Conflict - It's Time To See Who's Who

CONFLICT - IT'S TIME TO SEE WHO'S WHO

The intention of spreading awareness was an honourable one shared by a good many bands at that time of which Conflict would happily have included themselves. Garry Bushell had from the very start spotted the potential of Conflict to be a bridge between the Crass camp and the Oi! brigade and from there spreading their Anarcho message to an even wider audience.

'We want to further people's consciousness. And we want to use whatever means are possible,' as Conflict stated in a pamphlet included with their Live At Centro Iberico EP 'We want to reach people by whatever means we can - papers, television, radio, music, the lot.'

Their ambition was evident as was their energy and passion as witnessed during their live performances, along with their commitment as shown by their solidarity with the DIY Punk scene. Conflict readily offered their support to anyone aligning themselves with Anarcho Punk and in turn the Anarcho Punk elders such as Poison Girls, Crass and Southern Studios owners John and Sue Loder offered their support to Conflict.

The obvious next step in maintaining their momentum was for Conflict to release their début LP which they duly did in April of 1983 on the Corpus Christi label. Affiliated to Crass, Corpus Christi had been set up to allow bands total artistic freedom regarding their records. In particular, this meant they were free from Crass label design 'restrictions' and that John Loder instead of Penny Rimbaud would decide on who and what to release.

For Conflict at that time, artistic control meant releasing their LP in a full-colour gate-fold sleeve, the artwork and lettering beautifully designed by one Bernard Chandler, future bassist of Poison Girls. Entitled It's Time To See Who's Who, the LP was essentially the live set that Conflict had been touring around with, finally rendered coherently audible by Crass bassist Pete Wright on production duties.

When playing live, Conflict would create a blistering vortex of noise with vocalist Colin Jerwood - eyes popping, veins bulging - shouting for all his worth at the centre. On initial hearing of the LP, what surprised was how tuneful a lot of the songs actually were and what with the lyrics transcribed onto the sleeve, what exactly Conflict were raging about.

One subject known to be very close to Conflict's heart was animal liberation, represented most powerfully on the track Meat Means Murder. Flux Of Pink Indians were the only other band who had ever really focussed on vegetarianism and animal abuse, and even then had still not quite managed to disassociate the subjects from hippy and middle class connotations. Being solidly working class and thoroughly unpretentious hard bastards, Conflict were endorsing vegetarianism with a credibility it had never had before: "Can't you see that juice is blood? From new born throats red rivers flood. Blood from young hearts, blood from veins. Your blood, their blood, serves the same."

This was a subject that Conflict would never abandon, encouraging many of their listeners to not only give up eating meat but to become militantly active against the perpetrators and beneficiaries of animal abuse, animal experimentation and animal exploitation.

Conflict's natural-born inclination towards anti-authoritarianism manifested itself in them shouting down officialdom and power in all its forms, whether it be the government, the police, the law, the Bomb, the music business, the media or whatever. Conflict were natural-born anarchists, with nothing studied about their anarchism, nothing scholarly or gleaned from text books just an instinctive, gut-level understanding of right and wrong.

Equally important, unlike a significant proportion of the Punk fraternity as represented by The Exploited, for example, Conflict weren't at all interested in numbing themselves to the world through drugs and noise. Instead, Conflict were very much Punks of a positive inclination, offering much needed inspirational attitude: "The Left-wing manifesto, the Right-wing sham, tell us we can't but I know we can. They tell us we can't but I tell you we can. Stuff your lies, I know we can. We can!"

In the track Exploitation, The Exploited and their fine but amusing appearance on Top Of The Pops with their song Dead Cities is referred to as an example of how unrepresentative such bands were of their actual audiences, serving in the end to be of service only to the music business: "Yeah, we live in dead cities and the streets are grey, but I don't need Top Of The Pops to make me think that way. I can see this rebellion on my tv screen, but no sign of a future for you and me."

Conflict’s intention was to set themselves apart and to actively oppose the machinations of the music business through both word and deed, taking the same stance toward politics and social justice. In this respect, demonstrating in protest marches and involvement in direct action was just as important as playing a gig or releasing a record - if not more so.

There were high expectations of Conflict's début album but when it came to it, the album acted more than anything else as a way of cementing their presence as a band. Conflict needed to forge their own essentially anarchist identity not only within the realm of Anarcho Punk but within a wider social context. So, not only were they rejecting both Left and Right-wing politics as any good anarchist might but rejecting also all ideas of historical English identity: "Great Britain thinks it leads the world so civilised, pure and free. Great Britain doesn't lead fuck all, Great Britain shit, you don't fool me. Smashing Argies, Falklands ours. Falklands ours, what a con. We ain't even got a place to stick our arses on."

Many of the songs on It's Time To See Who's Who seemed to be more about dealing with specific subjects so as to get them dealt with and out of the way, so as to enable the band to move on to other territory. Along the way a veritable storm of bluster and fury was being whipped up and this in turn was becoming Conflict's most prominent feature. Like all the other Anarcho Punk bands, Conflict were saying 'No' but in their own unequivocal and unerring manner: "Fuck you! Fuck off!" they were roaring "Fuck you fucking fuck off!"

