March for George Floyd

George Floyd was a black man who was murdered by a cop while other cops stood and watched. He wasn't the first and he probably won't be the last, unless some crazy genius comes up with a system for screening new recruits so as to prevent dangerous nutcases joining the police force. Previous black persons murdered by cops have included the guy whose candy bar wrapper reflected the sunlight just like a handgun, the woman who was actually doing nothing in her own home when a cop who had the wrong address broke in and shot her, and millions of others whose personal details may be found on the internet if you want to have a look around. The factor common to these killing has been that the murderee has been either a black person or a person belonging to an easily distinguished ethnic group other than white. One might reasonably expect law enforcement officials to implement certain policy changes so as to reduce the occurrence of cops killing black people, but apparently they're not sure where to start or what to do.

Therefore, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, people have been gathering together in all of the major American cities to march, and today was San Antonio's turn. My wife and I went by mainly to have a look, just to see if anything was happening, but seeing as it was, we decided to stick around. We assembled in Travis Park, a small square close to the city centre, and there were already a lot of people. It seemed that a couple of streets had been closed off, with cops and even members of the National Guard stood around looking vigilant, doing the command presence thing. Everyone was masked, otherwise not much social distancing going on, but then Bexar County seems to have come through the worst of the coronavirus relatively unscathed - at least compared to most places - and it's not like anyone was going out of their way to get cuddly with strangers. There were a few speeches delivered from a stage, mostly obscured by news helicopters circling very much like vultures, and this being a part of the country where vultures regularly circle, the comparison is deliberate. The speeches mostly communicated the general idea that black lives matter, and I think most of us already understood that.

So we set off on a route of a couple of miles, winding through the city towards the police station. Mostly we were young and black or Hispanic - simply reflecting our city's ethnic composition - but plenty white, Asian, middle-aged or even old. I saw one Catholic priest fully robed as though about to perform mass and several Quakers, as identified by their t-shirts, somewhat refuting the protest demographic imagined by those who still maintain that the cops are simply doing their job and that you can't make an omelet without breaking an egg every once in a while. We're supposed to be dangerous bomb-throwing anarchists, looters who wish only to cause chaos, and Antifa footsoldiers, but we're just people who would rather not have our country turn into Germany in the thirties if that's quite all right with the rest of you. In fact a lot of us seem to be angry sixteen-year old girls with green hair, demographically speaking. We're Antifa only in so much as that none of us regard Fascism as having ever been a particularly good idea, and we're therefore against it. It really shouldn't need spelling out, but then we've found ourselves in opposition to people who can't actually manage a whole fucking sentence without invoking freedom as a concept, but only as a weirdly specific meaning of the word which somehow allows for the active suppression of information and the shooting of an occasional black person if it seems like the right thing to do. We're dealing with people who don't abide by logic and who are therefore impervious to whatever argument you might have, because - somewhat ironically - it's all about their feelings.

Having known several such persons, my theory is that at the heart of each one of those rightist fucknuggets we have a slightly dim child, a person who wasn't necessarily bad as a kid, but who may have been occasionally slow on the uptake and will inevitably recall one incident in which someone brighter, perhaps wearing glasses and holding a stack of books, made some unkind - if possibly well observed - remark about that person being a bit of a thick cunt; and everything since has been revenge piled up on a deeply ingrained sense of inadequacy. Anything that upsets a liberal, a brainiac, a speccy four-eyes book reader, anyone failing to show prowess on the sports team, failing to salute the flag with sufficient fervour, anyone a bit weird - anything that upsets these people must therefore be good and worthy of elevation, anything up to and including Adolf Hitler, because we're post-facts and it's all about how you feel. Whatever history books written by the sort of four-eyed weirdo egghead liberal braniacs who have the time to write a history book may say about Adolf Hitler, if you feel that he was a man with some very interesting ideas who simply went about things the wrong way, then who has the right to tell you that you're not allowed to feel that?

This is what we're up against in a country where the President wants to declare Antifa a terrorist organisation, despite it not actually being an organisation in any sense, presumably meaning that the alternative to Antifa, namely the Fa, is now something to be embraced.

We're also up against the mid-afternoon heat. Bess and I hadn't really intended to stay for the duration, so after marching for nearly an hour we head back to the car. The march has been peaceful but for the noise. I've barely noticed the cops, and I haven't seen any violence or vandalism, just lots of people marching and yelling and waving placards. Marches in other cities have given rise to smashed windows and looting here and there, leading to the inevitable social media backlash from persons who seem to have misunderstood the meaning of the word protest, flames doubtless stoked by the sort of reactionary forces who ask will no-one think of the millionaires or corporations or trickle down wealth creators? I personally believe that vandalism and looting provide the enemy - because they are the enemy - with an excuse to shut us down and should be discouraged, but to focus on the same is missing the point.

