Q&A-005: "'WE'LL FIGURE IT OUT' IS A RELIGION" - an interview with Bryony Beynon (THE SPIRAL TIMES, GOOD THROB, BB & THE BLIPS)
+++ an interview with Bryony Beynon, writer/broadcaster at 'The Spiral Times', guitar in GOOD THROB, vocals in BB & THE BLIPS and YFORY, and much, much more___
I first heard about Bryony Beynon when I returned to Sydney in 2017 after an ill-fated attempt to move permanently to Montreal. She too had just moved to Sydney (from London), and it was Nic at Repressed who mentioned I should talk to her due to our mutual interests in music, our related approaches to DIY, and the fact that both our brains were poisoned enough to have written about it for many years. She also played in GOOD THROB, who are one of my all-time faves of the 2010s, so I was very excited to hang and chat when we met at some shows that winter. We started the band BB & THE BLIPS with some friends soon after. Bryony’s impact on the Sydney DIY scene in 2017-2019 cannot be understated, and her arrival was the spark of several new bands as well as community efforts like Sydney’s own FIRST TIMERS event (a workshop series and gig dedicated to new bands that formed to include people new to music making). Bryony returned to London (and later moved to Berlin) before the pandemic hit, and in the time since then, the DIY international has changed and evolved (I think) as dramatically as at any point in history. As Bryony mentions below, this interview was initially slated for 2023, but many more important discussions were to be had in those intervening years. To bring in 2025, we’ve reworked this interview to discuss topics including punk and DIY, activism, autonomy, satire and her efforts working in solidarity with Palestine in the police state of Berlin. Bryony is in touch with several families in Palestine; please consider donating to these families seeking refuge: Ahmed, Ola, the Hamdounas, or to the Blips PayPal for redistribution at bbandtheblips@gmail.com. (A note that this interview is a nice, long read that will get clipped if reading in your email client: click through for the full interview, the back end of which is truly essential reading for the punk internationale.)
I’m trying to think of the last time we were in the same room together, possibly early 2019 in the week we recorded the BB & THE BLIPS Sickness Tapes that had you forecast a global pandemic. One thing (of many) that I think unites us as pseudo-siblings is our capacity for rumination and needless overthinking, so we will likely return to the pre-2018 years we spend as bandmates, collaborators, friends later in the interview - but can you fill us in on the FIVE YEARS since our last meeting?
So for the full meta insight here we might perhaps let our readers in on my secret shame of having taken a cool eighteen months to reply to you, which speaks to my both chronically disorderly conduct and your tenacity, but also something too about the world that has unfolded since. I’ll do my best to bring us up to speed via this horrible trick question… I left Sydney at the end of my visa, moved back to London with my then-partner, and we both tried in vain to reinsert ourselves into a music scene and social world that we’d been so deeply ‘in,’ which was two years older and had in many ways moved on. Punk, eh? So.. strange. Relationship soon got ye olde Do Not Resuscitate notice which is how I found myself packing my shit into a car the night before the national lockdown was declared. A plotline on the nose enough to be cut in the first edit! Crazy, scary yet ultimately transformative. I panicked and made the illegal drive down to Wales to surf the crest of a breakdown in my sisters’ attic, during which I became briefly convinced I’d somehow personally precipitated the Pandemic. That June was a hot one, you’ll recall. I went back to London, jumped headfirst into arrestee support, got largely out of my funk by remembering what the point of me is, oh and took acid for the first time. Crazy, scary yet &c. In September the British Government briefly reopened the restaurants to defibrillate the economy, under the slogan ‘Eat Out to Help Out.’ They did the same for the airports. I bought a flight to Berlin for what was meant to be a five day break. I’m still here. No big or romantic obsession with this mostly cold unfriendly city, it just swallowed me when I needed to be digested by somewhere new, and in both scale (less) and anonymity (more) it’s simply a less humiliating place to be a solo woman approaching her forties, notwithstanding the fascist turn but that’s nothing, uh, new. Still locked down but in a new city, like many of us I took time to explore sonic territories I’d always been curious about, and when things reopened shifted gears to making radio to have a place to share and experiment. I now have a monthly show on a beautiful grassroots local station called Refuge Worldwide. I do DJ live occasionally but rarely, am mostly interested in using sound, music and archival audio as a storytelling medium. So much of my interest in what radio could do comes from my exposure to Australian community radio and its radical history, especially Skid Row, here’s a show I did about the history of that station. I put out a 7” record in 2023 with a short-lived band called Yfory, still working in the gender justice field and other than that my priorities are mostly being kind to my friends, eating, organising and writing occasionally, mostly for the magazine Tribune.
In 2022, you spent some time volunteering in the Lajee Centre in the Aida Refugee Camp in Palestine. You’ve documented elements of that visit through writing, radio interviews and music from the region. Can you tell us more about how you became involved with the Lajee Centre?
Yeah, so that Solidarity Summer Camp has been run by Lajee, a self-organised grassroots center in the West Bank for the last twenty odd years. It’s part of their incredibly successful strategy to create international connections and opportunities for the community of displaced refugees that Israel has fenced in behind the apartheid wall. There are eighty-six Refugee Camps for Palestininans in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Gaza, and almost all of them have their own autonomous community organisations, consciously and deliberately not connected to the Palestinian Authority or UNRWA. I was especially interested to learn about the structure, role and running of these places and the people who participate in them. Lajee (which means Refugee) brings groups of ‘internationals’ who are curious and interested in each summer as part of a strategy of broader political education and advocacy. This leaves an indelible mark on every single person who passes through it. I was immediately dumbstruck to see the very peak of the deployment of the DIY ethic in these places, from the hydroponic garden on the roof providing food for the people who have no land or green space to grow things, the community healthcare outreach service, music workshops, lending library, with resources held in common by necessity, together under the eyes of snipers, and while insisting on the highest possible standards of education, training and cultural inheritance for their young people.
