tv Going Underground RT June 9, 2018 9:30am-10:01am EDT
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the democrats only looked at leadership. for it also turning down the queen were writers like hardy sure huxley and pincher i interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power to make during that power it is a central that people remain in ignorance but they live in ignorance of the truth even the truth that lives what surrounds us therefore is a bost tapestry of life artists to turn down on us from the queen those like lowery more and hockney and actors also like peter o'toole julie christie and vanessa redgrave so you have stood firm and you have refused to be intimidated by the threats of a small bunch of zionists to dylan's. pavia. behavior
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is an insult to the stature of jews all over the world and to their great and heroic record of struggle against fascism and oppression meanwhile musicians rejecting on is included vaughan williams john leyden of the sex pistols david bowie and brian ino we also late between extreme hubris and extreme paranoia the war on terror was paranoia the triumph of of the west and the downfall of communism was who brasi gun for some turning down orders like the o.b.e. with for what the east stood for empire a lot of the atrocities that were for the soon to africans as was a result of the slave trade and which was invoked by the empire and i wouldn't be now. account like a bad thing for me to do to upset the. and then be a member of the opposition empire it's
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a subject that has come under renewed scrutiny in the wake of the so-called windrush scandal in u.k. prime minister tourism aids hostile environment which led to deportations of british people with africa or be in the street and one icon of caribbean cultural interchange celebrates half a century this year trojan records the label was promoted by a d.j. who did so much to fuse the rebellion of political music in global culture don let's we sat down with the celebrated director and clash videographer at the old camden palace now koko in camden town in north london. john thanks for being on going underground here in a venue the old camden palace where the clash of course meaningful to me empty today on like it was then we have to start of a trojan records half a century the anniversary tell me about its provenance and what it shows about the jamaica u.k. connection the trojan records is a tremendously important label that started in one thousand nine hundred sixty eight when i was twelve years old and by the turn of sixty nine it was having an
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unprecedented amount of chart hits a run that's never happened again in the last sixty years and this is very empowering to my generation i'm first generation british born black which kind of rolls off the tongue now but back then it was a very confusing concept and it was through the music of trojan that we began to find out what we were about to understand the whole jamaican culture and what was very interesting about the label is this is that emerged at the same time as the birth of a particular british subculture called skinheads now i have to be very clear about this especially for russia when i don't i'm talking about all around the world as i'm talking about the fashion version not the fascist version that it became in the late seventy's in the mid seventy's. and what was interesting about that whole thing was that it's trojan soundtrack that movement and that can sort of acted as
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a tool for social change because it kind of helped black and white youth to unite in the schools on the streets and in the clubs and you got to understand this is against a backdrop of serious racial tension and we're talking sikh six sixty eight here when politicians like powell are doing the rivers of blood speech and really playing on the fears of the older generation but through the music the b.b.c. just recently played the entire rivers of blood speech ok and it really a grassroots level it was the music and the jamaican culture that was helping people to get on it was by understanding our differences that brought us closer together not by focusing on our differences because the only reason the caribbean people of caribbean provenance is in the news at the moment is the windrush whole when right thing i mean my god these are second generation people who were born in this country who were deported where did they go that they were so quietly living in britain without
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a passport oh you're exaggerating somewhat i mean basically what happened is in the fifty's. the empire asked for the africa to come and help rebuild the country after the second world war and there's been a lot of focus recently through in russia about them bringing their cheap labor which they did but just as important is that they brought their culture and it's that that's made the biggest impact on this country because it's changed the identity of what it means to be british you know if you check the kids on the street now the clothes the where they wear the way they speak their attitude and the music they listen to it's all coming from jamaica man but this is the twenty first century the trojan records they have number ones back then double barrel when you had dennis and greg isaac's a trio called bob marley in the wailers people probably haven't heard of that so long ago how could we possibly be still talking about identity and the hostile environment against people who was parents maybe grandparents were born there well hey it's
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a. popular theme around the world at the moment in the trump climate there's been a lot of focusing on immigration and all the rest of it and it's really sidetracking from bigger problems is money don't trick divide and rule you know and it's a shame to see it being so easily rolled out decade after decade the whole brics it thing is playing on the fears of old white people who have been in this case you're talking about trojan record music about healing our working class white people and working class like the liberal and today these are always the elite what if we can pull in government they want to create or environment the public at large waves or black or whatever color they are obviously responded to the wind or a scandal at all in they've been working things out on the street with the politicians to get you know to detract from the real problems they start blaming problems on him because it's an age old trick blaming the problems of the country on the illegal immigrants and the truth of the matter is this country couldn't operate without immigration and immigration built the nation now you
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contend that music like that from george records directly then fed in to the punk music phenomenon absolutely because how did it how did the salute really well call from through yourself because you were the d.j. at the other offices i mean hit this is what it is we were like minded rebels i mean in the late seventy's it was a time of social crisis economic political and as i said social and no change yeah exactly very similar to where we are today back but in those days i had a soundtrack to ease my pain which was reggae. the popular music in the late to middle age seventy's was totally removed from the feeling on the street so my white friends said about creating a soundtrack that was relevant to their situation of the people for the people by the people and this was punk rock and we kind of turned each other on through you know i like their guitar riffs and their d.i.y.
