Balls!

[quote["'Balls' is just that: Bollocks and balls. This has been put in this compilation as a warning, as an example of conscious self-recuperation by two King Mob participants to raise money for future revolutionary publications through conning some trendy periodical of the day to pay top dollar for complete bullshit. The money was then diverted for publishing a further King Mob edition."

"We never let the magazine editors know we'd named the script 'Balls' and this was the weakness of such a gesture so the question still remains was this a sound idea or not? And the answer must be, probably NO, simply because left in the dark it merely adds to the reigning confusion especially when dealing with a revolutionary analysis watered down into radical sociology. OK we had a good laugh at the time but it's not an avenue to be recommended. Of course, elegantly conning these set-ups as a means of exposing their vacuity is more urgent than ever (the annual Turner Prize especially comes to mind) but it's only of value if the scam is clearly exposed on the night with revolutionary clarity."

- from the introduction to 'Lost Ones Around King Mob' by David Wise[/quote]

The following notes are the result of nearly six months study of the build-up of tension in one particular area of London - Notting Hill - and suggests that this build-up could well result in a ghetto explosion unprecedented in England, but which could well be compared to recent outbreaks of mass violence throughout Western Europe and America - Berlin, Paris, Washington, etc.

The material on which this study is based could only have been obtained by people in the privileged position we found ourselves in: a small group of ex-university sociologist who, because we happened to live in the area, sharing the everyday life of the people there, because partly involved in the following events - events we can understand from the inside.

This allows us a unique balance between direct, eyewitness reporting and in-depth ana1ysis. Our source material has never been available to investigators from the mass-media. Beyond eyewitness reports, interviews and conversations, in taped or note form, we have: a collection of articles from the local press; colour and black-and-white photos; 16mm footage of near-riot situations; ephemeral magazines; a collection of posters, leaflets, street-comics and other literature which has never been reproduced anywhere, and is probably unique.

We have tried to be as direct and objective as possible. We have tried to avoid any judgements of our own, though we must admit that we cannot escape from a certain mixture of sympathy, understanding and fear at the whirlwind we have seen sown over the last six months.

NOTTING HILL: ENGLAND'S FIRST GHETTO ERUPTION?

1. The general context of recent unrest in the United States and Western Europe -more especially the youth and student revolt from the early Amsterdam Provo days to the wide-scale flare-ups in Berlin, Paris, Turin, Barcelona, Washington and Columbia over the last few months.

France has just been on the verge of complete anarchy. Why? Is it possible that the relaxed, 'liberal' tradition of English politics has been undermined by equally explosive forces?

There are two very prominent features of all recent revolt:

a) The initial spark was struck by disaffected youth.

b) Their basic tactic was the takeover of a small, relatively autonomous unit (university, Latin Quarter, ghetto).

It is our thesis that Notting Hill Gate has come to unite these conditions.

2. The twentieth century background to Notting Hill and the sudden growth of tension which has become apparent in the area over, roughly, the past six months. The atmosphere there cannot be reduced to any previous set of social problems. The influx of both Blacks and Hippies has produced a. essentially new phenomenon. English society: Notting Hill is no longer a slum, it is a ghetto.

Concrete examples of this process of ghettoisation: the Hippies and the drug scene - the Blacks and the Black Power scene - the children and their street gangs. The refusa1 to conform, the refusal to work, rising crime rate. The inabi1ity to adjust: rising rate of suicide. Interviews, descriptions, case-histories

3. The emergence of new forces can perhaps best be seen in one particular event: the recent 'seizure' of a. unused, over-grown, fenced-off garden in the middle of Powis Square, which, misrepresented, even broke through into the national headlines. On Saturday, June I5th, out of the blue, a 100-odd strong commando of 'Hippies', far left militants and street kids (mostly under ten) stormed the stout wire fence round the garden trampled it down, tore it to pieces, then broke, with their bare hands, the reinforced concrete posts that had supported it and, roaring with laughter, poured, jubilantly into the garden. A large number of police stood there not knowing what to do.The crowd, which rapidly swelled to several hundred, held, despite the intermittent appearance and disappearance of green riot buses, a spontaneous party which lasted until dark. The garden remains open.