Every day during the solidarity summer camp is a packed schedule of visiting different cities and camps, connecting with activists and getting stuck in with manual labour and working with children, and so much more. I had not come with the intention of doing interviews in the West Bank, I was just there to listen and participate, but on our day off, I realised I was so activated, so saturated by follow up questions that I knew I needed to capture something. Several hours of audio, hastily done on my busted iPhone, formed the basis for the first two parts of Sounds of Sumud, mostly narrating the two weeks spent there through songs and voices, some recordings from the street, especially the massive joyous celebrations for those who did well in their Tawjihi, which is basically Palestinian Schoolies. By some kind of miracle, I got to make the third part of Sounds of Sumud in collaboration with the youth of Lajee when I returned to Aida Camp with some Irish comrades I’d met on the first trip. It was a profoundly special experience to plan and make a show with them. I did sessions on beat making, field recordings and doing interviews and once I’d shown them how the zoom recorders worked, one young fella Omar casually mentioned we could probably interview his grandmother. He knocked on the door of the 86-year-old Nakba survivor Jalilah, who shared her memories of her displacement, her children being imprisoned and her own poetry written about life in the camp and her longing for return. It is truly one of the honours of my life to witness and help those young people capture her testimony.
You wrote that a part of your rationale for Sounds of Sumud episodes was to create a digestible way for the listener to hear about Palestinian resistance and life on the ground. It’s a really effective approach, and has played a massive part in my own understanding of life in Palestine. To my mind, the approach has a lot of utility in cutting through the fifteen-second info snippet that leads to social media brain fry, where finding a way to get issues digested and considered thoughtfully is increasingly difficult. What’s your approach to radio, and is there hope for good, genuine, heartfelt communication in the logged on dystopia we live in?
I think I try to make the kind of radio that can surprise, confound, or otherwise stop you in your tracks. I wanna do stuff that makes people need to pause, write things down, look things up, I personally enjoy the idea of shows packed with references and layers, provocations and spells. Anything but a jukebox that anticipates your ‘musical needs.’ Spotify logic should stay as far away from Real Radio as possible. Curate my arse, you know? I hope The Spiral Times can move you a bit, even if it's just a bit of aural whiplash.
With regards to your last question, yeah. Fuck. I am constantly hamstrung by how insane social media makes me feel despite how essential it has been the last 15 months, and in general I always feel like when it comes to online, if anything genuine and heartfelt is happening then it's only in the DMs. Anything else is the psychological equivalent of being strapped to a mirror while live in front of a studio audience. Throwing bricks or trying to have sex with you, sometimes at once. The access to friends around the world directly is what keeps me online.
It is both a demented psychedelic facet of our techno purgatory that someone living in a tent being bombed can reply to some stupid shit I have posted to ask me how my day is, but also a strange kind of miracle, so we might as well use it. I immediately thought of the new friends I have made in Gaza just because they reached out to people who appear to care and shared their links. At this juncture they are the only reason I do not delete Instagram for good. In my duty to connect and push through the alienation to just be a person speaking to a person, I can find a tiny way to witness and be a human.
I’m always interested in the punk/DIY origin stories of friends, and I know you’ve written at length about this in your MRR columns and various other pieces (all of which I hope get put together as a print compilation some day as an aside.) I’m interested in how much the embrace of DIY world has informed your general creative process, in particular your unrivalled ability to get shit done. Your writing, zine making, bands (drummer, singer, guitarist - are you still an ‘anything but bass’ person?), organising (First Timers! DIY Space for London!), agitations to create at all costs, to give back and literally force people to form bands... the BB oeuvre is of endless inspiration to myself and many of our friends and I’d love to know more about what drives it.
To be real, it’s less that methods learnt from our DIY world have informed how I do things, I’d say, and more that it is, for better and for worse, only the language I have, so its grammar ends up finding its way into everything I do. This is definitely sometimes to a fault, like when deferring to experts and respect for technicality would have served the project better, but I’ve found I’m just hardwired by punk to instead plump for ‘..ah how hard can it be?’ and dive into whatever it is as a smiling amateur, and usually (usually…) style out any humbling failures. In organising spaces people tease me for always volunteering to attempt the annoying but essential task that I realistically will just be Googling. In 2011, I put on a show in a squat for Total Control in the financial district of London with a decommissioned army tank outside. I had no fucking idea what I was doing and had bought the cheapest PA on eBay, but was absolutely adamant I was not having some guy do sound. So annoying hahaha. But whatever, the vibe was unreal and the building burnt down the following week.
