Warning - highly offensive content!
On 25 June 2011 a nightspot called the Slimelight in Islington, London, UK, plan to stage a concert that has attracted criticism over the involvement of musicians with links to Nazism. The headline band are an awful folk group called Sol Invictus, led by a singer called Tony Wakeford, who makes no secret of his past membership of the British Fascist party the National Front. Tony Wakeford was a founder member of Fascist bands Above the Ruins and Death In June, but says (on the Sol Invictus website) that his NF membership was the worst mistake he made. Tony Wakeford claims to have left his Fascist past behind him, but alot of people don't believe him, because still collaborates with racist musician Andrew King. Debate over the ethics of going ahead with this concert is divided between the small clique of fans, friends and members of these bands who bombard the WWW with comments claiming (usually without any proof) that (roughly summarizing) "they're alright mate", and anti-Nazis who present evidence showing that even if these bands aren't outright Nazis, at the very least they revel in displaying imagery that is highly offensive to victims of Nazism (1).
Slimelight manager Mayuan Mak told The Islington Gazette (newspaper) that "we would not tolerate an event that has a Neo-Nazi focus" (2), but Mayuan Mak is lying, because the Slimelight already staged concerts by Nazi performers Death In June, Luftwaffe and Non, and because, despite the ruckus caused by the Sol Invictus concert, on 1 Oct 2011 the Slimelight plan to stage a concert headlined by an electronic music group called Sutcliffe Jugend, who created their name by joining the terms "Peter Sutcliffe" (the name of a misogynist mass-murderer from Great Britain) with "Hitler Youth", while one of the support acts planned for 1 Oct is a convicted child sex offender and Nazi called Peter Sotos (3).
Sutcliffe Jugend is led by musician Kevin Tomkins, who is also an occasional member of another electronic music group called Whitehouse. Whitehouse leader William Bennett wrote a manifesto in the Belgian fanzine Force Mental (issue 1), also quoted in Flowmotion fanzine (issue 6), that explained how Whitehouse are "concerned with the struggle against the unhealthy Negroid influence in popular music". Whitehouse member Philip Best published a compilation (also featuring Sutcliffe Jugend) called White Power. Whitehouse member Peter Sotos was convicted for possessing child pornography after he was busted by Chicago PD for producing a fanzine called Pure, in which Sotos says "females are dogs whose only worth is as pawns for my pleasure" and describes death camps as "Triumphs of Nazism" (4). In a section called "Kiddie Torture" Peter Sotos describes "the sublime pleasure of child abuse" (sic), and shows graphic photographs of a man pleasuring himself over photographs of missing children (5). William Bennett also ran a record label called Come Organisation, who published a 10xC60 cassette box-set by Sutcliffe Jugend, entitled We Spit On Their Graves (extracts from which were reissued on CD by another UK label called Cold Spring Records), which features dozens of tracks which celebrate misogynist crime and Nazism (6+7). Many of the track titles from that release are named after women victimized by serial killers, refer in detail to murder techniques used by Peter Sutcliffe, and celebrate Nazism. Titles like "Storm Detachment Hitler", "SS 1982", "Reinard Heydrich", "Dictator Rule", "This Is Pommerenkke" and "New Camps" are some of the less offensive.
Debate about the morality of the music produced by the likes of Slimelight performers Peter Sotos and Sutcliffe Jugend is complicated, a little, by the defense put about by William Bennett, who (whenever anyone can be bothered to listen to him) argues against the huge weight of evidence provided by Pure fanzine and dozens of similar projects, that the ideas promoted by him and his friends do not come from National Socialist ideology, but that they come from a hyper-extreme interpretation of libertarian philosophy. William Bennett's self-justification takes libertarianism to the limits of self-parody, to an extreme in which the "rights" of the individual (as conceptualized in the Whitehouse track "Right to Kill") over-ride all rights and liberties due to all other people, period. William Bennett's self-justification distorts the meaning of libertarianism to equate the libertarian with the most psychotic libertine, who, through the broken lens of "Sadeian" cod-philosophy, identifies with "libertines" such as the Marquis de Sade, Ted Bundy, Peter Sutcliffe, and the Nazi war criminals who Bennett praised (in the Spanish music fanzine ADN) for enacting "glorious pleasures" rather than for their titular ideology. Bennett's defense is intellectually sub-zero, factually dishonest (as Bennett colleagues like Albin Julius are still Fascists), and a moot point when it comes to actual victims, because the bottom line is, legally and morally, that if some Nazi war criminals killed for "fun" rather than because they believed in Nazism... so what, they were still Nazi war criminals.
This is an issue of feminism and child protection as much as (if not more than) it is an issue of anti-Nazism, and attempts to discreetly stop these concerts at Slimelight, without publicity, have previously failed, which is (in case of asking) why the campaign's now gone public.
Both concerts are organised by promoter Gaya Donadio (who performs her own music under the name Anti-Child League). Objections to the Slimelight's entertainments license should forward this information to:
Licensing Service Public Protection Division Islington Council 222 Upper Street London N1 1XR Tel: 020 7527 3031 Fax: 020 7527 3430
Email: licensing@islington.gov.uk
1 - http://www.whomakesthenazis.com/2011/04/weather-warning-shower-of-shit-expected.html
2 - http://www.islingtongazette.co.uk/news/online_campaign_attacks_controversial_islington_gig_1_914659
3 - http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--qZWk4oN0mg/TfItm4wzMMI/AAAAAAAAATM/y1iQuuTlwz0/s1600/newpicoct11.jpg
4 - http://www.uncarved.org/othertexts/pure.html (reprinted from OVO magazine)
5 - These photos are documented in a book called Apocalypse Culture (Amok Press 1988)
6 - http://www.artnotart.com/come/cassettes.html
7 - http://noiz.tripod.com/sutcliffe.html
Photo 1 - Tony Wakeford (far left of photo) at NF newspaper stall in London's Brick Lane
Photo 2 - Boyd Rice of Non wearing Swastika pendant and "Rape" T-shirt
Photo 3 - Advertisement for Sutcliffe Jugend and Peter Sotos at the Slimelight
Photo 4 - Front cover and Whitehouse feature from Flowmotion fanzine, issue 6
Photo 5 - Detail from Flowmotion 6
Photo 6 - White Power compilation packaging
Not for Profit at Indymedia
