White Panther Party UK:  Armed Electric Love

I BOUGHT A CUP OF COFFEE and a piece of pie, for energy, in a restaurant on the main street. It was crowded with young people. The jukebox was playing rock — music for civilizations to decline by, man.

– Ross Macdonald, The Ferguson Affair (1960)

Join the White Panthers, subvert, attack, destroy, expand, now, now before it’s too late, stop the pigs, support the Black Panthers, support Yippies, Motherfuckers. Start a White Panther Party in your neighbourhood. The time is right, the revolution now, get a gun. Read Guerrilla Warfare by Che.

– SUN (Detroit, November 20, 1968)

Attitudenizing with Mick Farren

‘There were only two White Panthers and Mick Farren was the leader’

– John Peel.[1]

It was probably inevitable that Social Deviant, rock ’n’ roll maven, provocateur and man about town, Mick Farren, would find common cause with Ann Arbor’s White Panther Party; adopting its ten-point programme and wearing its badge before setting in motion a British affiliation. He wasn’t long involved in the White Panther Party UK, not in any hands-on, organisational, way, but he had framed the terms others would base their actions on and would remain a figurehead of sorts, less a leader than a cipher for a brand of revolutionary rock ’n’ roll. Years after the Party had dissolved he is the only indicator in cult memory that the UK iteration had even existed.

Farren belonged to the crowd of young people that Ross Macdonald’s weary, road worn protagonist dismissed as the disrupters of Civilisation’s forward march. The rabble-rouser that was Farren would have pumped another dime into the squalling jukebox, while calling for his generation to join him on the dancefloor to better begin a total assault on the status quo – not with guns but with rock ‘n’ roll. Farren believed that certain strands of popular music could function as a kind of ‘resistance movement against the establishment. Like in France during the war’, he said in 1968, ‘only today it’s sneakier and less direct . . . We don’t live in a completely repressive society like Nazi Germany, so basically the conflict is between an established culture and an emergent one’.[2] However stretched and absurd his analogy, Farren held true to his credo that rock ’n’ roll was an agent of change: ‘when you have a society like the Western free world which is conditioned into thinking that its own way of life is the only way anything else emerging horrifies it’.[3] The middle-class, middle-aged revulsion Elvis fermented, distilled by Dylan, then amplified by The Beatles and the Rolling Stones suggested to Farren that you could have ‘Revolution, in fact, with electric guitars and harmonicas rather than bullets and bombs’.[4]

 Pop music is ‘the only thing which this generation has grown up with and can totally identify with’, Farren said. ‘In the ‘50s teenagers identified with music of ten years earlier – basically Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry are the blues, and the blues grew out of a Negro culture as the only means of getting cultural solidarity. White kids who feel there’s something wrong with their parents way of life have picked up on this feeling, and therefore the blues’.[5] In a piece for Melody Maker, Farren wrote about the influence of rock ’n’ roll: ‘Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers called it “a generation of whites getting back into their bodies”. Some of our parents could never feel what rock was about, but the energy made them uneasy’.[6] The suburban kid self-identifying with the racially oppressed, Norman Mailer’s White Negro, is Farren’s premise. As a way to escape an inherited, stultifying conformity, it was also what motivated the MC5 and lay beneath the foundation of Michigan’s White Panthers.

An Assault on Pig-Death Culture: White Panther Party, USA

The formation of the White Panthers and the naming of its first Central Committee was announced to Detroit’s The Fifth Estate on December 5, 1968:

‘We can’t tolerate this bullshit any longer,’ Sinclair said in a prepared statement. ‘This shit is really starting to stink real bad. If Eldridge Cleaver – or any other brother – is fucked with any further we will be forced to step up our assault on the pig-death culture until the pigs can’t stand it’.[7]

Sinclair was listed as Minister of Information, Pun Plamondon, defence; MC5’s singer, Rob Tyner, Minister of Culture, and the rest of the band were conscripted as Ministers of War; J. C. Crawford, religion; Skip Taube, education; Gary Grimshaw, Minister of Art (in exile); and so on. A cartoon of the MC5 was used as the paper’s cover image.

In Sinclair’s own mimeographed tract, Sun – a free newspaper dedicated to ‘rock and roll, dope, and fucking in the streets’ – he set out the WPP’s Ten-Point Program – a total assault on culture – and its tenets:

We breathe revolution. We are LSD-driven maniacs in the universe. We will do anything we can to drive people out of their heads and into their bodies. Rock and roll music is the spearhead of our attack because it's so effective and so much fun.

We have developed organic high-energy guerrilla rock and roll bands who are infiltrating the popular culture and destroying millions of minds in the process. The MC5 is the most beautiful example.

The MC5 is totally committed to the revolution. With our music and our economic genius we plunder the unsuspecting straight world for money and the means to carry out our program, and revolutionize its children at the same time.[8]

Reviewing the MC5 in 1968 for Village Voice, Richard Goldstein described them as an ‘authentic guerrilla-rock band’.[9] Their credentials as revolutionaries were part based on their musical template which drew heavily on ‘the R and B genre, but ironically’, he wrote, ‘it is the white-boy rock ‘n’ roller jive that stays with you after the tonal assault has died down. . . They move with the kind of energy long gone from rock but not forgotten . . .’ James Brown, Chuck Berry, Little Richard . . . only The Who ‘utilise these clichés with such mastery of the logistics of rock’. [10] This was the same derivation of rock ’n’ roll that Farren, in practice with The (Social) Deviants and in theory (with his sloganeering), was mastering in. He would have had no hesitation in embracing and echoing Goldstein’s observations:

The kids get the point (and the MC5 is definitely a kid’s group). Far from the random ecstasy of a California freak-out, there is a highly directed release of energy. These are the children of insurgency; no wonder they expect their culture to coerce. To watch them standing under the strobes, hands raised in youth-salute, is to understand how pop can serve as a political mirror, refracting reality through slogan and myth . . . I tell Wayne [Kramer] his music is very violent . . . He gives a soft certain smile and answers: “Well that’s rock ’n’ roll”.[11]

The band’s devotion to R&B, as it had for other white youths, encouraged support for the civil rights movement generally and, in their case, with the Black Panthers directly. In his autobiography, fellow traveller, Pun Plamondon, described how he responded to Huey Newton’s suggestions that if white people wanted to help the struggle for liberation they should form a White Panther Party. He and John Sinclair took him at his word with the idea of ‘utilizing the media and culture the way the YIPPIES! do and organize on the street level as the Black Panthers do’.[12] Designed on the sonic blueprint drawn-up by The Yardbirds and The Who, with choreography courtesy of James Brown and His Famous Flames paired with the pizzazz of Motown, the MC5 cut and shuffled an unrivalled combination of showmanship and radical political credentials that was channelled through and through with the  attitude and style of first generation rockers.

Nestled within Ann Arbor’s bohemian, counter-cultural community, a satellite outgrowth from the political and cultural activism fomented by students and faculty at the University of Michigan, Plamondon and John Sinclair organised themselves on the model established by the Black Panthers with a central committee and ministers as well as adopting the uniform of black leather jackets.[13] The MC5 were crucial to the dissemination of the Party’s ideas:

Early on we bought White Panther buttons, little tin affairs with a white panther on a purple background. The MC5 threw handfuls of the buttons to the crowd during shows that were interspersed with political raps. Soon we were printing buttons in the thousands. Among the suburban kids of southeast Michigan, having a White Panther button became a status symbol. With the popularity of the MC5 and the button came the attention of more and more kids, many of whom contacted us and wanted to become real White Panthers. Naturally the parents, school authorities, and police were alarmed to see white suburban teenagers wearing white panther pins and carrying Mao's Little Red Book and reading the speeches of Fidel Castro and Malcolm X. The authorities mobilized for a counterattack.[14]

What attracted Michigan’s suburban rock ’n’ roll delinquents to the WPP worked just as readily with Britain’s equivalents whose distance from the main event, America’s racial politics, only added to their romantic identification with revolutionary outsiders with guitars and amplification.