In some very non-punk spaces, people have read this approach as either arrogant or cavalier. I’ve taken on feedback around that, but it’s odd, sometimes. When you spend your entire adult life in community with people who also speak this language, ‘We’ll figure it out’ is a religion. Ultimately it’s just that deep belief in the specific beauty of a patched-in cobbled together thing, made by many hands and thus essentially new and unique, always out of breath and dialled up to eleven, you know? My eternal problem, which my therapist has...thoughts on, is that I have never, ever felt like I’m doing enough, and the insatiable appetite for starting the thing that does not yet exist is probably about trying to feel like I’m enough. I think it is the same impulse as the gardener, you know. Let a hundred flowers bloom. The Maoist gardener. One of the coolest feelings in the world is starting something that really does get taken up and on beyond your contribution to it. Someone made a film about First Timers which is out soon. So beautiful - this is the trailer. Understanding that you cannot personally be the one to pollinate every flower (and that all things turn to compost in the end) is my ‘getting older’ wisdom. I am slowly (very slowly) learning in this act of my life that steady deeper focus on a shorter list of stuff has value, which is cool because I’d like not to die of a stroke in the next few years.
Your essay in 122 Hours of Fear was (and is) such good writing about returning to the punk show post-pandemic. It’s written with a gentle, reflexive touch that I’ve rarely seen done well in the minefield of post-pandemic writing which tends to struggle to find the right ‘what does it all mean’ balance. But I thought you nailed that, and as a sap, was moved pretty deeply by the closing lines of: “what is friendship if not gently reassuring each other even when we don’t deserve it?” How do you feel about the piece now? I feel like it has a real lasting document quality to it that I’ll be thinking of for a long time.
Layla’s zine about the show-going experience marked a special moment in time, for sure! I think everyone in her worldwide punk vortex was reckoning with how they’d changed after losing access to something as primal and evergreen as the gig enviro, so we were all perhaps uncharacteristically tender and less cynical, which comes across in the contributions! I wrote most of it in my phone notes app on the journey back from London. I went and re-read it just now and I’m crying so I guess we can say I still think it's...good, notwithstanding a few slightly overwrought metaphors that I always indulge in when I get to be the narrator. That night was an exorcism, a drunken joy, a funny little victory lap around the snooker table of a fucking terrible venue in London after easily the worst year of my life. I had forgotten how much of the piece reflects on the uprising in response to the murder of a woman called Sarah Everard by a serving police officer Wayne Couzens in March 2021. I had moved to Berlin but was briefly back in London that week, picking up my things. We marched on Clapham Common, a huge park which is where he had abducted her. You could tell the government was running scared for a couple of days. I did a bunch of press interviews about it and was able to say things about the reality of the police that I would have not been able to before then. It felt like coming up for air, into a smoke-filled room, but still. The idea that we conquer experiences by painting weird lil controllable vignettes has always felt true to me, and I feel like my memories of times in my life that I have also written about have a different quality of light, somehow. Back when I wrote for MRR, someone told me my style of writing is considered ‘autofiction’, but I don’t think I've ever made anything up, maybe just left certain things out for my own dignity. That is definitely true of this piece. I know I have expanded or contracted certain experiences that might help me make an idea I’ve had feel truer, which I guess is its own form of fiction. I’ve always been too scared to make things up, so I’m secretly green with envy that you are so deft with creating fictional characters and places out of our little world’s raw material!
Back to some ruminating! In early 2018, we launched the second volume of the Tempered journal together with some panel discussions about DIY spaces and an attempt to define the underground (and what that did or did not mean.) I don’t remember a whole lot of what was said to be honest, but I wonder if we had that chat again today, how differently our thoughts and feelings would be? Where are you at mentally now with what once felt to me like ‘the great international underground music project’?
The funny thing with this is, on reflection, at that panel discussion I was definitely playing the role of naive proselytiser, rose tinted with the benefit of distance. This became screamingly apparent literally the first moment I stepped back into DIY Space for London, the venue I’d helped start, then left for Aus when it was only a nine month old baby. All of the things I said in/at Tempered were true, of course! But on my return I was confronted by a nearly three year old toddler who’d been through several eras and personalities during my time away and was not best pleased at my attempts to jump right back in to tighten things up. During manic efforts to create a sustainable structure around it, some serious conflict and painful shit happened which a lot of us, myself included, still wouldn’t want to really look back over to this day. But suffice to say for that particular project, COVID-19 came at…not the worst time, as it provided an answer as the original five year lease came up for renewal. That it lived for that long is huge!
For context, I was convinced that some paid hours would finally help us break out of the burnout vortex and make the project manageable (up to that point only the finance person had been paid.) Word to the wise: when you have a community of people who feel both deep ownership over a space but are also riddled with deep burnout-related resentment due to breaking their own back for four years running a space voluntarily in one of the most expensive cities in the world… do NOT advertise for four jobs and expect that to go smoothly!!! Someone did their PhD on some aspect of archiving DIY Space, so I’m heartened to know the stuff exists somewhere, and more importantly there’s a whole generation of kids and bands for whom that place is an origin point. I also know venues around the UK that have used iterations of the model we built (which of course was taken from those before us) that are going strong. I see these echoes and resonances most often in the repurposing of an open source code of accountability/conduct that I wrote in kind of a hurry just before leaving for Australia, again a slightly ‘this seems right in theory, sure that will work’ - but the specific wording I made up on the spot in an effort to get very far away from ‘isms and phobias’ lists that I always thought were dumb. That part is so often reused and I get a warm feeling seeing it adapted and updated. Again, if the best our efforts can do is leave little cat hair style threads that someone can pick up when they need, that’s not so bad.
The agitation for an underground or DIY ethic that I felt really strongly at the time of Tempered II seems like it’s fallen to the wayside in recent years. I’m hearing horror stories now of things like bands (who proudly wear DIY identifiers) demanding guarantees before they agree to play a show. I think I want to blame poptimism, or post-pandemic ‘save the music industry / pay the artists / fuck everyone else’ narratives, but I can’t think straight. The crux of this question is: where has hatred for the music industry gone!?
