Monocled Alchemist

The Anti-Nowhere League: A group to make you retch

article published in NME, 29th May 1982

Anti-Nowhere League | Animalisms | IT’S COMING NEAR to closing time for one particular section of the punky playpen. Certainly more than a few of the dazed revellers will awake in the morning rubbing their eyes, scratching their heads, maybe even fortified by the spirit and fire which once drove them. Then, they’ll be ready to do it all again but the most recent evidence suggests it’s time to put a nail in the coffin of the present breed.

The dwindling hordes have lost their icons, their dignity and their identity: Rotten got out, Strummer did a runner and Killing Joke took their magic books to see a guru in Iceland.

The alternatives, the supposedly new alternatives have echoes of another time, another place. Crass offer a pow-wow and self sufficiency away from all the evils of western consumerism. Another generation faded and consoled itself cranking bad drugs in Haight Ashbury. The debris of this generation converge on London W1 and you can see them whiling their time away, their noses stuck in bags of glue, red rings around their eyes looking pretty vacant, pretty apathetic and pretty moronic.

The Movement itself becomes the new underground, a hierarchical sub-elite which is a perfect gutter reflection of the bigger more opulent rock fantasy. The stars are preened on cut-price package tours, made or broken by independent chart placings but it’s all the same — a safe and cosy members club, it just works at a two-star rather than a five-star level. (Perhaps it’s no coincidence that John Curd’s Straight Music, management and WXYZ Record label home of the ANWL have an office directly underneath The Rolling Stones’ British offices.)

So betrayed, denied and wronged by the entire world, punk continues to sit in the corner and pick its scabs. Punk pretends to be angry but really it’s just feeling sorry for itself.

IF YOU GET what you deserve The Anti Nowhere League show how undeserving you can be. Punk and ANWL make good bedfellows.

The ANWL —four delinquents of over a decade’s standing with no pretensions, no ambitions and no talent musically.

The ANWL — a barrage of obscenities and fifth-rate rugby club humour.

The ANWL — a shrine for every last streak of paralysed piss who never wanted to be anything but an honorary member of the NSSY (National Society of Slothful Yobs).

The ANWL— come and offer up a huge bellyful of phlegm and make your miserable existence matter, if only for a few short soggy minutes.

Being with The ANWL was like the three days I spent with Killing Joke last year. I got on with them OK in a run-of-the-mill human discourse situation. But trying to reconcile their attitudes and their worldview with mine (hell. Trying to find any sort of credence in what they were doing it all for, apart from the inevitable ‘laugh’) had me totally stumped, stuck and almost sickened. I was meant to spend even more time with them but I couldn’t handle it. I ran away.

I’d seen enough to know that the storyline was going to be the same. The same lack of purpose, the same stale ennui and all pervading whiff of decay that surrounded Killing Joke was beginning to wheedle itself into the ANWL camp.

Anti-Nowhere League | Animalisms

Don’t you ever feel that you’re going through a tired boring routine, doing the same thing every night, playing a totally outdated music? I asked in exasperation at one point.

‘Uuuh, I haven’t really got an answer to that. I suppose you’re right,” said guitarist Magoo, scraping at the dried mucus on his Artful Dodger top hat.

“What’s that?” said the scruffiest, hairiest and ugliest member of the band (he’s called Animal).

“He says what we’re doing is like a job,” says Magoo. “Like I said, as soon as one of us gets tired of this we’ll pack it all in,” he grunted convincingly.

ANWL ARE FOUR — Magoo (guitar), Animal (vocals), Winston (bass) and PJ (drums). They come wrapped in stubble, greasy denim, tattoos and torn leather they are inarticulate yobs and proud of it, they say “fuck” every three words (many now expunged from the transcript), and it comes naturally to them. They come from Tunbridge Wells and this is how they got here.

Animal: “It just got to the point where we thought we’ve got to start a fucking band, because all the toerags in Tunbridge Wells wanted us to form a band. They’ve got this stupid carnival up our way so we hid up in the common and rigged all this equipment up and as the carnival was going by we turned everything up full volume and no one could understand where the noise was coming from. The old Bill came up but they couldn’t stop it, the councillors came up and they blamed the police and it went on like that all afternoon. That’s the way it started, as a way of getting up people’s noses, we’ve always enjoyed getting up people’s noses.”