Phun City – Mud Gutter Music

A July 1970 issue of IT announced the booking of the ‘MC5 for Phun City Spectacular – Detroit Rebels for U/ground Super Fest.’[15] A photograph of Wayne Kramer illustrated the story. Having secured Michigan’s finest, the festival organisers were also hoping to bring a package of the Grateful Dead and Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. Conceived as a benefit to help fund IT’s legal fees following prosecution for running gay contact advertisements, the festival was a highly ambitious endeavour, over 20 acts were announced, including Free, Pretty Things, Pink Fairies, Edgar Broughton Band, Mighty Baby – the cream of the underground. Poets and writers of the calibre of Alex Trocchi, William Burroughs, Michael Horowitz and Jeff Nutall were listed. DJ’s Jeff Dexter, Jerry Floyd and Andy Dunkley would be on hand as comperes. Notting Hill’s Electric Cinema would provide films, lights were by Cyberdescence and Chrisantheum, and a scrum of alternative organisations were scheduled to play some sort of inchoate role; among them Hells Angels (East London Chapter), Release – a free legal advice service – and The West London Motherfuckers. The site at Ecclesden Common, near Worthing, Sussex, would be designed by Cedric Price – an experimental architect who had worked with Buckminster Fuller.

Phun City would take place on July 24–26, between festivals held in Bath and on the Isle of Wight. 150,000 had turned up for the former, double that were expected for the latter. IT’s reporter considered the west coast event to be too organised, overly policed: ‘Everything was well planned from the fixed food prices and the mass sleeping tents right down to the special Release office. The food lasted, the medicine was OK. In fact it was just like going on a school outing’. But . . . ‘authority did remain too much in control . . . and worst of all there wasn’t enough dope around . . . Whatever the reason we all remained very tight – very peaceful admittedly – but very tight. There was no open selling of what dope there was, there was no political thinking, no babies born, no making love in public, none of the love for life that you associate with Woodstock’s three days. You can see more fun and community on Southend beach’.[16] Beyond the walls of the festival, from the stage of a flatbed truck, the Pink Fairies and Hawkwind entertained the more dissident freaks locked out from or unimpressed by a more regulated environment.

 ‘Phun City Rave – But Then . . . Carnage!’ was the headline of Friends review of the festival after blind ambition had smacked head first into an inescapable reality. The event had looked like it would end before it had even begun when the local council sought an injunction that caused the Festival’s backers to pull out. The court case was quickly dropped but preparation time had been lost and the day was only saved after pirate radio entrepreneur, Ronan O’Rahilly, stepped in with financing in return for film and television rights. Tickets were being sold at £2 for 3 days and £1 per day, but it soon became obvious to all there was no way the ground could be enclosed and entrance managed. Even when turned into a free festival, attendance was relatively low at around 3,000. All appeared to agree that the private caterers were a rip-off and that alternative means of food distribution would have to be found for any future events. As at Bath, it rained over the weekend, the mud and wet adding to the sense of things being out of control, no doubt to the utter joy of those who had found the bigger, better organised, festivals too restrictive.

The MC5 made their British debut after sundown on Saturday, those in attendance danced while Mick Farren took note and set in train the idea of forming a White Panther Party UK.

White Panther Party UK: From the IoW to Abbey Wood via Berwick St, W1.

The security arrangements [for the Isle of Wight festival] are probably some of the most awesome since World War II. The entire arena is surrounded by a double wall of ten foot high corrugated iron, with guards and dogs patrolling the space between the walls . . .

The Pink Fairies & the newly-formed British White Panther Party are working on an alternative Free Festival somewhere adjacent . . . Spokesman, Paul Rudolph told IT: ‘The idea is to provide free music, free food & some kind of focal point for what looks to us like a very soul-less event’.[17]

IT published a three page diary of the event, with an introduction by Farren; he saw the Festival as a symbol of ‘the way the wealth of the underground is at present distributed’ – enclosures within enclosures, separate spaces for the elite who are guarded by private security, the commodification of love and peace.[18] The Pink Fairies and Hawkwind entertained those outside the perimeter fences, joined by ex-Pretty Thing Viv Prince on the Friday night and for over three hours  the ‘horrid, unstoppable electronic monster’ played on – ‘The pen shakes with reminiscence’.[19]

The British White Panther Party issued a statement: they were few in number, it said, the ‘situation too vast for any small group to instigate or forestall the anger of the people’. Condemning the Festival’s sponsors, who it accused of being profit motivated and ripping off the people. In turn, the bands fell in line – projecting only ‘towards a front stall elite’. [20]  Using the WPP as his front, Farren called for a ‘festival of the people, by the people & for THE PEOPLE!!!’[21]

In an October 1970 issue of IT, set verso to a page given over to John Sinclair’s ‘message to the people of Woodstock’ was the WPP Ten-Point Programme that was printed alongside a three column explanation of the British Panthers’ aims and objectives. Brothers and sisters with their American counterparts, but posed as an English solution to English problems. Positive responses to the adverts they had been running in IT over the previous months suggested there was a demand for what they had to offer, ‘one of the first things we hope to get together is a People’s Grocery Store’ – a cooperative system for the distribution of food:

For people to be involved in their neighbourhood is essential. Many people are empty, hungry for something to do, wanting to help but not quite sure what to do. The store (which to have meaning would be so much more than a store) could be the cornerstone of a real community. The thing to realise is that White Panthers are individuals with a common cause, not followers needing a leader & something to belong to.[22]

The emphasis on distributing food to the needy, which echoed a core element of the Black Panther social programme, defined a key activity of the various WPP UK chapters that appear in the wake of Farren’s call to armed electric love. The evil necessity of working with ‘hip’ capitalist individuals and corporations to fund festivals and to support community action was discussed. The piece finished with news of the incarcerated American White Panther members John Sinclair, Pun Plamondon and Skip Taube.

The second WPP report followed in a November/December edition of IT, key figures in the paper’s organisation were listed as making up a provisional committee:

Brenda Anderson – information

Joy Farren – finance

Edward Barker – culture

Mick Farren – defence

Paul Lewis – co-ordination

Steve Mann – co-ordination

Dave Goodman and Stephen X – without portfolio

IT’s editorial team were essentially the Party’s members and committee; the paper’s offices its centre of operations.

As part of the policy to rob the hip-rich to give to the poor, a campaign had been started against the musical Hair that it claimed had made £300,000 in the last two years: ‘We’re demanding that 1% of those profits (£3,000) be given back to the community Hair is exploiting’.[23] They were also mobilising against police harassment in the Notting Hill area, it was reported. Free from the everyday oppression of the American communities the Black Panthers were putatively supporting, the WPP UK kept up a running account of acts of persecution by agents of the establishment – the pigs. That these confrontations tended to extend from lifestyle choices, usually involving the consumption of drugs, rather than the lived reality of racial oppression, was a point of distinction between Black and White Panthers that barely troubled the British contingent.

The food programme was ongoing, it was noted in the 2nd WPP UK report, but it had hit difficulties and support was now being requested. Communicating who they were and what they hoped to achieve was a priority: ‘we’re continuing to take every opportunity to use the mass media for propaganda purposes – as is the case of the Frost programme hi-jacking’.[24]  Farren, alongside other UK freaks, had joined hands with Jerry Rubin in disrupting the David Frost show, a high-profile moment where the underground erupted into the consciousness of suburban Britain. For those wishing to publicly display their identification with the Party, White Panther ‘badges were now available’ to purchase.[25] Finally, the formation of a Manchester chapter was announced. It was led by IT alumni Sue Small – one of the few women to get involved with the Party at an organisational level.