Bruh we are so through the eye of the sponsored camel’s needle or what have you with this, I have no idea. Is a band sponsored by Camel Cigars yet? You were always more romantic on this than me, and I love that for you! But idk, Punk broke in 1991, the same time they got Coca-Cola into the GDR. When we thought through this stuff with gusto as younger people it was in the long shadow of a very different way of thinking about ‘selling out’.. I want to believe that for our gen, the concept itself was a gateway drug to a critiquing of capitalism, but of course it was always so partial. Rage at a symptom not a cause. Thing is, the ‘no ethical consumption under capitalism’ is both true and a profound sedative. I hate it all with every ounce of my bone marrow as a whole-world system, but more for the fact that Prison Slavery is a thing than the fact that while typing this, Youtube played me an ad for an Apple Watch that had a friend’s band’s song sequenced to it. Poptimism itself feels like a concept out of the ark! You know that meme that’s like the guy with the eyes getting redder and redder? I’m at the bottom misquoting Gramsci and doing the Jay-Z head nod meme to Chappell Roan. There are true believers drawing ideological lines within the underground of punk still for sure, but the battles being fought where I am are over the right to name genocide as such, and the degree to which punks indulge in, normalise, and spread overt forms of anti-muslim racism. Seeing just how reactionary the most ‘solidly’ anti-capitalist autonomist spaces can be has been the nail in the coffin for me of any pretense that from the mere label Punk flows any particularly ethical or moral imperative. My thing is generally what are the politics, where are the compromises, and does the music suck or not? I do not have TikTok.
Sponsor me TikTok! I suppose my position on DIY/punk being resolutely anti-corporate is looking more and more like romanticism these days (this may explain why I feel so bonkers all the time, but I really do think the toothpaste can be put back in the tube). You’re right that there are much larger battles to be fought during proto-WWIII than ‘please don’t license your image or music to a brand.’ But I’m becoming very tired of creative work that has the outright goal of making the career trajectory of artist, band, etc the focus of the project, and not some level of community activity, where, for punk/DIY in particular, larger conversations can begin to be had. Very naive I suppose, but I always see an alt-timeline of my younger self not being hit with the punk stick, and the snivelling centrist I would have become. Which is to say...a part of this interview project is to try to get some insight into how we’re all feeling about what is, broadly speaking, subcultural practice in the current day. Do you think that’s what we were doing as a band with BB & The Blips? Is that what our friends were doing?
Maybe! Or maybe ..just something to do in our downtime (or to make sure we never had any.) How many more coffee table archive books ’til we finally stop pretending any of what we do is secret? To your wider point, though, really, anyone out there who is genuinely trying to make some quick cash and selects The Music Biz of the mid 2020s as their target is surely so deluded it's mostly just charming. Is there a band called Dropshipping yet? I am firmly and non-jadedly settled on a reading of community-based DIY activity (of really any genre) as a gateway drug for personal transformation which, at best, can help young people access terrains of empowerment they often wouldn’t normally, and thus lead them to feel differently about their own potential. What if any political direction they take depends entirely on the person, the playlist and frankly the reading list. But even the briefest brushes with Punk World have been doing that for people’s life trajectories for nearly fifty years now. Don’t see it stopping. Whereas if the apocryphal members of Dropshipping are simply posting 50 second reels of songs that don’t exist, does it matter much if some old codger at the Guardian compares them to Gang of Four? If the internal experience is not there, it’s not there. For my sins, as a student of Cultural Studies at both levels of my degrees, I spent too long peering deep into our collective musicultural navel on this question, and talking about it too much fills me with a strange sickly feeling. I will say that while I constantly oscillate between poles of crucial-stupid and meaningful-meaningless when I think about punk, recent experiences here in Germany have somehow both cemented my position that there’s nothing inherently progressive about it as a form, and renewed fervour in my instinct to fight for it, in ways that have surprised me.
I’ve been dwelling again on the idea of autonomy, and am interested in your thoughts because you tend to make me feel sane on such topics. The best times I ever had making music was always scurrying around after work, practicing, playing on the weekend, somewhere in there we hopefully don’t lose significant amounts of money. My worst times have always been trying to raise money for a release, making decisions based on what might pay well to top up the band account. But lately, all I want is space to do the things that I want to do. Which I suppose means a mysterious source of income that makes rent and keeps the fridge stocked (Camel Cigars, while my door is not open, everyone has a price). I can’t tease this one out...what is it that feels so elusive here Bryony!?
Oh sweet Max. Move your tongue to the back of your palette and make a hard C sound, push out air in an ‘ah’, close your lips for a plosive, i-t-a-l buzz the issss and then a long warm mmmmm. I have thought so much about sustainability in a punk context especially when we had the venue, and the times when we really chose to look away from the fact that we could basically only make rent by having a bar and encouraging people to get completely obliterated, and I really do have no answers…
A sideways cheats way of answering but since you use the word...there some lessons we might glean here also from the political current of Autonomia (Italy in the mid-‘70s) is probably more interesting to both you and me. I had an Operaismo moment in the first band I sang in called the Sceptres, we had this t-shirt with a mad diagram connecting Negri to Abba I think. Four people bought it haha. Class War was a british anarchist newspaper (I wrote about it for Distort once actually!) edited by a man called Ian Bone (noted child of Swansea, like me). There’s a famous issue of Class War called ‘We Have Our Own Concept of Time and Motion’ which was controversial at the time because its guest editors pushed some of these autonomist ideas, which were all about challenging the idea that horizon for liberation of the working class would be being better jobs and full employment, and proposing controversially at the time that rejecting work in favour of a life of leisure, creativity and non-productive pursuits would be the real revolutionary goal. Which begs perhaps the question: How would we feel about the idea of DIY if we didn’t have to work?
