heart of all these contradictions,” Harris suggested that Vaizey “could blithely ignore their messages because his side of politics had the upper hand. Answered Vaizey:
“I think that’s a very good way of looking at it,” he says. “People could do all this ranting from the stage, but you knew it wasn’t going to change the tide of history.”
In Unionise, Dean sang:
We can talk of riots and petrol bombs
And revolutions all day long
But if we fail to organise
We’ll waste our lives on protest songs
Today it seems he was as prophetic as he feared.
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