In the New Year, coverage of the Party’s activities was limited to a few block ads in IT, then, in February, the paper reported on Abbey Wood Chapter’s attempt to defy eviction from a squat in Raglan Road, Plumstead:

Inspector Darvill from Woolwich arrived and asked the squatters to leave because they were ‘trespassing on GLC property’. He was answered with a shout of ‘We intend to defend our home and we have a right to do it!’ and much fist clenching. Two uniform pigs then broke in through the basement window and made their way to the back passage which had been barricaded with a bedstead and other pieces of furniture. In spite of strong resistance by the squatters, the barricade was eventually torn down and after a pitched battle they were kicked, dragged or thrown out of the house. There were no arrests.[26]

Prior to Christmas the Chapter had petitioned Woolwich area stores for perishables, about £200 worth was collected which they then distributed to ‘communes, old people and a psychiatric hospital’.[27]

 The following month the WPP report was solely from the Abbey Wood Chapter, authored by John Carding, ‘co-ordinator’, who was pictured with various members of Hawkwind and Pink Fairies. A successful benefit concert featuring the two bands had been held on February 12, attracting a 700 capacity crowd, £100 was raised. Housing and the free food programme were highlighted: ‘We are trying to make the Panthers in our area a catalyst for local peoples/revolutionary/community activity . . . Unity is our strength. If we work together we can win’.[28] Attempts to organise at local schools was reported on in April.[29] The contact address given was still the IT offices, when not squatting, Carding lived with his parents.

Whatever his living arrangements, Carding was moving operations up a gear. In April the Party was advertising their first dedicated publication, Chapter?, with ‘Articles from Agitprop, Gay Lib, Mick Farren, Schools Action Union, AND LOTS MORE . . .’[30] The WPP schools policy played a role in Carding’s next dispatch for IT when he reported that Tom X – Minister of Education – had been threatened with expulsion for distributing Party leaflets at Abbey Wood Comprehensive. Hiding his surname behind the borrowed alias chosen by Malcolm X in the States and Michael X in Britain had obviously not worked for Tom, but he was not alone, the Croydon/Bromley and East Grinstead Chapters also had schoolkid adherents. Abbey Wood’s first Minister of Information was also announced, Ray Carne, and his postal address was given.[31] What all this activity amounted to was an indication that the centre had shifted from IT’s office in Berwick St., W1 to South East London. In a June issue of IT, the Party announced new chapters in Exmouth, Rochdale, Ilford and Glasgow.[32]

 Chapter? was a substantial publication, 58 mimeographed pages. After a brief general introduction from the Abbey Wood Chapter membership, Mick Farren opened proceedings with a dystopian depiction of ‘The Shape We’re In’ – the planet is dying and our rulers are both totally corrupt and insane:

We learned to view our planet as a ship in space. We realised it is on a course for destruction, with madmen at the controls. We have to hi-jack the Spaceship, and change course before it is too late, and it is almost too late already.

–      Mick Farren, Minister of Defence, White Panther Party, UK[33]

Carding reset the scene and argued for the need for a participatory, interventionist set of actions that began at the local. Items on squatting, the arts group, free food programme and a trip to the coast for nine neighbourhood children. A basic aim of the WPP UK was to ‘operate all services for the benefit of the whole community, and not for the profit of the few’.[34] Offering free community services was fundamental, these would include transport, home and vehicle repairs, clothing, baby-sitting, hairdressing, cooking and the like. Much of this would be centred around a community market, but the success of these ventures would depend on people coming together to help one another: ‘NONE OF THESE IDEAS CAN WORK UNLESS YOU MAKE THEM. . . The pig exploiters aren’t going to hand over their businesses to the community without a fight. Help expand these ideas, and hit the Pig where it hurts in his pocket’.[35] Such communiqués were pitched at the group’s peers, the language used surely alienating to anyone who didn’t share their world view even if they felt the injustice that Carding and company were railing against. If the Party’s aims were laudable in themselves the means to achieving them often appeared to be out of reach.

Sections on town planning followed before the familiar WPP ten-point programme was listed. On page 16 a statement from the Manchester Chapter demanded the abolition of work, money and the state. Reviews of the latest Jefferson Airplane LP and a New Cross record shop were given space alongside a prose poem, of sorts, by Fairies’ drummer Twink. Schools Action Union’s aims were listed over three pages, which was followed by a page on the Black Union and Freedom Party’s fight against fascism and another from the Gay Liberation Front. More poems, agitprop and cartoon panels from UPS underground comix filled out leftover space; also from a UPS source was a lengthy piece on the freeing of John Sinclair. Support was given for Ian Purdie and Jake Prescott, two imprisoned men linked to the Angry Brigade. Eight pages were devoted to a July 1970 WPP revision of the ten-point programme (it would be published as a standalone twice more by the Abbey Wood Chapter in 1972). The final pages were filled with small ads. The sign-off was ‘armed love’.

Into the winter, reports of police harassment and tales of direct action were published in IT.[36] Capt. Shine, Minister of Information, Glasgow Chapter described the White Panthers as probably ‘the most alive and subversive group operating in the city’.[37] They had been subjected to harassment not only from the police but also from ‘gentlemen in pin-striped suits running a protection racket. The Panthers have gone underground for the moment’.[38]

Raising funds was a continual concern, the easiest means to fill the coffers was to organise benefit shows, which also raised a greater consciousness of the Party’s existence among their peer group. Two recent concerts had helped the cause:, the first with Hawkwind and Pink Fairies on February 12 and the second with Clark/Hutchinson and Mighty Baby on April 16, the former realising over a £100.

Suburban Planning: WPP UK Get Busy

As of January 1972, a block ad in IT listed the WPP UK chapters as Abbey Wood, Rochdale, West London, Glasgow and Ilford with new, or soon to be formed, groups in Portsmouth, Bedford, Hounslow, Croydon and Cardiff.[39] The Party appeared to be growing exponentially, Abbey Wood members, or those loosely affiliated, who were named checked in the Chapter’s publications, included Sean O’Brien, Steve Leman, Pete Bray, Dick Tilbury, Keith Bailey, Rob Wilton, Mick Powell, Adrian McDowell, Jim Savine, Bill Knight, Debbie Knight, Mick Brown, Mick Reed, Phil Stringer, Karen Hearne, Steve Graves, Keith and Sharon Brittland and Ray Carne. Co-ordinator, as always, was John Carding, who had recently returned from a fortnight in West Germany where he attended a political conference at Sonnenberg, near Hanover, and gave advice on starting a German WPP chapter.[40] Also that month, the Kensington Post reported on the activities of the West London Chapter, who were distributing free food under the flyover in Portobello Road, the fourth time they had run the event. The cost of the initiative had been supported by Hawkwind, The Pink Fairies, Oz and IT.[41]

Through the first half of 1972, the Exmouth Chapter published at least nine issues of its news sheet, Boot, later Exmouth Boot, which doubled as the student organ at Rolle College – a teacher training institute. John Gill and John Rowbottom were its principal activists. Running in tandem with Exmouth’s journal was East Grinstead’s Gnome and Catalyst; the latter an effort by a pupil at Imberhorne Secondary that was stopped by the school authorities due to him advocating the smoking of grass in its pages. Edited by Graham Dowdall and John Moore, with contributions from Benedict Carter, Roger Hayes, Allison MacMillan and Richard Green, Gnome ran for at least ten issues; its stated purpose was essentially the same as for the other chapters:

Gnome is a community newssheet for the East Grinstead. It is run by a few local radicals including local White Panthers and is an attempt to let all groups in East Grinstead have a say. We are going to report what is happening in the community truthfully, without undue censorship, but avoiding needless sensationalism or distortion of what we see as the truth. We want to show what is wrong with the town and society in general and report what various groups are trying to do about this.[42]

The first issue ran a cartoon of an ‘Armchair Revolutionary’, which featured the White Panther figure sitting on a crapper, a Molotov cocktail at its feet and a sign on the wall: ‘Please do not flush sanitary towels or revolutionaries down the toilet. Thank you’. Captioned, inside the word bubble, ‘Meh!  The only thing worth blowing up in Grinstead is Gnome!’. The music scene covered in the newssheet included wholesome praise for local band Halifax and a report on the Reading Festival. Boot ran a Marc Bolan lyric, ‘A Day Laye’, but otherwise both magazines’ concerns were resolutely with the local.