A few years back we had some friendly disagreements around the place of satire in issues-based songwriting, something that I’ve been constantly turning over and not resolving, outside of what I think my current position is: ‘what’s satire done for anyone lately?’ This is a bit of an inversion of where I was at in 2017 or so. In saying that, I find it hard to find the kind of lyrical intent I’m searching for in music today. We live in a world where songs about nothing (zany ‘90s Nickelodeon inspired egg punk) butts up against endless redux waves of anarchopunk that asks: “is nuclear war...bad?” In an email you mentioned you’d had a change of thoughts too, so I’m wondering where you’re at with this...
Haha yes I had a bit of a bee in my bonnet about The Rebel, didn’t I, around the time you were doing your edition on The Country Teasers (who I loved then and love now.) I was working through the last vestiges of a certain kind of puritanical militancy around the idea that all art needs to be sufficiently sanitary, I think. To say I’ve uh, moved on from this approach would be an understatement, and thinking back I was occasionally pretty insufferable. I still think irony has its limits and writing songs from the perspective of a bigot is always going to be a scattergun approach, but my sense of when something is like, actively dangerous vs just dumb, or maybe missing the mark but ultimately harmless, has completely shifted. I put this down to having matured politically a bit, learning to delight more in the sweet, sweet dialectic. These days I think the removal of any platform or active censorship in art should be an absolute last resort and backed by a pretty strong risk assessment. As a writer on the ‘problematic’ you always pleased me for resisting easy moralism and I got a lot from our debates on this. Although I was never a pRobLeMaTiC Warrior or the most guilty of this kind of holier than thou impulse, and not to sound like I'm about to do a ‘It’s the Blaaahdy Woke Left’ bait and switch here, but the dictionary says that Problematic means ‘difficult to resolve,’ which I think speaks to the psychological root of some of this stuff. You know, the idea that we must all experience total frictionlessness pre-approvedly ‘smooth’ words and ideas at all times. I remember being at the cute little pub gig you put on for Ben [Wallers, of The Rebel] and feeling genuinely so het up and uneasy, which is bizarre and quite funny to me now. What’s something you used to believe that you no longer do? I am very interested in how people’s minds are changed, or rather how they come to different conclusions and incorporate them, and how we can make more positive vocabulary for all kinds of ideological developments. Think that might be a key way for us all to get out of the void, actually.
I think I’ve grown up a lot on this topic, in the sense that I used to turn over conflicting ideas of this vein with a form of defensiveness; almost to protect this kind of song-writing. Which, I look back at now with a bit of embarrassment. It took the rise of the online alt-right edgelord being interested in my work that pulled me up a bit. It became a bit of a ‘keep an eye on the company you’re keeping’ type thing, where I now just think that no matter how clever the satire or parody is, the 2020’s being what they are, you’re more likely to find company with the target of said satire than you are changing anyone’s mind or highlighting some hypocrisy (ala the missions of The Rebel, Randy Newman, etc, whose songwriting approach I see as an attempt at being one front in a larger culture war, and will always appreciate the attempt, however misguided). I’m still interested in what this all says about us though, and feel like I can never quite drop it. But for songwriting that I can enjoy without any doubts, can I say that I’m a big fan of your songwriting approach, and it was an honour to be so close to it as a dutiful bass player. Like your essays, I felt you struck a great balance with your songs in BB & THE BLIPS: direct lyrics ('Shame Job'), referential lyrics ('Matriduxy'), big parodic allegories ('The Ballad of Personal Growth')... How does she do it???
That’s super interesting that we’ve both shifted positions without discussing it further. I’m with you on that. And, no, you’re a parodic allegory! Thank you. You know, the lyrics to Matriduxy were written in the studio which is the first time I’d ever done that from the gut type stuff. I remember welling up when singing it and facing away from everyone trying not to show it. I was also rushing because I had a show to play with Photogenic to get straight over to, if I recall. As ever, a time crunch focuses the mind! I think I also asked for those lyrics not to go up on the bandcamp because they reference some dark times in my childhood that I didn’t want to get into with my mother, who I thought might check it out because we had her paint our portraits for the back cover of the LP! She didn’t. The freedom of the punk lyric is something else. I’ve been getting my own back and evening scores discreetly with lyrics since my first band, sometimes to the extent of being extremely childish. I always have this debate over the extent to which you write explicit to your own experience or make it more ‘relatable’ by massaging the details out into a general vibe. My preference has always been hyper-specificity, letting references resonate where they might be familiar, or pique curiosity where they aren’t. This is in part for sure due to my love of British anarcho and post punk where naming sitting politicians and digging into headlines of the day for material was very normal, and on a less direct level the quotidian yet bizarro quality of the lyrics of Mark E. Smith. I know for sure that I learnt about various scandals and miscarriages of justice through Crass records, and first learnt what Armagh Jail was because of the Au Pairs.
