Punk's Not Dead

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Unions really are about community. They seem also to be one of the few places where you can still find that basic fundamental urge to create a better society. In my hometown of East London we have some problems with a racist political party that won a seat on the local council, and it's been the unions that have gone over there and flushed these people out. The Labour Party is moribund.

H: Have you been involved in this fight?

B: I have. In fact, I'm doing a tour that specifically targets both places where the British National Party may well win council seats, including my hometown. It's sponsored by several of our big unions. We're going out and trying to put down some hard antiracist ideas.

H: Do you still have contact with people you grew up with there?

B: Yeah, I do. The guy who taught me to play guitar lived in the house next door, Wiggy, I spoke to him today.

H: You still work together, right?

B: He compiled the box set. It was actually he who went into the archives and found all this shit. Because he knows where it all is. He's got a better memory than me, if anything, for what we recorded back in those days. So the box set, the last couple of years, has been his baby. But my mom still lives there, too. I was there the night before last. My brother lives there with his three kids and his wife. He's a bricklayer. So, I am over there quite often.

H: People who grew up in a working-class background and go on to fame and fortune sometimes face a personal dissonance -- or people from the old neighborhood look down on you for having left that life behind. Have you ever felt that?

B: Yeah, I do get that. Obviously, when I come over and talk to people about living in a community with all different kinds of people living together, some people attack me because I live in an area where there aren't too many people of color. They say that I should try living there. Well, my mom lives there and she manages to get on with people. My brother lives there. He and his South Asian neighbor have worked together to get a gang of abusive kids who were hanging around their alleyway to move on. They worked together to do that. They got the council to come, and the council spoke to these kids' parents. They got them talking together.

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