The 'demonstrations' outside Powis Square, sparked-off a few weeks previously by a splinter group from a number of normal left-wing organisations, were from the very first characterised by a certain crackpot merriment and poetry. At the first one a gorilla suddenly burst out of the gent's lavatory at Henekey's pub on the Portobello, and stumbled, snarling and growling, through the bar to lead an impromptu march and assault on the Square. An hour later, 11 people, including the gorilla and a pantomime horse, were in the local jail. There was a spate of night-time clipping of holes in the fences. Finally the police had to have men posted on the square twenty-four hours a day. The next demonstration saw Negro seven-year-olds wielding placards with quotes from Jacob Boehme, the Marquis de Sade and the Surrealiets. The point of the these, or so it was rumoured, was both to protest against the idea that 'play-space', was a need felt only by children, and to demand that the garden be turned into a 24-hour rendezvous, 'happening' and forum for discussion of local direct action - for 'The Devil's Party' - as one placard put it.

4. This sort of thing just doesn't fit into any particular political bag. Who were the people responsible? A sort of loose-knit coalition of forces - a melting-pot - a conviction shared by a number of people that no legitimate activity in contemporary society offered them any real sense of self-expression gaiety and communication.

This whole Notting Hill 'scene' has been fed by a number of sources. Little remains or the much celebrated Flower Power movement of only a year ago. It has been discredited by its own commercialisation. The movement's main organ - International Times - is, in the words of one erstwhile Flower Child, 'read just for the laughs. The Bhagavad Gita and the What's On of the faithful, rolled into one'. But pot evangelicism has only run to seed at the expense of a truly mass consumption of drugs. Interview with Release: the proportions of drug-taking in the district. 'Hash is the opium of the people' deadpans a twenty-foot vermillion graffiti, one of the first, so far as we know, to appear in the area.

Who, or what, is slowly and painfully dragging itself out of the psychedelic debris remains to be seen.

At one end of the spectrum are the Diggers: a freewheeling federation of several hundred individuals living in the Gate, loosely-knit round a common rejection of the city, the family and private property in general. A sort of spontaneous, fumbling primitive Christianity. Some of their theory - their free duplicated magazine Hapt - is exceptionally articulate, but their actual attempts to set up 'tribes' living in 'communes' in the country have not been conspicuously successful. One wing of the movement is tending to turn into what has been described as 'a sort of hip Salvation Army' while its other wing, practically its lunatic fringe, is a group of individuals completely denying 'the primacy of reason in Western Man' and playing round with a theory of life-style they call that of 'The Holy Madman' This later group comes close to:

The Brickers: the devil may-care-aristocracy of the 'speed' (methedrine) scene. Living solely for the surge of energy and direct physical pleasure - orgasm all over the body - as one addict described it -produced by the drug, the Brickers are devoted to the audacious and imaginative acte gratuit: baroque crime. They dismantle and filch electrical installations, church fittings and un-patrolled rose-gardens with the same deadpan Keaton-esque aplomb. (This frequently isn't even motivated by a desire for money: many of the Brickers are reputed to be wealthy drop-outs). Speed really does kill, but better, at least according to the Brickers, a short life and a merry one. Interviews and expand actual material on the effects of the drug.

The other main (semi-organised) group in the area can only be covered by the blanket term ' New Left ' Many of them university drop-outs, they see themselves as being, or as soon going to be, sort of anarchistically orientated commando groups. The break-up of their own post-Committee of 100 pacificism has been intimately associated with the collapse of Flower Power: lnternational Times was never too much more than a psychedelic Peace News. March the I7th swept aside their remaining inhibitions: the 'sub-violence' and, even more, the fundamentally festive atmosphere of their half-riot forced their shifting Third Worldism to click sharply into a Western focus: A theory of 'urban guerrilla' and a sense of humour breaking the barriers of traditional politics. (The original gorilla at Powis Square was clearly a pun). Recent street meetings in Talbot Road with loudhailers, literature, etc. Yet, for all their audacity in public, these groups remain completely disorganised and disoriented: New Left meetings are generally pure bedlam.

5. These groups are merely the most prominent features of a whole mass which is beginning to appear. Behind them stretches a hinterland of drop-out, National Assistance supported, petty criminal 'rebels still without a cause' . The truth of their society seems - fundamentally - to be that of a crowd as lonely as any to be found in Piccadilly or Leicester Square: disaffiliates kicking their heels in a jerky, speeded-up Bob Dylan landscape. A. lot of them really are going through Hell. At the same their aversion for society, for the whole of society, for everything it demands and for everything it offers in return, is steadily becoming more pointed and more articulate. And, more ominously, as their ranks swell, more violent and more destructive.