At some point in the Spring, the first issue of White Trash was published as West London Chapter’s in-house organ of record, they had a nucleus of 11–12 members who included Richard Aulton, Steve Gilmore, Alan James and Vicki Norman. Preceded by High Fever, a six-page news sheet printed in a run of 100 and given away at an OZ Independence Day carnival and on the street, White Trash ran through the usual list of direct action initiatives. Focus once more was at a local level, but materials included an unattributed passage from ‘Zen and Rock Throwing’ and ‘Seven Sins of the Urban Guerrilla’ from the Mini Manual of the Urban Guerrilla.[43] The issue concluded with an acknowledgement to those who had helped and inspired, which, in retrospect, gave a perfect summation of the culture the WPP UK operated within:

THANKS AND LOVE TO EVERYONE WHO HELPED ? – – –

STEVE – Brian – RICHARD – Eddie – MOIRA – Ted – SUE – Marie – Sue –  BLENHEIM PROJECT? – Pink Fairies (!) – PHILIPPA – Mick – WISHBONE – Alan – Mick – LSD – The Who – STARSHIP BARK – Foundation – RICE – Phlin City – ARTS LAB –Frendz – TEA and EGG ROLLS – Mountain Grill – GREEN Genes – AL'S – Powis Square – IAN & JAKE – Stephen McCarthy – CIDER – Paul – JOHN SINCLAIR – G.L.F. – Ernie – HAWKWIND – MC5 – AFGHAN – Virgo – PRUDENCE – and the black and white one – VIETCONG – Yoga – SPIRITUAL MASTERS O – Tao – I CHING – Tarot – Speed – COMPENDIUM – Liberateria – B.I.T. – No.6 – MARKET drop on road VEG – Vicki – CLARE – Keith – Paul – PAUL & CLIVE for the COVER – ANGELA – Telecommunications – FREE THINGS – I.T. – 0Z – Street theatre and the poets and buskers – HAPPY TRIPS – STONED BRAINS IN SPACE – Metropolitan POLICE – Energy and Matter Trees, trodden grass – totoises [sic.] and falling Leaves – ELECTRIC MOVIES – Amsterdam – GRASS – Hair – CLARE and her far out VAN – Doreen and the LADY across the WAY who gives us FOOD – RUPERT – GOOD VIBES – Acid – HOGFARM – Epping Forest – RIDERS on the Storm – HEAT THAT KEEPS US WARM – The FOUR HORSES of the APOCALYPSE – and the WARRIORS OF THE RAINBOW – these are the people we DO NOT KNOW – Tommy – ROD STEWART – Trevor – OTHER PEOPLE'S ROLL Ups – Soft Matter – HARDWARE – Music – WATER – Fire – EARTH – Space – LIFE – Spectrums of Colour – COSMIC CONSCIOSNESS – Caterpillars of Humanity – FOOD – Brown Rice – and Veg – GEORGE JACKSON – Dope – SPHERES OF EXPERIENCE IN THE PAST and REMEMBER THE FUTURE –

LOVE & TANKS – TO ALL

FOR WITHOUT YOU

THIS MAGAZINE WOULD NOT

BE POSSIBLE

In March, as a means of making themselves more visible to the local community, while playing up the idea of being a persecuted group, a protest was organised by Carding against ‘biased and distorted’ reports on the Party’s activities in the Kentish Independent: ‘Arriving at 3 o’clock in Woolwich High Street (where the paper’s offices are) we moved off in mock battle formation, distributing leaflets and informing citizens of the motives of the demo’, wrote Carding.[44] Around a dozen took part – less a demonstration of strength than an act of street theatre.[45]  Carding was the only Abbey Wood member present, the rest of the ‘performance artists’ were made up of the Croydon/Bromley Chapter, including founding member 22-year-old Brian Nevill, his wife Linda, Jeff Tree, Jerry Peck, Brian McCarthy and schoolboy Panther Rob Warr. Other members of the Chapter not in attendance that day included Alex and Kelvin, surnames unknown, Alan Male and Brian Eve.[46]

At the beginning of the year, the Croydon/Bromley Chapter had published its own journal, Street Sheet. Brian Nevill was behind this initiative, alongside his friend Chris Lansdowne he had started Croydon’s Red Fist Movement – their aims were aligned with the Black Panther Party’s – revolution and the liberation of the people – with the freeing of Angela Davis and the Soledad Brothers a stated priority. The pair were left-leaning but wary of getting involved with the factional, dogmatic and humourless politics of established Marxist and Trotskyist groups. One aspect that clearly differentiated the WPP UK from such groups was their espousal of hedonistic pursuits – perhaps not dope, guns and fucking in the street but certainly sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll. Moreover, as the historian of left-wing activism in Croydon, Daniel Frost, explains: ‘For the young white participants in Croydon’s underground scene, American figures like Malcolm X and the Black Panthers provided an example – and a style – of confrontational, liberatory politics which was distinct from that of the older white left’.[47] A large part of the attraction of the White Panthers for Nevill was that they looked west toward America rather than east to Russia. For Nevill and Farren alike, rock ’n’ roll was part of the Party’s life blood.

The first issue of Red Fist & Bust newssheet was a mix of typed and hand written pages that was produced in a run of 63 copies in the late Autumn, 1971. Listing a set of confrontations with the police, the Movement advised: ‘ALWAYS COMPLAIN (DON’T TAKE NO SHIT!)’.[48] Challenging figures of authority was their pronounced mode of action, much of the editorial content was concerned with giving guidance on what to do when being arrested or hassled alongside information on new drugs legislation. On a higher vein, a recipe for ‘grass omelette’ concluded if you can’t get that together, ‘don’t sweat, scrambled eggs work just as well’. Numbers 2 and 3 of Red Fist & Bust were exponential improvements on the initial issue in terms of layout and print quality. The content remained fixed on opposing authority and supporting the Black Panthers, but included guides to planning a trip to India and growing marijuana. Approximately a hundred copies of the 2nd and 3rd issues were printed and distributed gratis.

 In January 1972 Red Fist & Bust had given way to two publications, Street Sheet, the house organ for the Croydon/Bromley Chapter of WPP UK, which Nevill pulled together, and Community Press, captained by Lansdowne, that aimed at organising and providing information for the residents of the New Addington estate, it ran for five issues from April–August 1972. Four issues of Street Sheet were published in the first half of the year; its goals were set out in an editorial:

STREET SHEET JANUARY 1972

Back in Autumn last year, the Red Fist Movement first came together as a loosely defined group based in Croydon. It consisted mainly of the Angela Davis/Soledad Brothers Defence Committee; the free news and Information sheet called Bust which acted as Red Fist's voice as well as being a community underground paper; and a section (originally called Bust Movement) dealing with the problems of young people in the community, arrests, drugs, rent, and general hassles. By the end of the year, the Movement was evolving a definite direction. It was decided to concentrate on imminent issues in the direct community, which was New Addington. At this point Bust News Sheet took off in its own direction to become STREET SHEET, which will be a South London based alternative news sheet. Red Fist in the meantime are making a study of environmental relations and living conditions in Addington, which is an ideal place to do this. They are being helped by Suburban Press and Time Out. They are also hoping to start a school for social responsibilities, political consciousness and local history, and have in fact been given the go-ahead for February. In all this Red Fist has acted side by side with the Black Panther Movement and along similar lines as the Panthers, they have now been recognised by the Black Panther Movement as a sister organisation, working in a predominantly white area. Red Fist is also bringing out its own local paper, and Street Sheet wishes them all the best and sends greetings in struggle.