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ethics which is i think rock's greatest gift to itself and you know from the jamaican side they love the bass lines they loved the musical reports harsh quality of the lyrics you know it wasn't all about love it was like how are we going to live and furthermore how we going to do it together you know we were like minded rebels that kind of aligned ourselves and i guess that was sort of typified by that bob marley song punky reggae party because he recognized it as well you mentioned loving your grammy award winning documentary about the clash you have one of the clash saying that the original i'm so bored of the usa was actually i'm so bored of you and i was someone's ex-girlfriend or girlfriend of the day i think mick jones and written the song and he written more of an emotional kind of doing more than a romantic and he had a lyric i'm so bored of you and jerry came in was like never mind that rubbish will change it i'm so bored with the usa that was joe and you directed their videos of course do you think that they're internationalism because they sang about u.s.
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foreign policy in your liberal economics local government doing the internationalism spain catalonia it came from the internationalism provided by the base of the track from the caribbean as well i think that was one element but you have to understand that joe was the son of a diplomat and in these early years he lived in a lot of different places i think he lived in spain he lived in. morocco and he traveled a lot and joe was very empathetic to the downtrodden and the oppressed yet he was a man of the people very much in the spirit of bob marley's and guilt scott aaronson woody guthrie's and bob dylan's and. well and he was one of them because you did hundreds of music videos but take advantage of filmmaking and what why you liked the film about jimmy cliff the heart it out of a count of just tell me about as i said first generation british born black a very confusing concept in the early seventy's knew what we sounded like because we had our soundtrack we had reggae but had no visual accompaniment other than
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postcards from jamaica colonial images of a guy riding a donkey on a beach with a straw hat or people limbo dancing in one thousand nine hundred one that all changed when i saw this film the harder they come directed by perry haendel jamaica's greatest film and i walked out of that cinema empowered because i knew so much more about my culture and it was then that i actually thought i wouldn't mind expressing myself in some kind of visual medium but in the early seventy's ridiculous idea for a black man it was an old school white man network but then five or six years later punk comes along with the d.i.y. ethic do it yourself i'm looking around in all my white mixer picking up guitars and i'm not worried i better pick up something too i picked up a super eight camera and reinvented myself as don't let the filmmaker there is a lot of reinvention and punk rock and i think that's kind of why we're still talking about it because it weren't just a soundtrack it was a complete subculture can you then see the lineage going from trojan records
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through to punk and then to hip hop absolutely absolutely i mean what you're talking about here is a. music the x. is a tool for social change you know that's what it was about and in a lot of the twentieth century yes you could party to it but you can't spend your life on the dance floor you know venture the musical stop and you have to go out and face reality i think guess what there's some good tunes for that as well. and also you say about d.i.y. culture record executives can't censor like the way they used to try and sense of the data lands you directed the videos of their lyrics in the burst they don't try and censor anything as long as they can turn a buck. i mean they can deal with almost anything these days and i think they've learned that from punk rock how to package a rebellion and kind of castrate it and sell it to the people you know now punks about buying a ramones t. shirt or absurd vicious t.