I’d like to share about ‘Whinge and Whine,’ the closer on our Blips LP, as those lyrics were written based on details of the trial and eventual acquittal of the man who killed 14-year-old Elijah Doughty in Kalgoorlie by running him over in a ute in a creek bed, which happening in the first few weeks I arrived in Australia. The viciously proud quality of the racist dehumanisation in both the details of what had happened and media reporting on the case, as well as the uprising around it, were a rude awakening about power in that land. The rank hypocrisy of the entire case and media response stayed with me when the verdict came out, at which point we’d just started the band. The killer had been inspired to drive after the child by the increasingly vigilante tenor of a local ‘anti-crime’ facebook group called Kalgoorlie Whinge and Whine. We were working on a garlic farm in country Victoria to get a visa, and I’d hear updates about it on RN from our mud-caked radio. The simple gutpunch fact that there had been no swerve marks in the tracks left by the killer was a haunting detail I couldn’t stop thinking about…not that writing a song about it contributes much, but despite it all I believe in spiritual memory and tending to the flame lit by every injustice, in whatever tiny ways we can. The actual lyrics and explanation for the song were accidentally left off the sleeve for the record because I rushed finishing off the artwork booklet, which still annoys me to this day but if anyone wants them I can share! Bit of Blips lore there for you.
I was really happy to get a copy of the YFORY 7” when it arrived at Repressed. I’d completely missed that the band existed until that point thanks to my blissful year off Instagram, but as mentioned above re: being your fan, it was fun to see you back in the lyric mines. What was it like forming a band again outside of your home city, singing in Welsh, making music in the now (and/or then) and making music from Berlin?
After Covid I was pretty sure I was done with bands. Chris Onton (Diät, Golden fuckin’ Staph) asked me to sing with him in a lockdown project. Writing in Welsh, or rather Wenglish was a really cool challenge, and definitely stretched my abilities. I occupy a strange space of non-fluency yet deep identification with it, like a lot of people who were raised in and around minority or historically suppressed languages, even though it's my fathers’ first language and he speaks to me in it. I knew I wanted to lean into the canon of deeply weird ‘80s Welsh language post-punk for inspiration, especially bands like Datblygu (if we’re speaking of deliberately niche lyrical references, David R. Edwards will always take the biscuit) it was extremely cool to have to call my dad (generally an extremely reticent when it comes to feelings type of guy), and untangle a series of grammatically schizoid lines from the welsh rhyming dictionary, and have him be like ‘Yeah, that makes sense, but, it’s a bit dark isn’t?’
There is a type of rhythmic schema from the poetry tradition which uses internal rhyming patterns called cynghanedd, that I Iove because it creates this sonic lilt, and I wanted to see if I could make the pun or metaphor split across the two languages. Using Welsh was also an incredibly interesting journey of abandoning my desire to be correct (lifelong work!) and deploying what I started referring to as ‘non-fluency as method.’ It becomes its own language, just as ‘Wenglish’ is, but I was often using childlike formulations as my linguistic memory was strongest from the times when my dad addressed me as you would your youngest child. Translation as time travel! I was also incredibly anxious about making a tit of myself to the sometimes quite…prim Welsh language music community, but I don’t think they know we existed so it’s all good. I've always loved the vocal approaches of both Life Without Buildings and Cocteau Twins… playing with and getting slightly loosey goosey with meaning and sound, and where it takes you. Even though of course Welsh is very much a real language I wanted to push myself not to be desperate to make sense! Radical unintelligibility. It was a cool process. Band ended ’cos the drummer decided I was anti-semitic after I wore a t-shirt to play a show that said “Free Palestine”, sigh, but that’s a whole other story…I think he lives in Australia now! Anyway, here’s a Super-8 video my friend Leigh made of the song Baled Y Dolmen. It’s about me trying to save my last relationship by driving my ex to all my favourite Welsh standing stones in the pissing rain just before Christmas. As is so often the way, what had been a painful stupid memory has now been beautifully papered over by the fact that it inspired one of the strangest and most complicated songs I’ve ever made.
You have written at length both for Tribune, in your Substack, in print in a one-off zine, regarding the policing of protest in Berlin, the crackdown on Palestinian solidarity, and the many flow-on effects this has had in communities you’ve been a part of. I read these deeply shocked when they were published, until I saw it slowly begin to infiltrate the Australian landscape too: cultural institutions punishing creatives for taking their logical and moral pro-Palestine positions, politicians and the media re-framing everything critical of the genocidal Israeli regime as ‘anti-semitic’ and so forth. A whole lot has changed in eighteen months that cannot be unseen! I mentioned this briefly in the PUNKINTERN zine, but I’ve watched with disgust as a crew of Berlin punks started the ‘punksagainstantisemitism’ Instagram account which is, to summarise, one of the more absurd ‘Progressive Except for Palestine’ examples I’ve witnessed: a crew of people with Crass tattoos making excuses for the IDF was not on my punk decline bingo card, but there’s a lot I don’t understand about Germany’s peculiar defence of Israel. Can you bring us up to speed on this movement in Germany that has anarchists and punks leaping to lick the boots of a genocidal regime run by and propped up by some of the most violent, wealthy and powerful states in human history????
Let me preface this by saying I’m genuinely sorry to alert your readers to the existence of this particularly insane and crazy-making cultural peccadillo, but yes, we have radical ‘left-wing’ German Zionists. I’d recommend reading this, this (essential!) and this to get a deeper sense of the context, but I can speak to how this mind virus hobbles otherwise normal seeing punks....