Please remember that any community paper depends on its readers' response for further issues. And also that the price that is now on the front is going to useful purposes. Lastly (but not least) the beautiful illustrations in this first Issue are by Hilary. God bless you baby.[49]

The focus on direct action at a local level was shared with Suburban Press, which had slightly higher production values. Designed by Jamie Reid and featuring his collages, its broad aim was to re-radicalise a moribund scene:

There is a danger that REVOLUTION is becoming, amongst sections of the so called left, a word to be sneered at ––– old hat, unfashionable a bad scene. This is because THE WORD HAS been bandied about by all factions of left publications. It has been defined and redefined, screwed and twisted around frustrated and analysed. It has become ACADEMIC ––– ABSTRACT ––– verbally wanked and intellectually neutered ––– a haunting abstraction to get neurotic by.[50]

Suburban Press’ emphasis was on urban planning, specifically the vast council estate of New Addington, and their theories of living in someone else’s dreamscape – aspirational bourgeois fantasies of abundance:

If there is, and there must be, a radical change here IN ENGLAND, the situation here in England must be understood. This is not a global village;

ENGLAND IS NOT CHINA

ENGLAND IS NOT AMERICA

ENGLAND IS NOT CUBA

ENGLAND IS NOT VIETNAM

Pictures of Che and MAO on the wall are just trendy decoration, groovy![51]

 Part of the publication’s uniqueness was its wry sense of humour, some of which, but not all, was derived from French Situationists (straight-faced quotes from Guy Debord made an appearance in #3) on the dreamscape of suburban living – ‘fresh from the suburb – poodles blood’ announced one advert for the magazine in IT. ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom Willesden’:

The contradiction between urban and suburban becomes more apparent – the city is dying. Suburban is the establishment’s ideal. The natural level to which we should all adhere. Suburban desires and obsessions are as much a part of this as the geographical location itself. This must become the target for struggle.[52]

‘Suburbia Suburbia/Padded cell of society/A haven of isolation/Tasteful rest place for the bourgeoisie’ – which was to be sung to the tune of ‘Jerusalem’. . .[53]

Mutually supportive, Red Fist, Street Sheet, Community Press and Suburban Press had shared access to printing facilities. Jamie Reid, who had been producing Suburban Press out of his flat in Norwood, had introduced Lansdowne and Nevill to Crest Press in Notting Hill, the latter recalls:

Jamie didn’t know anyone else in my sphere, and seemed to be solely engaged in activities that he had started while a student at Croydon Art School. He was focused. A few months older than me, and more intellectual.[54]

These suburbanites were small in number but highly motivated, with a shared purpose, commitment, an abundance of energy and a stated desire to reach out beyond their immediate peer group. The rallying call in the first issue of Suburban Press made its point effortlessly:

NO MEANINGLESS JARGON

WE MUST FIND A COMMON LANGUAGE FOR CHANGE

UNDERSTAND HERE *ENGLAND*

ACTION NOW[55]

Writing in the third issue of the journal, Brian Nevill laid bare the problem of news sheets addressing a self-affirming audience of middle-class hippies. This was especially true of the more established underground press, however, Suburban Press, he thought, side-stepped this solipsism and addressed itself to the ‘mass of working-class kids [who] find the papers unattractive or incomprehensible. Therefore the big selling alternative papers are useless as far as revolution is concerned’.[56] He was writing as a representative of the Angela Davis/Soledad Bros. Defence Group, Croydon Branch, and wanted to explain why issues of Civil Rights in the USA had currency in Britain and at a local level:

Now, to most people in the suburbs of England the problems of black people in American prisons and in America generally seem to be very remote. But the fact is that the establishment that imprisoned George Jackson for eleven years and then killed him before his trial, imprisoned Angela Davis and is keeping hundreds of poor black people in disgusting conditions in prison for committing the monstrous crime of being black, is the same establishment that runs our lives here. It is the same establishment that is bombing innocent people in Vietnam in the name of ‘Peace and Justice’, that is shitting on black people in South Africa, that is firing rubber bullets on people in Northern Ireland, that is imprisoning people for their views and beliefs as in the OZ case, and that is putting people in the clink with no evidence, like Jake Prescott and Ian Purdie (of the reputed Angry Brigade bombings). It is all the same establishment, and people who have any kind of conscience should feel concerned, people who feel humane ought to feel responsible.

For Nevill, British class politics and American racial politics coalesce in the face of oppressive establishments. His role, he argued, was to ‘raise the level of consciousness of ordinary people . . . The ordinary man in the street only thinks that he is far removed from the realities of Angela Davis because he has been conditioned into thinking that way, and in fact he is just being selfish, complacent and a vegetable. If we were all to sit on our arses and let the governments of the world continue their oppression (over us too), they will get heavier and heavier . . . You are part of the answer or part of the problem:

As for the so-called drop-out freaks, they can relax in their cosy world of pretty clothes, turn on the stereo and let people make money out of them. But the pig with the cosh is just round the corner and you ain't gonna stop him with "alterative" rap. We have to get together, show solidarity in our beliefs and do our thing so they can see us doing it (not in our pads) and that 'll scare the shit out of them.

We were all in it together was his message, aligning oneself with an oppressed group over on the other side of the Atlantic was how he and his fellow travellers in Croydon amplified and made that point visible.

***

The politics and aesthetic of the WPP UK and the Croydon news sheets would make a bright return five years later with punk. They were echoed in Jamie Reid’s incendiary graphics for the Sex Pistols, which cannibalised some of the images he first used in Suburban Press, in the racial and social politics of the day, as expostulated by The Clash and Rock Against Racism, and in the fanzine culture that sought to capture lightning in a bottle and pass on the message.

Discussing the development of his approach to designing for McLaren and the Pistols, Reid told Jon Savage:

The answer was staring me in the face because I’d already done it. A lot of the images came from stuff done in the early seventies. Again, that was to do with what was at hand at Suburban Press. Xerox and cheap printing, rips and blackmail lettering.[57]

The collaged sleeve of Subway Sect’s single, ‘Nobody’s Scared’ (1978), with the band pictured as picnicking on a tube line with the platform turned into an aerial view of a metropolis, best exemplifies the continuation of Reid’s Suburban Press aesthetic.

The Clash’s ‘White Riot’, both song and the single’s picture sleeve, were refracted echoes of WPP UK slogans – hate and war, sten guns in Knightsbridge, creative violence, heavy duty discipline. They used the same imagery of alienating vertical (sub)urban landscapes, disaffection (Generation X quotations), surly posturing and, most significantly, the identification with racial others that was used as a means to enliven apathetic white British youth living under heavy manners – punk rock rebels down the Palais.

The sleeve’s photograph of the three Clash members up against the wall (motherfuckers) had been shot by Caroline Coon, a figure whose roots went deep into sixties counterculture but who was now proselytising on behalf of punk. About this, Simon Frith, in 1978, wrote:

Scratch the average punk band and you find an old head band. The old hippie pub crew are the new punk pub crew – same pub different hair styles. The original new-wave ideologist in the music press, from whom the provincial punks learnt their moves and their motives, were themselves sixties survivors. Caroline Coon, who in the 1960s helped found Release and became a prominent hippie spokeswoman, in 1976-77 used Melody Maker to champion punk and to articulate its supposed critique of the rock establishment. Her countercultural themes came naturally, and gave confidence to the influential group of young musicians with whom she became associated.

Similarly, Jonh Ingham – who changed the spelling of his first name in the hazy days of California in 1970, and used to publish a fanzine called Twas Ever Thus, devoted to himself and to vague sci-fi ramblings – used his features in Sounds to establish punk's proper place in the history of rock, making the connections with American garage bands and proclaiming the music's sociological significance before most of his readers had heard a note. Ingham now manages the punk band Generation X.[58]

As Malcolm McLaren told Jon Savage, the Sex Pistols ‘were going for the tradition of mutated, irresponsible, hardcore raw power­ Iggy Pop, New York Dolls, MC5, bits of The Faces. They knew where their musical scene was’.[59] Those lines of influence were being worked on and addressed as the sixties turned into the seventies and a third generation of rockers hewed into view led by David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. You can follow one of those lines in a short appreciation of the Velvet Underground written in 1971 by a University of Kent undergraduate, Helen Chastel, for her student paper:

Proposition: for consistent and versatile genius in rock the Velvet Underground (or V.U.s to the cognoscenti) are equalled only to Dylan and the Stones. Don't ask questions if you dispute it, write your own review. If you deny it, you are a Quintessence or Andy Williams fan and not worth bothering with.[60]

Here, in this now defunct New York band, was a truth that spoke directly to the disaffected: ‘The deep sleep of a suburban upbringing can be shattered by sudden exposure to such a group. Faced with Velvet Underground and Nico in 1968, I saw darkness of which I knew nothing, saw an extreme weariness, people born to die. [College] life became petty, its inmates absurd.’[61] Lou Reed, she wrote, had a ‘clear and cliché-less view of modern city life’, White Light/White Heat extended even further ‘into a chaos of light, blood, heat and noise . . . The third album is a surfacing, a return to verbal precision’.[62] Of their fourth album: ‘The fact that Lou Reed has recently had a breakdown and left the group in no way nullifies the final statement of Loaded: “A Sweet Nuthin/I Ain’t Got Nothin’ at All.” The world is too much with us’.[63]