Today really brings it home that such violent action - at least without serious provocation - really is absolutely unnecessary. I've been on marches before, but never have I seen this many people moving in the same direction, so obviously pissed off, voices raised to deliver a single very clear message. It's a show of strength, which is really all it needs to be right now, because psychologically speaking, it's fucking terrifying. If I were on the other team I'd be quacking my pants; and I suspect they are quacking their pants, hence the virulence of responses given thus far.

My wife and I walk back along the length of the march to our car, and each time we think we've reached the tail, another swarm of protesters appears from around the next corner.

As we drive home through empty streets on the other side of the city, we pass a group of five or six men - all white but for one Hispanic carrying a massive flag, all in combat gear with assault rifles. I don't really care about what may or may not be permitted by state law regarding firearms, no-one walking around in the centre of a city with an assault rifle does so with honourable intentions.

Several hours later, we watch the evening news. The five or six men were apparently part of something which calls itself Freedom Force. There are now about twenty of them stood around the Alamo Cenotaph, having volunteered themselves to protect the defenceless granite edifice with their openly carried guns. Someone spray painted graffiti upon it the day before, something about it being a monument to white supremacy - which is probably a bit of an overreach - but the graffiti was removed and the culprit arrested. Freedom Force have turned up to make sure that it doesn't happen again, apparently believing that the two-hundred strong line of armed cops in riot gear isn't enough in the face of thousands of black teenagers and sixteen-year old girls with green hair; but of course, they're not really protecting anything. Even if they were, doubt is cast by how they're all wearing those cool mirror shades after the sun has gone down, just like the action movie bad asses they clearly wish they could have been in other lives. Can any of them even see the Alamo Cenotaph they claim to be protecting? Either their motives are absolutely genuine and no-one had realised how provocative they would appear as white guys turning up to a black lives matter march with assault rifles - which would mean that they're genuinely a bunch of morons - or there's something else going on here. What a puzzler it is!

Comic book readers may recall that Magneto once led a team of supervillains called the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants were eventually incarcerated by the Marvel universe version of the US Government, then pardoned and freed conditional to working for the same government agency as politically dubious super-espionage types, and as such they were renamed Freedom Force, which seems telling.

The protests continue on into the night, some smashed windows, some looting, and a shitload of graffiti - much of which is cleaned or repaired by volunteers from the march the next morning, which isn't as newsworthy for obvious reasons.

Normal service is resumed in San Antonio, at least within the limits of the prevailing state of lockdown, and the rest of the country apparently catches fire.

These are interesting times, I guess you could say.

Simon from Discovery Records

Stratford-upon-Avon had four shops selling records by the time I'd reached the age at which music becomes the most important thing in your life. There was WHSmith - obviously, Midland Educational, RVS and - the best of the bunch by some way - Discovery Records which was independent, a chart return shop, and was owned by a hairy man named Bob. The shop was pretty small, almost a kiosk, situated on the left as you made your way to the precinct from its associated multi-storey car park. RVS was generally decent, but Discovery was the place to go if you wanted anything truly off the beaten musical track. Also, the staff were a couple of vaguely punky kids from the local school, two or three years older than myself or my peers, so even if we remained too awestruck to actually converse with them, it was better than having to deal with the squares who worked behind the counter at RVS. There was Ollie and there was Simon Morgan, and probably a few others I've forgotten but those seemed to be the main two. They were talkative and funny and they seemed to enjoy the job, even occasionally taking the piss out of our overly-earnest schoolie purchases, but not in any mean-spirited way. Simon was kind of beefy with spiky blonde hair and a leather jacket and I recall him as the man who facilitated my purchase of at least two Sex Pistols albums, so obviously he became lodged in the mental map of my teenage years early on. The second of the two albums was The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, which counts as an overly-earnest schoolie purchase if anything does, but Simon nevertheless managed to keep from rolling his eyes too much. Being a double album, it cost more than I could afford with a single week's worth of combined pocket money and paper round wages - so probably a tenner, obliging me to buy the thing in instalments; and I can still see either Simon or Ollie taking my two quid and noting it down on a payment slip kept in the till.

We also knew Simon to be in a local punk band called Domestic Bliss, because my friend Graham's older brother had the single they had recorded and released through the shop - Child Battery with Life on the other side. Life featured one of the first bass lines I ever learned to play through copying it from the record. Others were Gotta Getaway by Stiff Little Fingers and Public Image's Theme from the first album.

By 1984, I'd moved to the other end of the country, and Discovery Records had relocated to Leamington Spa. I bought a few things from there, but I'm not sure Simon was involved by that point. He turned up in Runaway Rhinoceros, a local zine, as a member of a group called the Hop (pictured), whom I'm pretty sure I saw at the Royal Spa Centre supporting the Three Johns. Unfortunately I don't recall much about them, although later came to the startling realisation that their drummer had been Simon Gilbert who eventually joined Suede. This section of the anecdote trails off with myself in the rudimentary recording studio of Maidstone College of Art bashing out a cover of Life by Domestic Bliss just to see if I could do it, and because it was a fucking great and criminally neglected song.