Omega Tribe - Angry Songs

OMEGA TRIBE - ANGRY SONGS

Having previously graced Bullshit Detector 2 with the outstanding Nature Wonder track, Omega Tribe had been steadily raising their profile by playing support to bands such as Conflict and Poison Girls, providing a more melodious and approachable counterbalance to Conflict's Punk barrage and Poison Girls' brilliant oddness.

The Angry Songs EP, released on Crass Records, revealed a maturity beyond Omega Tribe's years, not only musically but in their grasp of protest politics where their desire for "a peaceful, happy, equal earth" was tempered by an unblinkered perspective. The opening track, Another Bloody Day, kicked off in healthy Punk mode but then almost immediately cast off its thrash cocoon to reveal the butterfly within. As an elegant piano motif took over, the sudden change of gear gave pause for reflection as vocalist Hugh in dulcet tones asked: "Angry songs and bitter words, have you heard it all before?"

When the Sex Pistols appeared on the Bill Grundy-hosted Today programme in December of 1976, television history was made as they and the idea of 'Punk' was propelled into mainstream public consciousness. Just as important though less acknowledged, however, was their very first appearance on television a few months earlier on the Tony Wilson-hosted So It Goes programme. This was the seminal moment when a combination of factors were joined together to define Punk as inherently a force of absolute relevance and uncontrollable energy. Moreover, it was the moment when utter anger became an integral part of Punk.

"Woodstock!" shouted Johnny Rotten by way of introducing his band, "Coming to get you!" Seemingly aimed not just at Tony Wilson in his soft denim and clogs attire but at the whole smugly satisfied, grim, burnt-out culture of early-Seventies post-hippiedom; it was a taunt brimful of contempt.

"Get off your arse!" Rotten roared, the hostility in his voice and the incandescent fury in his eyes warranting a sense of danger before unleashing a savage version of Anarchy In The UK, soon to become, of course, one of the greatest urban folk songs of the modern age.

As the song screeched to a halt in a blaze of feedback, the band along with leading uber-Punkette Rocker Jordan had already started kicking over mic stands and throwing chairs around the set as the camera zoomed in on Rotten, looking intensely into the distance as though surveying the battlefield of future wars to come.

"Bakunin would have loved it," said Tony Wilson in his summing up and indeed he might well have done; intrigued by the rage, the urge to destruction, the indignation and, of course, the anger. The die was cast. Anger and the feeling and expressing of it would forever more be an important facet of Punk, acting as an engine for action. "'A' equals action, 'T' equals time, 'V' equals vision," as Mark Perry put it, perceptive as ever.

Anger was a weapon for use in defence and attack, a motivating force and a wholly justified response to injustice. Without anger Punk could still be dangerous of a sort though far less potent as would be evidenced by the number of Punk bands over the ensuing years choosing Punk style over Punk substance. The arrival of Crass and (in the words of Garry Bushell) their 'full-frontal, screaming banshee attack' imbuing this Punk anger with an intelligence even fiercer than Rotten's, cementing it as an irrefutable virtue that would inspire legions of new Punks, Omega Tribe being among them.

"Angry songs and bitter words, it's all the same old stuff," advised Omega Tribe, and indeed they had a point. As Anarcho Punk flourished, it was apparent that a plateau had been reached and even though rage was being vented in a variety of ways from Disorder screaming blue murder to Conflict shouting the odds to Crass getting near-hysterical, it was crucial to remember that the medium was not the message, or as Omega Tribe put it: "Angry songs and bitter words, but words are not enough."

Another Bloody Day was a nod toward the same production values as exhibited on No Doves Fly Here by The Mob although a more typical example of where Omega Tribe were at musically was the song Profiteer, which served also as probably the best track on the EP.

If capitalism is cannibalism as Anthrax had pointed out, the engine driving capitalism to devour itself and everything else was the eternal quest for profit. As Conservative government policies prepared the ground for deregulation and privatisation, profitability was becoming the singular method of measuring the worth of anything and everything.

This was a hard and unforgiving ethic of Thatcherism that made a mockery of core human values such as empathy and charity. The profit motive bypassed all notions of collectivism and mutual aid, appealing directly instead to conservative individualism and selfishness. Not that this was any kind of new phenomenon for in one way or another it had always been in place but only now was it being magnified ten-fold. "Implanted from your childhood in your mind is to profit, not to love, to care, be kind," sang Omega Tribe.

Thatcher's advocacy of the free-market supposedly meant the democratization of capitalism and the birth of the stake-holder society but it also meant the social acceptance of exploitation and the sense that greed was a good thing. Thatcher was giving the green light to economics based on the survival of the fittest and then letting that idea bleed into civil society where it would manifest itself as neglect and basic dehumanization of less able people.

Omega Tribe's initial aim was to simply make people aware of aspects of the world such as this, sugaring their message in a tuneful, Anarcho Pop Punk style: "You are exploited from the very day you are born. You are paying them for the privilege of living. You are giving them their profit."

Coming from the same stable as Crass, their suggested solutions were familiar ones: "Why must we suffer to fulfil their positions of power and greed? If you stand out you are a start towards a change. Say 'No!'"

Omega Tribe's special talent was in conveying these ideas in a highly approachable manner, their Angry Songs EP being fine evidence of this, making it to be one of the most respected and loved records of that whole era.