The final values on which these 'post-Hippies' have turned - as, presumably, something whose destruction still means something to them - are those of culture, of art and philosophy. In 'happenings', galleries, poetry readings and concerts have been systematically heckled and broken up. An Arrabal play staged a few weeks ago at the famous Mercury Theatre was disrupted by a group of youths chanting 'Art is Dead' and 'Riot' in unison: they swung on scenery ropes in an arc shaving the heads of the audience, shouted obscenities about 'passive spectators' and could only be removed from the theatre at the expense of a punch-up in the gutters outside. Duplicated pink and blue leaflets were handed out by another group of a dozen wearing black hoods: they praised the attempt to murder Andy Warhol, the most celebrated New York Pop artist, as an eminently artistic act. One street-poster - presented in the form of a comic-strip - incited young people to shoplift, dismiss culture and make love indiscriminately. Another - apparently a product of the recent street-fighting in Paris - showed a maniacal, glaring C.R.S. trooper, truncheon raised, S.S. emblazoned on his chest...

All in all, the most succinct credo of the whole of this milieu would seem to be expressed by the now almost legendary Notting Hill spray-can graffiti. Their mingling of Romantic poetry, public lavatory wall gags and incitations to arson and looting doesn't seem to us particularly characteristic of the Black Power groups, to whom they have been generally ascribed. Black Power promoting Dada? A heady mixture..

6. All this is brewing up in a slum whose atmosphere was already pretty highly charged. All the traditional social problems of N. Hill - unemployment, overcrowding, apathy, crime, friction between ethnic groups and violence - have been fed with a new highly inflammable material: their combustion could be purely nihilistic.

Appraisal of the traditional, essentially liberal people's bodies set up by local people as an attempt to combat the traditional problems of Notting Hill, and appraisal of their failure to deal with these new forces. The repeated disruption of the People's Association by young 'militants'.

Appraisal of the attitude taken by the police in this situation. To what do they owe their growing unpopularity (results of the questionnaire about police violence recently circulated in the area by the B.B.C.) Are the police being, as the Sunday Times has already suggested, somewhat violent and hasty? Or, on the contrary, are a number of young people just being deliberately provocative?

7. To date the whole of the milieu we have been describing has been weakened by its complete separation from what are perhaps the two most aggressively militant groups in the area:

a) Black Power. A Movement already snowballing long before Enoch Powell's rhetoric gave it added impetus. The present mutual mistrust between black and white could well be stampeded into a really pathological political conflict. Rundown on Black Power in the U.S.A. and effects of its importation here:

Difference between the American Negro and the West Indian immigrants here.

Role of Michael X. Local, largely black, paper here, The Hustler and the possibilities it raises of black and white really coalescing.

b) The street-gangs formed by the children of every street and square in the heart of the ghetto - formed almost as a necessary condition of survival. The fact that delinquency and drug-taking are being produced by younger and younger children. The violence of their street games. The recent outbreaks of violence at the Isaac Newton school in Lancaster Road: and real violence - knives, bicycle chains and meta1 bars, used by young children - cases of assault and attempted rape of the staff. Their future? The role they played, for example, in the taking of Powis Square.

8. Unless we are to remain, like ostriches, with our heads stuck in the sand -, 'it couldn't happen here' - then such developments can only he discussed in terms of the unrest sweeping all the highly industrialised countries. Thus in Notting Hill - always an area or social breakdown - the nervous system has shown its pulse perhaps before the rest of England. If ever the various minorities we have discussed should become 'politicised', become fused in street action (a possibility that cannot now just be ruled out) then the ensuing conflagration would almost certainly make the Notting Hill riots of 1958 look like a. vicar's tea party in comparison.

One cannot predict the future but certain parallels suggest themselves. Notting Hill is a ghetto and it finds its closest counterpart in the ghettoes of the United States. Not in the ghettoes of Los Angeles and Detroit but in the sub-ghettoes of San Francisco (Haight-Ashbury) and of New York (the Lower East Side). Recent developments there are far from reassuring. Hippies have attacked art galleries, briefly taken over Grand Central station and rioted (Flower Children !!!) in their own areas. Isolated elements - Puerto Ricans, Hippies and Blacks - have joined each other on the streets. During the riots following the assassination of Luther King, Hippies and poor whites felt the same emotiona1 fury as the Blacks and joined them in wrecking and looting Times Square. Characteristically, there is interplay between Notting Hill and the American ghettoes. Friends from S.N.C.C. come and go. Leaflets and posters handed out in the Lower East Side appear a week later in the basement crash-pads and streets of Notting Hill.

Is Notting Hill beginning to show the symptoms of the same disease already far advanced in America? What happens there may well determine what is going to happen here. While the specific characteristics that shaped a Washington or a Watts or even a Quartier Latin may be discounted, an explanation of some sort cannot. Alternatively are these events in Notting Hill restricted to an absolute minority: no more than just another fashion, a self-indulgent game for dead-end kids, a last flicker of life from those who are about to surrender unconditionally to apathy and despair.