Addressing the issue from an entirely different but complementary perspective, social historian Daniel Frost wrote of Reid’s magazine:

Suburban Press emerged in the context of post-war affluence, produced by young artists willing to challenge the limitations of the world that they were entering, frustrated with the 'pessimism' of a middle-class suburban New Left, and aware of the dangers of incorporation that were implicit in the suburbs.[64]

Hyperaware of their suburban identity, as with Chastel in her admiration of the Velvet Underground, the world was also too much with the WPP UK who were attempting to come to terms with a profound dissatisfaction with the life they had inherited. Their response to the threat of incorporation was to find common ground with each other as they explored their connection with American urbanicity and its radical inhabitants – a world away from the suburbia they presently tenanted and hoped to leave behind. Like with the punk fanzines to come, they gave lucid voice to their frustrations (and pleasures) through cheaply produced, self-distributed, small run publications. They may have affected no great social change, the revolution they called for always elusive, but in their joining of hands, in their creative play, they took an active role in attempting to fuck up the dominant culture – a performance of termite-like resistance that takes place out of view, underground, but when it breaks out into the light it has a power to unsettle and disrupt the flow of the everyday, to turn a suburban mundane into the marvellous.

Frith saw punk as belonging to a tradition of bohemianism that had been ‘central to British rock culture since the days when such arty fellows as John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe found themselves in Hamburg’s low life. Rock’s radical proletarianism now, as then, comes primarily from its social association with the lumpen leisure of city streets and clubs and bars. Punk’s cultural significance, in particular, derives not from its articulation of the experience of unemployment, but from its exploration of the aesthetics of proletarian play’.[65] The performance space for this activity was not in the established political arenas of the Socialist Workers’ Party or other Marxist/Communist fractions but, like earlier with the WPP UK, within a social sphere where they could, in Frith’s words, make a ‘strident expression of the traditional bohemian challenge to orderly consumption’.[66] Being a White Panther didn’t stop you from being a pleasure seeker.

***

In July, a West Kent Chapter had been added to the party list and The Pink Fairies once again played a benefit for the WPP UK, £50 was raised this time.[67]  Having being forced out of the Raglan Road squat the group were now occupying a house in Conduit Road, Plumstead – a Vietnamese flag flying above the top bay window[68]. They had not long established a base there before they were forced to vacate – new residencies were listed in a September issue of IT.[69] Squatting was the highlight concern of the second issue of Chapter! (the question mark used in the title of the first edition replaced with an exclamation), published Autumn 1971. Pictured on the front were five Party members on the balcony of the Conduit Road house fists raised behind a Vietcong flag. Other news was the dissolving of the USA WPP and the formation of the Rainbow People’s Party, but ‘as all our readers know we have learnt from their errors and remain the White Panther Party U.K. . . . Power to the People’, wrote Carding.[70]

In IT, Glasgow’s Chapter reported on police harassment and their attempt to establish a free food programme, while the West Kent Chapter were active at the Harmony Farm festival, Nutley, which was attended by around 1500 freaks, the Pink Fairies played.[71] The Ilford Chapter was also being harried by the police; their co-ordinator Ted Humphrey’s house was raided under a dangerous drugs warrant but the law was less interested in pharmaceuticals than in Panther literature: ‘Special Branch please note if you write to our new address we will put you on our mailing list’.[72] The Abbey Wood Chapter called in their lawyer and met with Chief Inspector Bethel, Bexleyheath police, to address the issue of squatting and trespassing.[73] That sense of being persecuted by the establishment was fuel for the Panthers’ activities, uniting the disparate individuals involved in its various Chapters.

In April, IT gave over two-and-a-half pages to the ‘Revolution, the life culture and the White Panther Party UK report March 1972’.[74] A photograph of four long-haired young men in uniform dark Levi’s jackets and jeans standing outside a police station illustrated the piece. It was shot on the same day as the Woolwich demonstration and featured left to right Brian McCarthy, Jeff Tree, John Carding and Brian Nevill. The three columns of text was not a ‘report’ as such but a tract, a polemic of us against them:

One thing we must always remember is that time is on our side, we have seen the future – we are the future – and we know that it is not only ours, but it likewise belongs to all the people of the planet. The death culture is having ulcers because its children do not want their values, their morals and the material/consumer society they wish to perpetuate. The death culture expects oppressed groups like blacks to fight them, but its own kids! Whew! They say the kids will grow out of it, but they know, they have lost their own children, they are losing their replacements, their system is dying.[75]

Much of it was also lifted wholesale from American WPP publications.

Croydon and North Sussex were added to the active list of chapters with mailing addresses. John Carding, the ‘report’s’ author rejected the ‘old left’ as having failed to build an effective revolutionary movement, to choose ‘life culture’ over ‘death culture’ – the White Panthers UK still stood with their brothers and sisters in the Black Panther Party even as Carding announced the end of the American arm of the WPP: ‘In this country we have observed the mistakes made by the Party in the USA and learnt from them; we have made some errors but do not feel it necessary to disband the Party and start again as in America. We are going through a reflective, self-analytical stage and some changes will be made, but we will retain the name White Panther Party UK’. [76] Harassment by the police as the chapters form and take their ten-point programme onto the streets was a key concern, the focus remained on squatting and ‘trying to provide viable alternatives to the present pig system’.[77] Taking  ‘pro-life drugs’ were advocated, ‘like marijuana, hashish, peyote, pure LSD and mescaline’.[78] The Party was anti ‘death drugs like phony THC, downers, speed and smack that threaten our nation like a plague’.[79] And, as Ann Arbor had its bands, they had theirs:

We bring our music to our communities with revolutionary, high-energy bands like the Pink Fairies. Our life style becomes our politics, our politics our lifestyle. . . . To live one must love – to love one must survive – to survive one must fight! All Power to the People!’[80]

Confirming their credentials, the Pink Fairies had played a benefit for the Party on May 12 at the Harrow Inn, Abbey Wood. A free rock festival in Greenwich was also said to be on the cards but before then the Party members were organising their attendance at a festival in Lancashire.[81]

The Bickershaw Festival took place on May 5–7, the WPP attempted to put into action its free food programme but were thwarted by the organisers who refused permission for them to distribute their edibles: ‘as far as [they] were concerned . . . the Panthers were just violent thugs’.[82] John Peel reported that ‘some White Panthers, who spent most of the weekend preparing free food for anyone who wanted or needed it, have been busted for swimming in the nude. It’s sometimes hard to believe that the police haven’t got anything better to do’.[83] Such injustice, the life blood of generational conflict.

Further changes to the Central Committee were announced in June, alongside a merger of London chapters.[84] Brian Nevill was listed as Minister of Welfare, though that was news to him. His interest in the struggle of black Americans, especially the campaign to free Angela Davis, aligned well with the concerns of the White Panther Party UK and he had reached out to Carding with the suggestion that he form a South London chapter. Carding welcomed his approach and then poached the idea of having a wider catchment area for his Abbey Wood group, even though he never acted on it. Undeterred, Nevill founded the  Croydon/Bromley Chapter. Also in June, the Glasgow Chapter used the pages of Frendz to report on the formation of a separate Easterhouse group, the housing estate they took their name from ‘is the biggest and toughest housing scheme in Glasgow . . .Many of them are ex-gang members from the Mental Drummy . . . The rest are members of the Claimant’s Union’ who were partly responsible for organising a rent strike on the estate.[85]

The emphasis in the communiqués remained resolutely local; housing, welfare, drugs and policing issues were the chief concerns alongside a paranoid sense of being persecuted. Activities remained focused at a street level but in the WPP UK Programme (published in all likelihood early Summer 1972) the stress shifted toward the global.[86] It was another ten-pointer, adapted verbatim from a revised tract, dated July 4 1970, published in the Party’s Ann Arbor Sun/Dance paper.[87] It began by noting that this was a time of great change; a new social order was needed to meet the challenges and the possibilities offered by a ‘post-industrial cybernetic technology’ that can be harnessed for a ‘post-scarcity economy’.[88] Freedom to determine one’s own destiny and from oppressive structures like conscription, justice for all and the release of political prisoners was demanded, free money, education, access to information, and a call for a clean planet and healthy people. Point 10 concluded with a quote from the American Declaration of Independence.

