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“When Johnny Rotten proclaimed that there was 'no future,' we saw it as a challenge to our creativity … we knew that there was a future if we were prepared to work for it.” … Penny Rimbaud of the anarchist band Crass, 1982
Social historians and cultural commentators seem to have taken Johnny Rotten at his word. History, for them, stops with punk. But riot, revolt, imagination and utopias haven't disappeared, they have simply taken new forms. The last twenty years have seen an extraordinary rise in the numbers of young people living outside the moribund institutions of British society: travellers, ravers, tribes, squatters, direct-action protesters. This book is the first attempt to survey and analyse these cultures of resistance and to explore and celebrate their endlessly creative senselessness.
George McKay looks at the legacies of 1960s' hippies and 1970s' punks, and shows how those legacies have been subsequently transformed. His journey through the undergrounds of the 1980s and 1990s takes us from the first Windsor Free Festival in 1972 to the Castlemorton Free Rave Megaparty of 1992, from the anarchopunk band Crass to today's still spreading anti-road protests and to the huge opposition to the Criminal Justice Act.
Assembled from the underground press, from record lyrics, interviews and diaries, and illustrated with photos, posters and record sleeves, Senseless Acts of Beauty gives a vivid account of these argely unrecorded countercultures. At the same time McKay offers his own answers to the questions they pose: what are their politics, what are their aspirations, what are their consequences? If there is resistance anywhere in Britain today to consensual politics and continuing social devastation, McKay argues, it is here, in the beat-up buses and tree-top barricades, that we should look for it.
George McKay was born in Glasgow in 1960 and grew up in Norfolk. He's been a punk, involved in the anarchist movement, a squatter, a painter and decorator, a jazz musician and even an administrator. He has a doctorate from Glasgow University. He is currently worried about the creeping process of embourgeoisement as a Senior Lecturer in Cultural studies at the University of Central Lancashire.
Publication
June 1996
224 pages
40 b/w photos
Cloth
1 85984 908 3
£39.95 / US$60.00
Paper
1 85984 028 0
£12.95 / US$18.00
