Confrontational Volumes

Ah, the solstice.  It can’t get any darker now; every day a bit more hopeful. We need more light.  I need the darkness to recede so I can get up earlier.  The date always gets overshadowed in the rush up to Christmas but 12/21 is actually the more consequential day of the year. 

Home alone.  Dishes to do.  Music please.  Loud music.  I came upon some old British Punk from the early 80s that I hadn’t heard in years.  This was that remarkable time when it seemed like cities in dozens of countries were beginning to turn out bands playing hard core punk.  Beneath the dull overlay of stadium rock, kids everywhere felt had the same disruptive inspiration and formed garage bands to express themselves.

The group that came on had an EP, a few singles and then an album and to my memory, vanished after that.  Blitz had skinhead overtones, but at the time of the release this hadn’t all metastasized yet, at least in my mind.  When I encountered them, first on the ‘Punk and Disorderly’ compilation LP they seemed like punks.  The song from that album “Someone’s Gonna Die” is rough and everyman, as the name suggests.  It has the tell-tale “Oi Oi Oi” chorus.  But the sound is a portal back to the days when music was unquestionably the most important thing in life, and a very small group of important friends all agreed about the power of this song.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitz_(British_band)

As I recall, there was always something particularly distinct about the British hardcore band’s drumming.  The American drumming was faster but the best of the British bands were tighter.  Listening again, thirty-five years on, it is on the one hand simple and violent, and yet the sound was distinct and tight.  Midway through a pile of dishes, at confrontational volumes, the opening chords were absolutely therapeutic. 

I looked them up and who knows what to believe on Wiki, but it sounds like they disassociated themselves from the whole Gary Bushell, Oi movement that Crass so famously disposed of, but rather saw themselves as two punks and two skins to who’d gotten together and therein made a statement.  They broke up, got back together, disparaged one another, and sadly, Alan Nidge apparently walked into a speeding car, after a show in Austin Texas 2007, felling the guitarist behind those power chords.

I looked and in two minutes had figured out what would have been all but impossible as a teen in 1982: they were from a place called New Mills in Derbyshire not far from Manchester.  I didn’t know the city or the county.   The Wiki link took me to a mournful picture of an old Cotton Mill, called Torr Vale Mill, which was still operational, it stated, in same year I would have listened to them,: 1982. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derbyshire

Associating themselves with shuttered mills and grey factories, in the Midlands tied them in, oddly to the sweep of British industrial history and I began to imagine them there amidst the grey stone and polluted streams.  I began to look to see if the mill or the town showed up much in literature and the county shows up in Jane Austin and D.H. Lawrence, but it may just be a coincidence that I think I recognize the mill’s name as something infamous in the history of British labor.

One day, I’ll drive around in Derbyshire and park my car near this Torr Valle in New Mills and see what there is to learn.  I’m sure the topic of Blitz will come up, with whomever I meet who seems the right age.  This, whether they like it or not.