Several decades later, I encounter Simon on facebook, and so we have our first conversation which doesn't end with a financial transaction. I tell him that he sold me the first Pistols album. I think he may have apologised, which was funny. We talk a little about mutual friends, and only now in my fifties do I realise there have been so many of them. Had I been aware of this at the time, I might not have been quite so desperate to get myself as far away from Warwickshire as I could manage. I send him my cover of Life, and am amazed that he likes it, even makes noises about putting it on YouTube. I guess it's flattering to have someone cover one of your songs.

Months pass and we communicate from time to time. He posts clips of bands I've never heard of on my facebook wall and tells me, you need to get a copy of this. This is how I first hear the Sleaford Mods, Pessimist, Parquet Courts, Enhet För Fri Musik and others who now sit neatly alphabeticised within my collection. Simon's recommendations are always good, and it's funny that even after all this time he's still influencing my listening habits. I still don't know much about him beyond what I gather must have been a pretty serious battle with booze in the years between Discovery Records and facebook, which led to his involvement with recovery in a more general sense and helping others to get clean, to sort their lives out; but then I don't feel I need to know much more because I already appreciate that he's one of the good guys. He's a constant voice of reason and common sense on facebook, one of the few, always generous and considerate, kind and funny, never acting the asshole. He's one of those people whose existence seems to prove that there is good in the world, a man about whom one can find nothing bad to say; and it's inspiring seeing him doing so well, still cutting through the crap of daily existence. Like myself, he cycles a lot, and I'm hoping one day we might hit the country lanes together when I'm back in England visiting my folks.

Out of the blue, I find a photograph of Simon posted on facebook suffixed with a trail of condolences. It seems difficult to believe. He was only a couple of years older than myself, and there have been too many deaths this year, and this isn't even the first Simon. It was a cycling accident, an encounter with a tractor along a country lane upon which I myself have ridden many times. Death is never fair, but this one seems unusually harsh. In the days which follow, social media fills with glowing tributes in numbers proving that it wasn't just my imagination. Simon was popular because he was one of the good guys, one of the best. Even from halfway around the globe, his sudden absence is shocking.

Robert Dellar

Photo: Shirley Pearson.

Going back thirty years to Friday the 15th of July, 1983, here's what I wrote in my diary.

I'm really getting to hate my paper round. I got the Sudden Surge of Power compilation through the post from Larry Peterson along with tons of other stuff. The tape is excellent. My favourites are by Mex, Cult of the Supreme Being and Mandible Rumpus, all of which I'm surprised to find are superior to tracks by the big names like Chris & Cosey, Test Dept, 400 Blows and so on. The weather is bloody hot as usual. I must get down to some recording one of these days.

Should it require explanation, A Sudden Surge of Power was a compilation cassette costing a couple of quid and distributed through the mail, advertised in fanzines and showcasing music created for the most part outside of the existing music industry infrastructure - bands you've never heard of recording their efforts on home stereos, in their bedrooms and so on. Cult of the Supreme Being had two songs on the tape, Chlorine Fills My Lungs and God is Thicker Than Water. The booklet which came with the tape describes them thus:

The Cult of the Supreme being started in February 1982. They played gigs at Kelly Drake's party, the Centro Iberico Anarchist Centre, and Watford Girls Grammar School before splitting up in March '82, appearing with such convenient namedrops as Twelve Cubic Feet, Replaceable Hedz, the Apostles, and the Godless Pinkoes.

Since this short spate of activity, David has joined the Expansion Chambers propaganda and fundraising arm of the Watford Revolutionary Bakuninite Collective whose activities include setting fire to the local branch of McDonalds and declaring Hunton Bridge roundabout a republic. Robert is now in the Wanderin' Graves, a post-modernist skiffle-art biscuit tin orchestra.

The Robert in question was Robert Dellar and I soon became familiar with his name as it reappeared on other hissy tapes with photocopied covers, notably Khmer Rouge's Year Zero Disco from Dead Hedgehog Records upon which he is credited with keyboards.

I made quite a respectable quota of friends through the cassette thing, and I kept in touch with a few of them over the years, notably various members of the Apostles and their pals. Ten years later I was living in London and had come to know a number of these people in person, having ended up as second guitarist for Academy 23, the band formed by Dave Fanning and Andy Martin in the wake of the aforementioned Apostles. Our first somewhat shambolic live performance was at Hackney Hospital in 1994, a gig put on for the benefit of psychiatric patients and organised largely by Robert Dellar, now working for the patients council.