With an illustration on the cover of a dragon eating its own tail enveloping a yin-yang, White Trash II was published early Summer of 1972, ‘Armed Love: Creation – Destruction; opposites flowing, merging into one life energy moving into perpetual revolution’ was what the illustration symbolised. The magazine followed much the same pattern as #1 but now included a breakdown of the costs of financing the publication and free food programme. There were 400 copies printed of White Trash at the overall cost of £7.60. The West London Chapter’s distribution of free food under the motorway arch on Portobello Road had cost £10.10, a further £5.90 worth of free donations had been received.

Listing the price of things and the means of production so that others may follow your lead would be later picked up, and more successfully applied, by bands like the Desperate Bicycles and Scritti Polliti at the height of the punk DIY revolution.

By July, a Central Coordination Committee had been established and Carding used the pages of Frendz to announce that Issue 3 of White Trash was forthcoming and a July benefit for the WPP, played by Brinsley Schwarz and Fruupp, had, he reported, been poorly attended. The benefit had been held at Bumpers club in Coventry Street, Piccadilly. Before the communiqué signed off with ‘Armed Electric Love’, the new ministers, drawn from local chapters were listed, Carding was chairman and Abbey Wood was Central HQ:

Jeff Tree (Croydon) – Internal Security

Chris L. Urca (West London) – Propaganda

Eddie Hayes (East Grinstead) – Defence

Wendy Willard (Ilford) – Finance

Jeff Willard (Ilford) – Vice Chairman

Linda Nevill (Croydon) – Transport

Brian Nevill (Croydon) – Welfare

Richard Aulton (West London) – Minister of Information [89]  

White Trash #3 ‘Journal of the West London White Panthers’ appeared in the Autumn. With the Silver Surfer on the cover promising ‘Amazing Offer . . . two magazines in one!’; it was the most professionally produced of their publications. Its editorial made the claim ‘The White Panther Party is now a national organisation working and relating to the people on many levels, global, national and local and in many spheres of consciousness  . . . political, social cultural and spiritual’.[90] They also had their own line in t-shirts, seven designs including Armed Love and Pigfuckers. The latter had a white panther mounting the rear end of a pig. You could even make your own White Panther supporter’s badge. Michael Moorcock and Robert Calvert provided copy to run alongside the usual news and diatribes. According to Brian Nevill, it was Chris Urca who was mostly responsible for cultivating the tangible connections between Ladbroke Grove’s underground luminaries in the Pink Fairies and Hawkwind as well as with contributors to IT and Frendz.

With the WPP UK and its Chapters covered regularly and widely  in counterculture papers like IT and Fapto the impression given was that it was larger and more active than it actually was. The Party probably never numbered more than 50 members of whom maybe only 10 were ever fully involved. Chapters, like the those in Exmouth and Manchester, might be organised by only one or two members and have lasted no longer than whatever announcement John Carding, or whoever, was making in IT that month.

Like the British Hells Angels, the WPP UK was a faint echo of the rhetoric and action of its American counterparts – no bombs, no guns, no charismatic leaders and not much fucking in the streets, I’d wager. They offered little if any threat to the establishment; police harassment, of which they complained, was no greater than that meted out to any other long-haired group of squatters and dope smokers.  WPP UK’s structure was provisional, more imaginary than actual, co-ordinating committees equally tentative, these were short-lived alliances that came together around producing their individual publications, at events like the Woolwich march, the West London free food programme, the many benefits that they organised and at the festivals they attended. Their commitment to a rock ’n’ roll revolution, however, could not be denied.

Exploiting their involvement in the contemporary music scene, the White Panther Street Band, led by Steve Gilmore and Ray Birch, was announced in IT #134. They were ‘ready and waitin’ to play at local gigs for expenses (no less)’.[91] But, no sooner had the Party made a bit of noise, it shut up shop. There was no great cataclysmic contretemps between its members, no concerted police action to harass them into oblivion, nor any public declaration of its end of days. No bang, no dynamite, it just faded out. Its activists simply stopped participating and moved on. In November 1972, an overarching London Chapter was putatively formed, giving IT’s Wardour Mews, W1 location as its contact address, a final ineffective effort to keep things alive. Carding, presumably, had produced a news sheet calling all likeminded radicals to work together to remove the Tories from power. Its mundane appeal to throw out Heath and all was a faint echo of the hopes and ambitions of armed electric love the Party had once held for itself.[92]

***

 Today, the White Panther Party UK is at best a rumour passed on between the followers of The Deviants and Pink Fairies, barely rating a footnote in histories of the British counterculture. There are no well kept secrets in their tale, certainly there was no volcanic eruption into the public’s consciousness. But their failure to capture newspaper headlines is beside the point, what matters was that they played a part, however small, in the tumult of the times – their voices added to the volume of dissent. They were an active part of an ill-defined community, one that refused to be coerced by either the blandishments of consumerism or the bad faith of the established left; they made their own culture and formed their own identities and, in turn, passed on their knowledge and experience to the next generation of recusants.

In late 1972, having left the estate of New Addington behind, along with their WPP UK affiliation, Brian and Linda Nevill moved to the other side of London, first to Chalk Farm and then to Ladbroke Grove. After gaining his A-levels, the youngest of the Croydon/Bromley members, Rob Warr, born 1956, went to the University of York. While still a student, his friendship with Bob Last, of Fast Product records, had him working with the Human League and as the Gang of Four’s soundman. By 1979 he was managing the latter and co-producing their debut, Entertainment! – the definitive agit-prop album of the era. In his managerial role, Warr was aided, and then succeeded, by Linda Nevill. As the Gang of Four moved out of Leeds their centre of operations was the flat Linda shared with Brian; he would roadie for them in their breakout year and later, briefly, played drums for their peers, The Pop Group. At home they may have felt like tourists, but outside, in the street and in the dance halls, thumbing another coin into the jukebox, they found each other, swung to the new dance beat and announced a further decline of civilisation.

A companion piece , ‘MC5 Live on Saturn – London, 1972’, is published in Ugly Things #66 (Summer 2024)

 Selected Bibliography

A good number of the WPP UK publications and leaflets are included in The Underground and Alternative Press in Britain (Harvester, 1974) a microfiche collection that can be viewed at the British Library and in other collections, eg. Brighton University’s library.

 Allen, Rod, Isle of Wight 1970: The Last Great Festival (London, 1970)

Callwood, Brett, Sonically Speaking: A Tale of Revolution and Rock ’n’ Roll (Shropshire, 2007)

Davis, Michael, I Brought Down The MC5 (Los Angeles, 2008)

Deakin, Rich, Keep It Together! Cosmic Boogie with The Deviants and The Pink Fairies (London, 2007)

Farren, Mick, Give the Anarchist A Cigarette (London, 2001)

Fountain, Nigel, Underground: The London Alternative Press, 1966-74 (London, 1988)

Frost, Daniel, ‘Looking Both Ways’: Place, Space, and Left-Wing Activism in Croydon After 1956 (Doctoral thesis, 2021)

Green, Jonathon, Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground 1961-1967 (London, 1988)

Kent, Nick, Apathy For The Devil: A 1970s Memoir (London, 2010)

Kramer, Wayne, The Hard Stuff: Dope, Crime, The MC5 and My Life of Impossibilities (London, 2018)

Nevill, Brian, Boom Baby: The Escape From 60s Suburban Culture (London, 2013)

Plamondon, Pun, Lost From The Ottawa: The Story of the Journey Back (on-demand, 2004)

Reid, Jamie & Savage, Jon, Up They Rise: The Incomplete Works of Jamie Reid (London, 1987)

Sandford, Jeremy & Reid, Ron, Tomorrow’s People (London, 1974)

Savage, Jon, The England’s Dreaming Tapes (Minnesota, 2010)

Sinclair, John, It’s All Good: A John Sinclair Reader (London, 2009)

Endnotes

[1] Jonathon Green, Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground 1961-1967 (Heinemann: London, 1988), p.328.