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the networks of autonomous squats in both east and west were legalised into ‘house projects’ where left ideologies find their everyday expression, and anti-zionism=anti-semitism took hold as a sacred cow in the spaces where most punk shows traditionally happened. The virus metastasised throughout the 90s, hence squats adorned with Israeli flags and more and more extreme positions. Many of the people exposed to these ideas in those spaces grow up to take influential positions in liberal civil society organisations and NGOs, unions, the Green Party, and of course journalism. After 9/11, the original anti-Deutsch movement splits again, with one side of the Antifa staking out the just… chefs’ kiss levels of normal pro-Iraq War stance (bearing in mind here the German state was against it!), replete with eyewateringly extreme Islamophobia that outpaces the War on Terror. These days, it should be noted, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone active in DIY punk who’d refer to themselves publicly as anti-Deutsche, it’d be a bit of an anachronism to do so.. But for this younger generation, the same psychotic hardline stances against any kind of Palestine solidarity as ‘Judenhass’ or Jewhate, finds a more identity-politics based expression, all rooted in an outrageous widening of the net for what can be considered anti-semitism, and protecting the sensibilities of an Imagined Jew who just so happens to be a paranoid neurotic caricature they have made up... For example (testament that I’ve had enough of these suckers in my rearview that I can now think like them) they’d say you did a blatant anti-semitism by mentioning wealth in your question.. because… money is jewish? One of the most mental zionist left groups (oh yes, ShaLOM Linksjugend! Melting Emoji) say supporting Luigi was also anti-semitic because he killed a capitalist.
This is the ideological scaffolding that enables a German guy I was in a collective with to say that he himself was ‘triggered’ when challenged on his batshit views about Israel. Same reason a sound engineer at a gig my friend played got so mad that she had a Kuffiyeh print vest on that he unplugged a bunch of things from the console and stormed out of the venue, sabotaging the sound for the rest of the gig. It’s also a feature of the demise of Yfory, the last band I was in. Back in November 2022, our drummer, a German guy who's been in tons of bands and toured internationally, realised I had worn my Lajee Center t-shirt on stage with the Handala design and the words ‘Free Palestine.’ He, avowed ‘feminist’ punk man, said if he had seen my outfit he would have ‘made me’ take it off, and that if we were to continue the band he’d need to personally check over any future lyrics for anti-semitic tropes! (..In Welsh?!) He explained with a straight face that Handala is actually an anti-semitic dog whistle code because he read that Naj Al-Ali (a man murdered by Mossad in London in 1972) draws soldiers with, to his German sensibilities, unacceptably big noses. I think I blacked out for a second at this point. He called me ‘an extremist’ after googling that Lajee Center supports BDS, his ‘red line,’ and that he refused to say the word ‘Palestine.’ Ignorance is not an excuse in a city where perspectives and lived experience for anyone genuinely curious are not in short supply, we have the biggest Palestinian population in Europe. To hear this whack job conspiracism from a guy who’d been a dear friend and collaborator was both heartbreaking and a rude awakening for me. That this level of delusional racism could be accepted as punk was a foreshadowing of what was to come. For years, outright Kuffiyeh bans have been normal, I’ve been kicked out of a lefty bar for wearing one myself. As for flags, well, the logic goes you cannot come into an anarcho space wearing a ‘nationalist’ symbol (unless it's a Ukrainian flag, of course…, or the rainbow Israeli flag…) A common formulation in many Antifa venues is ‘no racism, no sexism, no Islamism.’ This is all the status quo as it was long before last October.
We figured the response within the DIY scene to October 7th and the uprising on the streets of Berlin in response would be something mental but had no idea the extent to which so many punk acquaintances would out themselves as holding openly fascist views. For context, in the days after, on the streets, all expressions of solidarity and of course all demos were completely banned by the police. The heavily Arab neighbourhood where I live was subject to intense police violence, rioting, water cannons and insane surveillance. Anyone with even a tiny flag or scarf was arrested, which they would do by covering your mouth and nose and dragging by the neck. I saw kids as young as nine hauled into vans. We were out every night filming, trying to do arrestee support, and it was the most intense sustained police violence I’ve ever personally witnessed because it was targeting Arab men and boys who happened to be in the area. This was not a Paris-style burning barricades deal, I must stress, it was night after night of police siege, cops coming in to tread on candles, punch children and so on. At our DIY space, at the the bottom of that same street, a friend quickly proposed a benefit show to contribute to our hastily arranged legal support fund for the latest victims of police brutality each night. German members of the collective, outraged, blocked the idea on the basis that this was tantamount to celebrating the murder of Jews. They set up ‘Punks Against Anti-Semitism’ in response to the fact that a version of the show did eventually happen, which is a dubious honour of ours! We out here inspiring movements lmao, as they mobilise to defeat...what? The Armed Wing of the Noise Punk Scene? Truly, people absolutely lost their minds. When a friend put out a donation pot for victims of police brutality at the GLUE/INSTITUTE gig (who she had paid using a bit of cultural funding she’d got) someone from ‘Punks Against Anti-Semitism’ reported them to the State Senate, who made them repay all the money. Particularly disappointingly, The DIY label Mangel Records, which has a couple of really good post-punk bands on or associated with it, asked for a guest slot on Refuge Worldwide, a noted anti-Apartheid station, and read out a statement live on air condemning the fact they now they felt pressured to take a position on ‘the Middle East War’ and then stated their view: ‘this is not a freedom fight’ condemning ‘Khamas’ and that they are against ‘every anti-semitism.’ One month into the genocide, thousands dismemebered or under the rubble, what image did they use for this radio show/intervention? A bug spray called ‘Clean Kill.’ In my view? Unforgiveable.
