Sleeve Notes: The Redskins ‘Red Power’
Paul Morley’s 2019 essay looks back at The Redskins, the socialist skinhead soul band who injected a righteous anger and militant commitment into the early 1980s British music scene. Led by the sharp-witted Chris Dean, they fused the electric swing of punk with the soul of James Brown, aiming to popularise revolutionary politics through blistering live shows and the power of music.
“We get it all the time, this well-meaning soft-liberal inability to accept that if you’re a socialist you can’t possibly be an artist, an imaginative entertainer, that you must always prepare dour pamphlets and display a stubborn consistently about your cliched beliefs. You get asked – well, what’s more important to you? The music or the politics? The politics and the music infect each other. It’s like how can you say what’s more important, being in love or singing about it? It all works together.” – Chris Dean, interview with Paul Morley for New Musical Express, April 1986.
Any rare on-line references to Redskins are tagged with words such as socialism, soul, working class and skinhead- without this incendiary trio plus inflammatory brass section there would never have been socialist skinhead soul, and we might not have knowingly missed such a thing, but it would have been a damned shame such a thing never happened. Such a thing where a debut single used Leon Trotsky’s birth name for the title of one of its two sides, ‘Lev Bronstein’, where righteous anger and militant commitment was given hectic electric swing and a kind of utilitarian glam punk swagger. Redskins weren’t a “what if”; they were the real thing, eyeing up real change.
Topics associated with the internet Redskins naturally include class war, politics, Thatcherism, Miners’ Strike, right to work, co-operation, Rock Against Racism, social disorder, economic cuts and punk rock. You get your bearings, you understand there they were operating in the tense, turbulent right wing stained early 1980s Britain when explicit youth tribes were still very much a discriminatory force; fighting for rights not chart positions, although hit singles would come in handy to spread the word and share the sentiments; heard first on broadminded John Peel mating mutant rockabilly with gung-ho garage band activism; skulls shaved with intentions, shirts fit for heroes, jeans cropped with meaning, image tucked behind anti-image; within sight and sound pop-wise of The Jam, Dexy’s and the Specials feeding mod, soul and ska through a punk primed agit-Brit filter; angry as hell; channelling James Brown, Arthur Conley, Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett, Curtis Mayfield and Otis too, the beating and hurting from slavery you could hear in the music, roughly speaking transferring the move on up, say it loud, people get ready into a broken, desperate, outsider Britain; condemning mean spirits, foolish hearts and political corruption like a Yorkshire MC5 as if there was no such thing as rock without rebellion and pop is an ideal place for propaganda. Redskins knew how messages and meaning can come through sound, beat and energy as much as language, passing through minds, pressing into experience, creating a politics of becoming.
For a brief time they were known as the too dead-on right-on No Swastikas. They became Redskins in 1982, named after a crew of very much non neo-Nazi progressive minded Sheffield skinheads – because there were other Redskins, they could not be The Redskins, but this lack of a cliched rock group “The” also hinted how Chris Dean, singer, guitarist and to some extent leader of the gang was as much knowing, slippery, shrewd, self-contesting pop conceptualist as mouthy intimidating preacher man. He knew his political history, about the puzzling traditional British resistance to revolution, the dangers of a repressive social environment, of a rigid, unbending adult world, and the consequences of the destruction of heavy industry. He knew his pop history, with a sharp, no-nonsense approach – not one diluting drop of fancy prog – to mixing influences based around the amplified glories of the three-minute single from Motown and ska to the Mekons and Dr.Feelgood. Pop music had been an important new form not just in distributing new types of empathy and insight, but also in contributing to the invention of new kinds of people, new kinds of communities, enabling social bonds to form that are not mediated by judgemental institutions.
Dean was an unforgiving critic of the uninspiring softness of some of the well-intentioned left-ish acts associated with the Labour Party courteously courting a youth audience at the time. He was also the masked and crusading ‘X. Moore’, changing identity to defy The Man – in this case the dole office – writing zesty, street level pieces, investigative and theoretical, for the then at-the-very-centre-of-things NME, adding charged updated post “No Future” Orwellian sense amidst often more imperial or airy-fairy seeming critics. (J’accuse moi!) Wanting to do and experience more, the music writer imagined a group that walked like the Supremes and talked like the Clash, and with Martin Hewes and Nick King kicking up red power rhythm there was in the nick of time a group called Redskins using common language in an honest direct way to communicate complex thoughts.
After their primitive but rip-roaring indie debut and the flash pressure of follow-up ‘Lean on Me!’ reaching number 3 in the increasingly important independent charts, Redskins signed to London Records of major label Decca. They followed the Clash and Buzzcocks big label route rather than the more expected independent way, rooted in the band’s love of pop and the “criminal waste” of writing songs that needed to be heard whilst languishing as a merely beloved cult, trapped in a ghetto, for populist Dean an elitist form of cowardice. It was a strategic compromise, a tactical concession, made with the faith of the innocents that this would lead to being able to properly promote their causes. Their single studio album ‘Neither Washington Nor Moscow’ made it to number 31 in the album charts, breathing contemptuous heat down the necks of Phil Collins and Duran Duran, but stalled there, as if such an astringent confrontational work – soul expression plus Marxist dialectic, labour times love, songs reaching deep inside a sense of injustice – could not ultimately be allowed through the guarded gates of the mainstream and into the mostly obedient pop everyday.