We hadn't become bosom buddies or anything, but we knew each other, and I suppose you might say we were all in the same gang - an extended sprawl of artists, writers, musicians, and awkward buggers loosely in orbit of various squatted premises on the Brougham Road in Hackney. We often ended up in the same pub and Robert seemed a decent guy - quiet, intelligent, funny, and somehow always reminding me of a young Peter Cook - strikingly good looking. Also he was one of the few people I knew who liked the New York Dolls more than I did, so he had that Byronic rock dude thing going on without being a dick about it. I think I freaked him out a bit when I first introduced myself as a fan of the Cult of the Supreme Being. I think he was hoping we'd all forgotten.

We seemed to live on opposite sides of our shared social circle, but his name remained a constant because it was always Robert is doing this or are you going to Robert's thing? and Robert's thing eventually became Mad Pride, a series of gigs and CDs set up for the benefit of those obliged to use the services of the psychiatric profession. I vaguely knew he'd written books, or at least edited them, and I was slightly miffed that he'd never asked me to contribute to his Gobbing, Pogoing, and Gratuitous Bad Language anthology - although to be fair my contribution probably wouldn't have been up to much - but anyway, the Ceramic Hobs were playing at a Mad Pride event at the Garage in Islington and I'd fooled them into letting me drop science - as the rappers say - on one track. So I turned up and paid my money, then Robert arrived and told me that I needn't have paid seeing as I was a performer. He even seemed a bit miffed on my behalf and I was almost surprised that he even remembered who I was. I'd assumed he had me down as one of Andy Martin's adoring session musicians, but apparently not.

More recently, despite my having moved to Texas, he recruited me as cartoonist for Southwark Mental Health News - a magazine he put together as part of his involvement with the patients council at Maudsley Hospital, but retaining much of the spirit of the kind of punk fanzines through which I'd first encountered his name. The hospital had adopted a no smoking policy and recruited a sniffer dog named Raffy for the purpose of locating sneaky packets of fags stuffed down the back of beds. Raffy was introduced to patients as a welcome addition to the team, helping you along the road to recovery because everyone loves his waggy tail and happy bark as he confiscates the one thing that's keeping you from really losing it - all for your own good. Naturally Robert felt strongly inclined to take the piss out of this potential violation of the rights of a particularly vulnerable group of patients, and so we came up with the cartoon strip. It was at least fifteen years past the point at which I'd had much interest in drawing cartoons and my eyes weren't what they had been, but it really seemed like something worth doing; and it was, proving popular with more or less everyone who read it, so I'm told, which made a nice change from the days of drawing material about which no-one gave two shits even when it got published.

On Friday the 9th of December, 2016, Robert left the following message on facebook:

I had an ultrasound today at Lewisham Hospital. I've been unwell for a few months now - hence have kept a low profile: no energy - but don't know exactly what's causing this. Maybe the ultrasound results will shed some light on it, maybe not.

Then on Thursday the 15th of December:

Tomorrow I have to go to hospital for another blood transfusion as my haemoglobin levels are low again. Might have to stay in over the weekend. Tomorrow is also my birthday. A strange way to celebrate. Maybe someone will bring me a cake. I have packed for all eventualities and have earplugs and a good book.

Finally, on Saturday the 17th of December I read the following message posted by Shirley Pearson, his long-term partner:

Our beloved Robert died today.

He has been unwell since May this year and very unwell for the past couple of months.

I found him dead at home earlier this afternoon.

I have tried to contact as many of you as possible personally. Sorry to anyone who is hearing the news this way. I will update you as soon as I know anything else.

I still haven't quite taken it in. I think back to all he did, and to all the people whose lives would have been so much poorer without Robert involving them in this, that or the other, and it seems impossible that his existence can simply have stopped just like that. I had an idea he probably wasn't in the best of health and may not have been for some time, but still this seems wrong, something which happens in an alternate timeline but not here. I consider all those millions of miserable, joyless, shrivelled-up fuckers out there busily poisoning the collective consciousness against anyone or anything slightly unfamiliar, and yet the Death Gods somehow decided it was Robert's time? How the hell does that work? His narrative has come to an end and is a finite thing. This world has no Robert Dellar in it, which really fucking stinks. Like I say we were never bosom buddies but he was one of the gang, someone I was glad to know, one of the few people I've known for most of my life and now he's dead.

I've managed to avoid getting too upset because it's better to remember that even though he's gone, the main thing is that he was here in the first place and that he made a huge difference to the lives of many, not just those of us who knew him. In some sense, he's still there, still with fingers wiggling about in a million different pies, still making the world a better place; but he's in a part of it to which we can no longer travel, a part accessed only by memory. He's gone but at least he was here.

Goodbye, old friend. You are missed more than you probably would have realised.