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shirt you know that's what punks been reduced to and it was never about any of that stuff it's about attitude and a spirit that can actually and for whatever you do man you know i don't even know if we need any more punk musicians we could do some more punk politicians and punk doctors and punk teachers you know i'm saying i think it's very important people understand punk it's not this dead anomaly that began and ended in the late seventy's it has a lineage and a tradition and if you've got a good idea. and the bold you can be part of it that's something i recognize as a very young man you know listening to music that you know is about helping you to be you know you could be about selling you a pair a pair of sneakers has to understand what i'm getting at you know music had that potential back in the day now a lot of it you know is about entertainment. after the breakout thirty years of complacency led to over seventy people dying in the grenfell tower we hear more
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from grammy award winning director and d.j. don't let all the civil coming up in part two of going on the ground. play. i've been saying the numbers mean something they matter the u.s. has over one trillion dollars in debt more than ten dollars crimes happen each day . eighty five percent of global wealth he longs to be all for rich eight point six percent market saw thirty percent year some with one hundred to five hundred per second per second and bitcoin rose to twenty thousand dollars. china's building two point one billion dollars. but don't let the numbers overwhelm. the only numbers
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you need to remember one one doesn't show you can't afford to miss the one and only . play football and bring people together and i'm sure. the exception of good will come on the field of play. for the future of the nature of russia to show that able to. welcome back the grand felt our tragedy britain's most lethal tower block fire will be remembered next week one year after over seventy people died in the poorest
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community of one of europe's richest a week into the trades made backed inquiry into green felt as too many blames everything from firefighters to class war for the atrocity and as the grandfather area prepares for europe's largest street festival the notting hill carnival some were outraged last year when tory m.p. and minister of state for international trade suggested moving the carnival away from the tower in part two of our interview with grammy award winning director and d.j. john let's we speak about what caused wren fell as well as the notting hill carnival which will again this summer be in the shadow of a tragedy characterized by what shadow chancellor john mcdonald called social murder and you seen fears over europe's largest street festival the notting hill carnival in west london over year after year and the emphasis of politicians on drugs knife crime story reason he said that why is it the police presence in glastonbury seems so different to the way police act in france is annoying all gone
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of all the celebration of culture and its potential to unite the people is more important now than ever and i mean a lot we don't realise the code is not really a big street party it was started in the late fifty's as a means to heal what was then a fractured community there was a lot of the riots in the fifty's not exactly and it was conceived as a way not even as a black carnival initially it was about all the local immigrants immigrants to get together irish dogs and blacks exactly polly i mean everybody then and it was actually an indoor event initially it took place in the. the town hall king's cross town hall for a few years it moved around various town halls they used to happen in january to mirror what was going on in trinidad because they have theirs in january anyway england far too cold and it moved to notting hill in the mid sixty's and it's there were it really started to grow and then the sort of afro caribbean community basically took it over for quite a while it was hard jacked by the jamaican sound systems in the early seventy's but no all tribes are welcome and everyone's represented except techno techno don't
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work at a carnival man cheesus do you believe though that music is becoming even more of an issue as regards censorship by the authorities obviously the british police want to take down all these videos by drill artists type of graham music one of them abracadabra saying that this is ridiculous that it's about distraction from cuts to schools youth clubs and social housing yeah exactly i mean you hit the nail on the head it's an absolute distraction once again demonizing the youth aware of we seen that before and yet it distract people from dealing with the real problems you know the cutbacks that was started years ago that slowly eroding a lot of people's rights in this country but the people have let it happen man this erosion hasn't just start in the last ten years or even just take this decade it started in the eighty's and we've let these little things get chipped chipped away you know who is it you said you know the price of freedom is eternal vigilance i
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think it was thomas jefferson can we haven't been vigilant man i mean what do you think they're responsible ground for because it comes off the i think the winder scandal came of the back of the hostile environment came of the back of the ground . reeks of an incompetent government but also i've got to say you know it's all too easy to kind of blame this country's all good at blaming a player i think people need to look at their part in the process how they've allowed these things to happen because as i said earlier they just haven't been in the last two or three years and felt we've allowed them to take liberties with the people for thirty years and this is the end result of people being complacent. or i mean one could say in the eighty's and the late seventy's it was a lot about identity politics feminism and the racism all these different things do you think there's more of an emphasis ironically on class and the uniting of all these disparate ideas into it is the ninety nine percent this time around.