When they formed, before the world drowned itself in music and fashion, and associated self-interest and vanity, there was a definite sense whether coming directly from Crass and the Mekons, intellectually from the Gang of Four or abstractly from the Pop Group and the Fall that pop music was a way to popularise revolutionary politics and that self-taught cultural energy was a vital, realistic alternative to mundane, repressive education systems, to the spirit sapping, controlling nine to five or dead-end waste of time and spirit unemployment. It was a time when working class music about urgent contemporary things was being listened to and acted on by working class kids.
The usual politically weighted Redskins tags and topics only tell part of the picture, though. There needs to be other words in the list to fully explain the range and rage, and drive and dreams, calling and falling of one of the great unknown and lost British groups. It was more than the hard hitting revved up protest and forceful rants, more abrasively entertaining and uplifting than being benefit playing, union supporting dry and worthy, and not as lacking in come and get it showbusiness and mind tingling poetry as it might seem. Joy and release had to be part of political thought.
Redskins were seeing red and tearing at the false pretences of power, but they were convinced that dance was part of the protest repertoire. It’s a way that the marginalised and neglected can act together, start something new, recreate the world according to their taste, the essence of revolutionary thinking. For Redskins, pop and dancing was about starting something new, in the way a revolution sets out to. If politics exists inside our bodies as a kind of dormant knowledge, Dean and comrades somewhere between naively and aggressively set out to release that knowledge with the confidence of those who thought success was a foregone conclusion. They didn’t want to waste their time singing protest songs. They wanted a reaction, a greater level of awareness.
In terms of tags apart from the obvious list, I’d also go for quest, mystery, secret, courage, loneliness, disappointment, and even failure, self-abandonment and tragedy, because this story ends . . . well, it just ends, leaving few traces, no trails, few opportunities for padded sentimentality and nostalgia, almost a burnt-out blankness that ultimately reveals the abrasive honesty and savage originality of the idea of the band, which was as much about ideas as it was music, and those ideas were relevant up to the time they split, and then immediately not. When I interviewed him for the NME in spring 1986 – Art of Noise NME meeting Redskin NME and more or less getting on, linked by the multi-faceted functions of pop – Dean was as you’d expect deadly serious and quietly intense, and hard to shut up, in a good way. “Talking is a big part of what we do. We go on and on, explaining, reconciling, defining, bloody talking. The talk completes our performance if you like. You can’t do the things we do, say the things we say in our music, and then go – we’re not going to talk about it.”
But there was a down to earth, self-deprecating lightness of touch and an unphased determination that didn’t suggest within a short while there would be such a muted come-down, and an exit stage left. “I’m much more than X. Moore, grim menace, or Chris Dean, bald third-rate Trotskyist.” But history sweeps you up and drops you to the ground in its own time for its own reasons.
The Miners’ Strike ends in defeat, the strongest union in Britain is humiliated, the Labour party is left stranded, Wham! sing white sugared soul for the Thatchered ’80s, and voices of the left are demoralised. Redskins disappear, recognising that the cocky, contentious energies of punk had too, vinyl was dying, and any resistance was drifting through the night on the way to dreamier, perversely more entrepreneurial rave, a more shadowy musical presence, and rock becomes increasingly larky and nostalgic, or just strokes an audience rather than challenges it. For Redskins, there was no point merely repeating the rallying war cries, the worked-up complaints, becoming a bleeding hearts revival band. How pathetic and futile it would have been to regularly regroup simply to have a party, an insular series of anniversaries and reviews, and remind everyone that the liberation demanded, threatened and even promised in their songs never happened.
To carry on would have been a sign of weakness, a sign that what they said, or shouted, in their songs, through their appearance, was just an act, one more tarted-up musical distraction, something that would forty years later be laden with well-meaning but self-serving and glib hashtags. To join in with the sort of empty routine Dean had always scorned as he rebelled against subordination would have been exactly the sort of hypocrisy the group railed against. Put up or shut up.
This really was a case of; you had to be there. This was the time when a spontaneous musical reaction to a perceived crisis was pretty much the whole point. After that, in the purist sense they advocated in their music, no reforming, no reunions, no rewinding, no going through the motions, and complacently remembering the good – or bad – times. The rhythm of this particular would be revolution slams to an end. Dean exiles himself, disappears into his own mind and vague rumours like a decentred Syd Barratt, or into an anonymous steady job like a revolted, retired Rimbaud. For Dean, it was the end of the word. (Those with something to say often fall silent for years on end; the mediocre are unstoppable. Societies in decline – or maybe societies overhauled and undermined by social media – have no need for visionaries, etc etc.) The noise of militancy became the silence of reclusiveness that is an artistic statement in itself.
Redskins were the sound of history not quite being made. A revolution once more never materialised. Not for old time’s sake of anything, or because there might be some sort of clue in their approach about how pop might constructively revitalise purposefully directed ideological energy, but we shouldn’t forget Redskins abruptly crashing in and out of pop history in the absolute belief they were on the verge of achieving the impossible. They took on the world. It was a struggle. They were doomed to failure. It was magnificent. It was all true.
Paul Morley, London, 2019.