[2] Hugh Nolan, ‘Underground: Revolution with Guitars, Not Bullets’ Disc and Music Echo (November 2, 1968), p.20.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Mick Farren, ‘Rock – Energy For Revolution’ Melody Maker (October 3, 1970), p.31.

[7] ‘White Panthers Meet’ The Fifth Estate (December 12-25, 1968), p.16

[8] John Sinclair ‘White Panther Statement’ Sun (November–December 1968), p.2.

[9] Richard Goldstein, ‘Kick Out The Jams’ Village Voice (1968), republished in

Goldstein’s Greatest Hits: A Book Mostly About Rock ’n’ Roll (New York: Tower, 1970), p.163.

[10] Ibid., p.164–65.

[11] Ibid., p.166.

[12] Pun Plamondon, Lost From Ottawa: The Story of the Journey Back (Trafford Victoria, BC, 2004), p.115

[13] Ibid. pp.118–19.

[14] Ibid., p.120.

[15] IT #82 (July 3–16, 1970), pp.1&3.

[16] Ibid.

[17] ‘Isle of Wight Preparations’ IT #86 (August 27–September 10, 1970), p.3.

[18] Mick Farren, ‘Five Days of Peace Music & love’ IT #87 (September 10–24, 1970), pp.7–9.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid. The single sheet Bulletin issued by the ‘White Panther Ministry of Information, dated August 18, 1970, condemned the Festival as a capitalist fraud and noted that the festival site has weaknesses: ‘a) The fencing would not withstand a well organised attack by the people. b) The area is overlooked by a hill (not part of the sight [sic.] from which the bands can be seen in comfort and for free’. On the rear was a questionnaire for those interested in the group’s activities. Included in the microfiche collection The Underground and Alternative Press In Britain (Harvester, 1974).

[22] ‘White Panthers: First Month of British Party’ IT #89 (October 8–22, 1972)

[23] ‘White Panther Party Report For November’ IT #92 (November 20 – December 3, 1970), p.7.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid. Detail about Sue Small and the Manchester Chapter is from Nigel Fountain, Underground: The London Alternative Press 1966–74 (London: Routledge1988), p.150.

[26] ‘White Panther Party’ IT #97 (February 11–25, 1971), p.15.

[27] Ibid.

[28] John Carding, “White Panther Party News’ IT #99 (March 11-25, 1971), p.3.

[29] ‘WPP Abbey Wood Chapter’ IT #102 (April 22–May 6, 1971), p.4.

[30] Block advert, IT #101 (April 8–22, 1971), p.6

[31] John Carding ‘White Panther Party Abbey Wood Chapter’ IT #102 (April 22–May 6, 1971), p.4.

[32] ‘White Panthers UK’ block ad IT #106 June 16–30, 1971, p.23.

[33] Mick Farren, ‘The Shape We’re In’ Chapter? #1 (1971), pp.2–3.

[34] Chapter? #1, p.10.

[35] Ray Carne, Minister of Information, Chapter? #1, p.11.

[36] ‘Abbey Wood Chapter News’ IT #116 (November 4–18, 1971), p.15. ‘Ilford Chapter’ IT #118 (December 2–16, 1971), p.5.

[37] ‘Glasgow a Cold Winter’ IT #119 (December 16–30, 1971), p.14.

[38] Ibid.

[39] WPP advertisement IT #122 (January 27–February 10, 1972). The Cardiff Chapter was run out of a youth centre in Charles Street, see Penny Simpson, ‘A Royal Look at Project” South Wales Echo (July 2, 1990), p.2. See also, Anthony Brockway, ‘Welsh White Panthers’ Babylon Wales: Notes from the Margins of Welsh Popular Culture https://babylonwales.blogspot.com/2006/12/welsh-white-panthers.html?m=1# (accessed March 26, 2024)

[40] ‘News’ IT #122 (January 27–February 10, 1972), p.3.

[41] ‘White Panthers Give A Free “Eat-In” Every Week’ Kensington Post (January 14, 1972), p.36.

[42] Gnome #1 (1972), np.

[43] Much of this material was in turn republished across two pages in Fapto #3 (Margate, 1972), pp.14–15. See also Fapto #8 which gives a page (6) to John Carding to once more outline the Party’s aims

[44] ‘Panthers Pamphlet Party Poops’ Frendz #26 (April 28, 1972), p.9.

[45] cf. BN’s photos of event

[46] Names listed in Brian Nevill’s notebooks from the time.

[47] Daniel Frost, ‘Looking Both Ways’: Place, Space, and Left-Wing Activism in Croydon After 1956 (Doctoral thesis, University of Reading, 2021), p.208.

[48] Red Fist & Bust #1 np.

[49] ‘Editorial’ Street Sheet #1 (January 1972), np.

[50] Suburban Press #1, np.

[51] Ibid.

[52] Block advertisement IT #116 (November 4–18, 1971)

[53] Suburban Press #1, np.

[54] Brian Nevill, Boom Baby: The Escape From 60s Suburban Culture (London, 2013), p.237

[55] ‘Myth’ Suburban Press #1, np.

[56] Brian Nevill, ‘Dear Brothers . . .’ Suburban Press #3 (1972), pp.12–13.

[57] Jon Savage, The England’s Dreaming Tapes (University of Minnesota, 2010), p.441.

[58] Simon Frith, ‘The Punk Bohemians’ New Society (March 9, 1978), pp.535–36.

[59] Savage, p.16.

[60] Helen Chastel, ‘Velvet Underground’ InCant (February 17, 1971), p.6.

[61] Ibid.

[62] Ibid.

[63] Ibid.

[64] Daniel Frost, 'The city is dying ... The suburbs are growing ... The country shrinks': Spatial Maoism and Suburban Press’ Twentieth Century Communism v22 n22 (2022), pp. 166–190.

[65] Frith, p.536.

[66] Ibid.

[67] White Panthers ad, IT #109 July 29–August 12, 1971), p.10.

[68] ‘Abbey Wood Squat’ IT #109 July 29–August 12, 1971), p.5.

[69] ‘White Panther Abbey Wood Chapter’ IT #112 (September 9–22, 1971), p.3.

[70] ‘White Panther Party U.S.A.  . . Them Changes’ Chapter! #2 (Autumn 1971), p.5.

[71] ‘Harmony Farm’ and ‘White Panther Party UK’ IT #113   (September 23–October 7, 1971), p.5.

[72] ‘Whiter Panther Party UK Ilford Chapter News’ IT #114 (October 7–21, 1971), pp.3–4

[73] ‘White Panther Abbey Wood Chapter’ IT #115 (October 21–November 7, 1971), p.5.

[74] John Carding, ‘He Not Busy Being Born . . .’ IT #127 (April 620, 1972), pp. 16–17, 45.

[75] Ibid., p.17.

[76] Ibid.

[77] Ibid.

[78] Ibid.

[79] Ibid.

[80] Ibid.

[81] ‘Community News’ IT #129 (April 5, 1972), p.11.

[82] ‘Shut Up While I’m Talkin’’ IT #127 (April 6–20, 1972), p.18

[83] Gnome identified the swimmers as members of the West London Chapter

[84] ‘Letters’ It #131 (June 1, 1972), p.4.

[85] ‘Panthers’ Frendz #29 ((June 9, 1972),

[86] White Panther Party UK: Our Programme July 1971. The four page leaflet is illustrated with the same photograph of the four members used in IT #127 which was taken in 1972. The date of ‘July 1971’ then is probably a misdated reference to the original American program from July 1970. A six page version, also dated ‘July 1971’ is held in the British Library which is erroneously attributed to Glasgow rather than, correctly, to the Abbey Wood Chapter.

[87] ‘The Program of the White Panther Party, July 4, 1970’, Sun (July, 1970), p.31.

[88] Ibid.

[89] ‘Panthers All Change Live Free’ Frendz #32 (July 28, 1972), p.5. London Central Committee membership amended with the aid of Brian Nevill’s contemporary notes

[90] ‘Editorial’ White Trash #3 (Autumn 1972), p.2.

[91] Block ad, IT #134 ((July 27–August 10, 1972)

[92] See The Underground and Alternative Press in Britain (Harvester, 1974).