The ANWL are men of the world, living outside the law and society they reckon themselves as sort of modern day outlaws with a touch of the blameless teenage rebellion that was sired by James Dean and has since been fostered by many.

“They slag the youngsters down because they’ve got no money and no brains in Tunbridge Wells but they’ve got their silly little toy-town express which comes out every week. They open up a nightclub in the town but you try getting in there with dirty jeans on. So they say dress up but that puts you in the same category as them. They’ve got you doing exactly what they want you to do, it’s like a concentration camp.”

Anti-Nowhere League | Animalisms

Beneath an armour of studs, chains and manacles, Animal fights off the suggestion that what we have here is more old men trying to be eternal teenage rebels.

“Everyone says we’re old men but we’re only fucking 25, it’s just that we’ve been around and done a lot of things before this. Basically we’re just young lads down to the bright lights of the city and feeling fresh and healthy. But just because we don’t wash or shave we get called old men.

“Everyone can be a rebel until they’re 19 it’s when you get past that age that it starts to get hard. When you realise that you don’t belong in the category of being nowhere. Fucken nowheres only live up to get their picture of their wedding in the paper, and then as soon as it’s over they’re away to shag the nearest nymphomaniac or to beat up their wife. We don’t fit in with that society, we fit in with the toerags. We have a much better time than they have and everyone we hang around, all the toerags, are fucken genuine people. People you could trust with your life.”

THE ANWL are the logical end to punk as we know it, bringing images and preoccupations to fit the caricatures that littered the gutter press in 1977, and turning them into reality.

Any popularity or favour The ANWL may find represents an unbelievable loss of intelligence, agility and awareness in the hothouse of youthful interests, be they protests or enjoyments.

The ANWL sealed their reputation in the new punk elite by outdoing The Damned in the gross overkill after-gig party tricks when Winston stuck a carrot up his anal passage and ate it along with a lump of excrement (source unknown). It was a performance that had Rat Scabies retching and the rest of the liggers choking on their chateau de blanc. The ANWL had snared a minor victory changing the crass comedy of The Damned into repulsive reality. The new guard arrived and punk progressed like a shit house rat in a sewage pit, ever downwards.

Animal: “I think we’re popular because of the anti side of us because the kids what am I saying? The geezers that come to see us —don’t want their parents to like the music that they do. Nowadays rebels in music are accepted rebels, parents turn round and say my little Johnny, he’s a right outrageous boy because he likes so and so but their music is really quite good y’know.

“But our music is for the toerags like us, who know what it’s like on the streets. People don’t like us walking the streets.”

In particular, the nowheres don’t like ANWL walking the streets, one presumes. A nowhere is part of the 90 per cent of humanity who should, according to Magoo, be exterminated. To not be a nowhere, to be a somewhere, all you have to do is spend all your time criticising nowheres and drop out, man.

“A nowhere is someone who really hates his life. He plods on through the same routine, he may as well be dead because no one would miss him, well we would because we wouldn’t be able to take the piss out of him.”

Aren’t there a lot of nowheres who follow you around?

“No I hope not. The mushes who follow us are toe-rags on the street who’re just the same as us. Just toe-rags, youknowharrimean? — Toerags, we’ve always been bleeding toerags, always will be. Geezers who know the hassle we’ve had every day of our life.

“Like some pubs serve us now cause they’ve seen our picture in the paper, but even now most places still won’t serve us.”

Anti-Nowhere League | Animalisms

AS FAR AS their songs are concerned, the ANWL seem fixated on the most disgusting and abject areas of language and society.

Animal: “When we sing about sexual perversion and child molesting and everything . . . the whole thing is not about us going out and doing these things it’s about nowheres that we’ve met who’re married and settled down. They realise that they’re sick people, they realise that they wanna molest children and then go and get caught doing it, exposing themselves up on the common.

“They’re the people who made this world and we sing about it because we find it fucking hilarious. There’s Joe Straight, probably goes to church on Sundays as well, and he’s settled down with a wife and kids, has a bit on the side with the secretary and he’s creeping into the corner shop to get his dirty books. He thinks he’s normal and he slags us off as abnormal. But we don’t get done up in court for the sort of things that they do.”

I try to get serious: but it all sounds so sick and mindless the way you do it, you never effectively castigate or highlight any of the sickness you talk about. Your music doesn’t say anything.

