sufi

lala
No, nearest I've been is big demos or Reclaim the Streets. Demos are life affirming though, that huge gathering of people of like minds, You're not alone all of a sudden. My main memory of Reclaim the Streets was seeing an Italian squat punk bird OD on something and be carried off to an ambulance - sometimes you do need the state.

Actually I remember how quickly it came together now I'm writing. Some bloke led a lot of us into Kings X (I think) and we jumped on a train to Tottenham and it all came together in like 20m - barricades and sound systems. Very impressive.

Big illegal warehouses had that vibe as well I guess, though i was normally too spannered to make much sense of that.
RTS Brixton High St watching a hooded prankster scale a cctv pole in the centre of a jubilant crowd and put a bag over the cameras to tumultous applause then descend rapidly and melt into the protest before the cops could close in
brixton-reclaim-the-streets-1998-5.jpg
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
I've never been in a political riot, but I was in something close to a riot at a music festival where everything got set on fire and people went completely feral, leaping over bonfires, wandering around naked, ripping down a big flagpole, blowing up aerosol cans. I thought it was great at the time, but I'm sure it wasn't for a lot of people, the stewards in particular.
was that Reading? in 2004 or thereabouts there was a level of anarchy that I haven't seen anywhere else. all of the things that you describe were a regular night in the campsite.
 

version

Well-known member
here is Sinclair's review of the class war book

He's a bit much, but some good lines.

"Or should the exhausted city, as depicted on the wrapper of this book, be razed to the ground behind the heroic salute of the last bare-chested poll tax samurai?"
 

version

Well-known member
was that Reading? in 2004 or thereabouts there was a level of anarchy that I haven't seen anywhere else. all of the things that you describe were a regular night in the campsite.

Leeds, a few years later. And yeah, it was in the camp sites. It just ratcheted up and up each night until total chaos on the last one.
 

version

Well-known member
here is Sinclair's review of the class war book

Verso have performed a dubious service by packaging these petulant yelps like the latest punk revival pressing. They have granted an unrequired status to texts whose only virtue lies in an ephemeral throwaway vitality.

[...]

Verso’s gathering will provide a useful sourcebook for bibliographers and nervous collectors. Bounty-hunting runners are combing the jumbles for copies of Sniffin Glue, and it will not be long before Class War becomes the thing that it most despises – a middle-class item of exchange, a document framed for display alongside concrete poems and Debord pamphlets.


🔥
 

sufi

lala
Leeds, a few years later. And yeah, it was in the camp sites. It just ratcheted up and up each night until total chaos on the last one.
Glastonbury in maybe 1990 was like that iirc mad max crusty rioting, the cops under siege at worthy farm, the last year of the open travellers field
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
was that Reading? in 2004 or thereabouts there was a level of anarchy that I haven't seen anywhere else. all of the things that you describe were a regular night in the campsite.
I've just come back from a tiny and very family-oriented festival on a farm in the West Country, where the punters were exclusively parents with kids up to about 12 at the most, most probably between toddlerhood and about seven or eight.

While witnessing my son being one of six kids riotously playing inside the cabin of a parked tractor, with as many again playing on top of it, I said to my wife "If all the grownups here vanished, how long do you think it would take before it turned into Lord of the Flies in here?", and she said "About five minutes."
 
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