There’s always been a bit of a gap between migrants and those born in Germany when it comes to punk here, the language thing but also politically. Naturally those who show up in Berlin from colonised countries in the global south, or as refugees, and get active in punk, are instinctively critical of apartheid, let alone genocide. The response to this from the average zionist punk is at best a deeply racist paternalist ‘forgive them father for these savages know not what they do,’ when it comes to AS, and at worst an apparent excuse to any more of all that rather unsavory race mixing. Retaining my vestigial affinity with a subculture which is so fatally compromised in this city had even started to become a source of some shame, non-punk German anti-imperialists (there are some!) that I organise with would be like ‘why do you even go to those gigs, aren’t they just full of Zios? But Bands like ZANJEER, URIN, INDUSTRY, SIHIR, A CULTURE OF KILLING, BRAK, DESINTEGRACION VIOLENTA, BERITAN, CUNTROACHES, NYLON CLUB and one or two other have solidly refused to be censored despite so much boring bullshit, continue to play benefit shows both for the movement here and in Gaza. As the stakes get higher, sometimes you really do just have to heighten the contradictions. I initially attempted to be a voice of reason and thought about how to create space for some dialogue, as I naively thought there was no way so many punks would follow Israel this far into the abyss. There are a lot more morally bankrupt little freaks out there than we realise. At this juncture, anyone who still insists that the ethics of atrocity are made more complicated when the torturer happens to be Jewish needs to either be shamed into disavowing their hatred or be made irrelevant. Seems like a fait accompli that none of these bands will ever be able to play a gig outside of das Vaterland anyway, but touring bands still want to come here. For this, there is a Europe-wide research platforms being created to help touring bands who do not want to go into or fund venues that discriminate against Palestinians or celebrate ethnosupremacy, which is available at Network Of Friends, while Gegen Jeden Genozid a recent compilation of anti-Zionist Germany-based bands made all the right people piss the bed and acts as a useful list of bands to play with! Check out Strike Germany too and Archive of Silence if you’re a DJ, cultural person or artist considering a trip/job. By the way, that legal fund? It raised 100K in a year, and grew into 3ezwa, a fully-fledged registered Verein (cooperative organisation) now offering weekly counselling and covering legal fees, which is beautiful.
To pull the nose of the plane up from crash landing into that heinous bullshit, let’s finish on some good culcha. What kind of things have you been reading or listening to that have felt worthwhile engaging with?
Oof yes, Two Books:
Hannah Proctor - Burn Out: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat
I read this in one sitting during a self-imposed solo trip to Morocco this summer. I was definitely burnt out after adjudicating various internecine conflicts (Pavlovian pulmonary response to Signal notification type beat) and what a balm it was. The book looks with so much love at what happens after we fail, taking in the fate of the Soixante-Huitards to Tahrir, Amiri Baraka to the Bolsheviks. They used to get sent on mandatory Spa Retreats to help ease the overwhelm!? She uses close readings of films and literature to unpick structures of feeling like Melancholy, Bitterness and Nostalgia. It’s just an extraordinary read. No Marx without Freud, no Freud without Marx!
Wisam Rafeedie - The Trinity of Fundamentals
The story of how this novel came to be published is so improbable as to imbue the pages with a kind of magic from the start. Translated into English as a project of the Palestinian Youth Movement last year, it’s a fictionalised memoir of a young revolutionary who goes into hiding, a total rollercoaster of daily battles between his inner life (‘I’) and the party who has sent him on this mission (the ‘we’) and the real enemy outside his safe house. Written by Rafeedie in his cell in Al Naqab, the desert prison, it was read secretly by other prisoners until it was discovered and destroyed by the guards. Then somehow, a copy shows up in another prison (!) a prisoner had read and loved it so much he made a copy by hand. The whole thing was smuggled (read swallowed) out of the prison page by page, and took more than thirty years to be published. It is deeply moving, funny and extremely thrilling.
Two Youtube Channels:
Doomscroll
New, longform and extremely stimulating discussions on culture and politics with the artist, internet researcher and absolutely dime piece Joshua Citarella.
Gemma Wheeler Architecture
I recently quit ketamine. This is what I’ve been doing instead. Trust me.
Two Songs:
Ghadr - Chamoun/Sahyoun/Atoui
Glitchy and experimental warm bath music (w/plugged-in shortwave chucked in) recorded in Lebanon recently. Absolutely gorgeous and disquieting music for the times we are in.
Melanie - Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)
I made a radio show with my parents earlier this summer and in the process of thinking about what music they played when I was small, I remembered 60 folk singer Melanie, aka Melanie Sakfa, whose song ‘Babe Rainbow’ my dad would play a cassette of in the car a lot, while Mum teased him for having a crush on her. When we finally recorded the show in classic parental style they were both like ‘wait, who?’ (Forgetting.. the secret to their fifty years of marriage?) Generally people know Melanie for that kinda irritating song ‘Brand New Key’ but a lot of her oeuvre is about the aftermath experience of playing at and being at Woodstock (it is said that her set there was the very first time people held up lighters at a gig!) and her lyrics just take me away. She sings in this incredibly rich way about ecstatic unity and its cost, the promise of merging for a moment with your people (‘we were so close, there was no room, we bled inside each others’ wounds’) about the mourning that comes when that moment inevitably ends, and the lessons in the afterglow. A song that inspires me never to give up on myself or other people.
+++please consider donating to these Palestinian families seeking refuge: Ahmed, Ola, the Hamdounas, or to the BB & The Blips PayPal for redistribution at bbandtheblips@gmail.com.
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