Magoo: “What do you want music to say, politics or something like that? Lots of groups try to change the world but they’ll never do it, you may as well expose what’s going on and have a laugh while you’re slagging them.”

It’s negative laughter, you’re just revelling in squalor. I looked over in the corner and a spectre looked back. It was punk still sitting in the corner, still picking its scabs. It absent-mindedly watched as the blood and the pus oozed out. But it smiled to itself, happy in the knowledge that it had the ANWL as a friend.

FOR A WHILE, anyway. At the minute the ANWL are engaged in the So What tour on which they headline a package of four bands including Chelsea, Chron Gen and The Defects. It’s hailed as the biggest thing on the punk calendar this year, but somebody obviously forget to tell this to the people of Sheffield.

The crowd that troops into the town’s Top Rank is sparse and docile, dutifully depositing their studs and chains at the reception and standing in small clusters or hunched around tables, there are huge yawning gaps all over the place. There’s a ritualistic security about the evening tinged with desperation because the safety that was once to be found in numbers is gradually disappearing.

Anti-Nowhere League | Animalisms

The So What tour is low budgeted, cheap labour, high quantity and low quality rock’n’roll. The fresh, virulent attack of The Defects opens the show, it’s the best thing on offer, but even they fall into an old pratfall with the puerile misogyny of ‘Bitch‘. Gene October still prowls about the place playing the overwrought rebel/hero to kids young enough to be his children (if only . . . )

And coming top of the bill, the ANWL are so devastatingly dull, dumb and disgusting that they must represent the end of something (or else, God forbid, the beginning of a bastardised mutant subculture, doing for British music what John Waters did for the American cinema). Stage centre Animal attracts all the attention, abuse and phelgm. He cuts a truly hideous figure in scrapyard metal and torn leather, his crotch covered in a screaming skull cap and the perverse contortions of his face hidden beneath wraparound biker shades. His excruciating spastic dance and his penis-obsessed performance go with the puerile lavatory graffiti of his lyrics. Mid-period Jed Tull with a lobotomy and tertiary syphilis, a fantasy from the pagan stone-age past.

“The society that we’ve got has created all the people that are rebelling against it. Society has taken everything away from them that makes it worth while being a human being. I’ll tell you that was fucking great times when the Romans had the arena — that was brilliant. When you could go down and fight in the arena, can you imagine the excitement of that? Standing there facing another gladiator in a screaming arena,” says Animal.

THERE’S A LOT of brutality and anti-civilisation in ANWL songs, even in their worldview (it’s taken the good Lord billions of years to develop the characters we have before us and I bet he’s wondering why he bothered). At one point Magoo lets his views on Argentina be known, for no apparent reason.

“If I was unemployed I’d go out to fight in that war. The mushes on the dole have nothing left, it’s the only form of excitement left.”

You must be joking, you’re playing right into the hands of ‘the straights’ you’re supposed to hate. But, no they all agree, the war would be a good idea, a better way to spend the time, more excitement. At times the ANWL remind me of the Stranglers, pre-loopy cosmology and without the university degrees.

Their background is probably something similar — years spent in street gangs, biking round the continent, doing judo and taking part in speedway, Winston used to be a male prostitute but he gave up after getting ‘VD of the bum’.

Forming a band was just something different to do, music has never played a big part in their lives and it’s only since they’ve been in a group that they started to listen to other groups.

No Respect

“We’ve always done things rather than sitting back like all the other bores and thinking oh dear, my life’s so boring, what am I going to do — have another pint I suppose. We just do things and if it works, it works if it don’t it don’t. It’s better to try and fail than not to try at all.

“We’ve got no respect for no-one, never have, never will. If you respect someone go and do it yourself, otherwise don’t respect them at all. That’s my total view.”

IT’S THE END of the evening in a dressing room that reeks of piss and disinfectant. Winston is trying to coax one of two 16-year-old girls, who are the only backstage visitors, to go back to the hotel or into the toilet for at least three minutes but to no avail.

While a member of the roadcrew bundles curling scraps of food into bread rolls, Animal and Magoo pass the time taking the piss out of the girl’s friend (but she’s smart and gives as good as she gets).

For a three-year-old it might be an impressive performance, for four grown men it’s pathetic. I ask Magoo if they’ve changed much over the years. “Yeah,” he gurgles, “we’ve got more childish.”

I wasn’t about to argue.