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you know it's what is it's like you have this. was a pendulum thing where it swings from this way all the way that way to really the solution somewhere in the middle because it seems like there's almost an overkill going on at the moment and i guess i wanted to get a more distraction to distract you from actually bigger issues although those issues are very important to individuals obviously but i do wonder whether they do it i mean or something just like all this nonstop nonstop stuff. and it should have been really been dealt with much earlier on in a much more thought out way and it's interesting now we have similar conditions economic racially social all the rest of it but i don't hear too many voices of dissent other than somebody like storms who is a real exception back in the late seventy's it was a movement you know i should say we have a lot of them on our show melissa phonics and dead time for them or lots of different brands or of to talk with you must come across who have with your radio
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show you see the the heightened politics arguably of guilt and then to queasy johnson. you where where are where did they go in their later years of the greatest joint still around and not around jimmy cliff lately i don't think it's the right question i think the right question is where are those kind of people that are in that tradition and in that lineage in the twenty first century who we're talking about people what thirty forty years ago and you know the last half of the twentieth century you can see there was a tradition of these people who would come up every ten years johnny rotten we should mention john leyden he calls himself now but in the twenty first century it seems to me that flatlined why that is i don't really know i have a feeling a lot of it's to do with the aspirations of the young themselves because when we got into this business or this it's form of expression i don't like the word business back in the late seventy's it was an anti-establishment thing. but come
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the twenty first century it seems to me that a lot of people to the young want to get into it to be part of the establishment and if that's your goal i don't really know how radical you can be in a win early i was reading a story to a quote from benjamin zephaniah who's very much of the school of linton crazy johnson and he was saying you know i believe in anacreon revolution but everyone wants to go shopping and i think that summed up the situation twenty first century very well and i mean i don't want to tar everyone with the same brush there are people out there that are trying to say something but in more cases than not they're not the ones getting elevated to a kind of a contract to keep them quiet shut up you're supporting the party we just want to party that you childish gambino video this is america that's all about that you know you can either look at the guy that's in taney you in the front or if you look beyond that and see what's going on in the background it's kicking off i think very clever video and everyone loves in the office actually take us back to how you heard it is more to the point and it has to be said though your some of your films
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do talk about violence just the way that people are now talking about violence then joe strummer says he's trying to set fire to a car in west london and who are to each other member of the clashes thinking of the liberation of throwing a molotov cocktail in the police line do you think the new scare and horror stories of gangs in britain are some thinks uniquely new or this is a tro preview seen for the past few decades and listen the media been creating urban folk devil since the fifty's you know it was the teddy boys back then it was the skinheads and the molds and the punks and they've always looked to demonize the youth they're really trying to express their frustration i'm telling anybody going through a molotov cocktail you'd be better off picking up of paint pen and voting you know to me but you do have to be active in the process and the thing about young people
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is you know when you're young everything's either black or white you can kind of intellectualise the grey bits. and it does lead to anger and frustration but i think you know it's hard to criticize young people expressing that expressing themselves that way when intelligent educated people act much worse worse with corporate crimes as far as i'm concerned and that's thought out criminality you know look you understand they know better young people you're asking young men who can't get a job can't feed his kids to be rational come on strangers often are part of the lyrics of any of these bands but you can see why there are some communities which are glorifying arguably violence in their music as the only desperate option against what they see as as austerity policies rather than your kind of organized ideas of ticking boxes and yeah listen i'm all for it by any means necessary but unless you do that stuff smart it's going to work against you really it's going to
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work against you don let's thank you. don let's say speaking to me at coco in camden town and that's it for the show before we go after the death of the last poets member noureddine widely seen as the grandfather of rap we'll play you out with a lot of poets performing here on going underground keep in touch with us by social media with you on monday called exam calculations three thousand two hundred two years to the day of the sacking of troy in the trojan war hero of the last poets with the streets a calling. calling calling there's always the street. to big time to trick or treat.
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screams abandoned. buildings become the rage the latest. polling on the phrase number one has. gone. both ways you know who it puts on the head. they test the waters and dance. but never the names looking looking over. to hear what. they come to only the only way out because. spose you're to let in devon fan. of the game. becomes. addiction because.
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this is all i've got. is a plot. to start with. if you take. a few people real i'll be romance young. boys young boys keeping that little box it . becomes tempting and. becomes. revving the streets. grabbing their dream that they were found. there's plenty of. these because if you take your cue i'll take a chance. up a romance house a moment. i'll be romantic. for well man. street so call. streets or go.
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the rules faced international law that is the challenge facing main architect and go on to the u.s. the g. seven summit in canada is marred by discord with anger over u.s. tariffs and division over donald trump's suggestion to reinstate russia into the group of leading industrial nations. these photographs capture the moment when a tear gas canister fired by the israeli army gets stuck in the mouth of a palestinian protester the guards of border. google unveils a new range of a moji saying cleaned couples who are gender neutral and salads for the good but all they politically correct.
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