‘I Fucked Thatcher’ « Ian Bone

‘I Fucked Thatcher’

‘I FUCKED THATCHER’ is the street fighting autobiography of Darren Ryan with an introduction by Ian Bone

The chapters of this work in progress by Darren Ryan will be posted up here as they are written.

The crazed Ryan left in charge of small child - in The Warwick Castle

INTRODUCTION - SYDNEY, THE GUNNERY and WOOLOOMOOLOO

ENGLAND 1985

Darren arrives on stolen plane ticket
Meeting ‘Mad Mark’and ‘The General’
Darren’s first night at Wapping
Darren’s first Class War meeting – the fight with DB
Mile End ‘street work’
The National Front raid Mark’s bedsit
The protection patrol/racket on Burdett Road to protect asian shops from the National Front
The big fight with the NF at Wapping
24 hour anti-NF patrols
Conflict – the anarcho-punk scene
The big Coventry Conflict pub fight
The Conflict Tour
Free food rounds for Asian families
2^nd Conflict tour
Writing Conflict mags and answering their mail
The South Shields boys
The Burdett estate and the Pakistani kids
Lisa from Manchester
The end of Mad Mark
Millwall football fighting: Arsenal/Liverpool/Midlesborough
The West Ham night game riot
Class War people
Getting CS gassed at the Main event skinhead gig by the Chelsea Headhunters
Oi! Gigs – the skinheads, 100 Club, Nicky Crane, Ian Stuart, the Last Resort, the Nazis
The Punk scene
The Notting Hill Carnival riots
Illegal living by any means necessary
Armed robbery/shoplifting/cheque fraud for survival and a living
Red Action
The Liverpool anti-fascist riot
Toxteth autonomous zone
Anti-fascist action – class war bootboys and bootgirls
The trip to Ireland
Grafitti
The loneliness of the whole thing – personal life and loves
Boxing with Peter Kent
Kick boxing with Judd
24 HOUR Class War activist
Joe Strummer – Rock against the Rich
The Joe Strummer 30 gig RAR tour of Britain
The Notting Hill by-election
Cynthia Payne – prostitutes madam
Maxwell Worrel and radical black politics
The East –End anti-yuppie campaign
The Joe Strummer Isle of Dogs gig
Anti-yuppie action
The ‘Pink’Un’ football newspaper
The Tichbourne Claimant – Darren claims to be heir to English aristocratic fortune!
Stamford Hill squatters – the battle of Stamford Hill
The pubs - the drinking
Soul crew – Cardiff City hooligans
The Community defence Force
Millwall football – more fighting
the train strike looting spree
The possibilities of the Class War takeover
The anti-poll tax movement
The Town Hall poll tax riots
The Trafalgar square poll tax riot
Thatcher goes
Back to Aussie - in a hurry!
Thatcher’s Britain - 4 riotous years
My part in Thatcher’s downfall

“Margaret Thatcher ruled parliament – but out on the streets, well, who ruled out there was up for grabs.”
Darren Ryan

“In the summer of 1986 if you hated Thatcher all you had to do was to take a balmy evening stroll down to Wapping and lob a brick at a copper.”
Ian Bone

Foreword: RUCK RIOT’N ROLL

Darren Ryan arrived in England using a stolen plane ticket from Australia in May 1986. Within 12 hours he had thrown his first brick on the Wapping picket line. Four years later in the summer of 1990 he hurriedly flew back to Australia after the poll tax riots in Trafalgar Square that brought down Margaret Thatcher.

Job well done.

In the intervening four years, Darren Ryan caused more mayhem in the United Kingdom than British anarchists had achieved in the last 50 years. In I Fucked Thatcher Darren Ryan and Ian Bone, for the first time, chronicle those four years of mayhem with shocking and brutal frankness and an honesty that will have the authorities checking their extradition arrangements with Australia.

Ryan ran with anarchist organisation Class War and declared all-out war on the rich. Ryan roadied and fought for anarcho-punk band Conflict and instigated a riot outside their Brixton Academy gig in 1986. He was the only person ever to be asked to leave a Conflict tour for being too extreme.

Ryan compered Joe Strummer’s Rock Against the Rich tour around Britain, making trouble from Newcastle to Edinburgh to Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham and way beyond.

Ryan fought and chased with Millwall football hooligans through the Isle of Dogs. He was the only football fan who would leave the match at the end of the day not knowing what the score was or caring what the score was.

Ryan fought Nazis and fascists with Antifascist Action in many a bloody confrontation across the country. He initiated the anti-yuppie campaign in London’s East End. It culminated in full-on insurrection on the Isle of Dogs with Strummer playing against an incendiary background of burning yuppie loft apartments.

In the meantime he formed the Community Defence Force in Burdett Road; ran vigilante patrols with asian gangs; delivered food parcels to poor asian families; kick-started the Notting Hill bank holiday riots; trained in the East End with the world kickboxing champion; laid claim to being the Tichborne Claimant - the Australian heir to an English aristocratic fortune; planned to start a major national football newspaper; fought a by-election campaign and continually battled the National Front.

All the action was funded through an illegal lifestyle of cheque forgery, armed robbery, benefit fraud, shoplifting, political vandalism and running illegal speakeasies.

Ryan played a central role in the Poll Tax riots that brought down Margaret Thatcher. The first ever true account of the Trafalgar Square poll tax riot is here. Then… He fucked off sharpish back to Botany Bay!

He recently featured on the Australian front pages after Sydney’s MacQuarrie Fields riots. Incredibly he remains at large - but on parole - on Cronulla Beach where he sings in a barbershop glee club and takes solace of an evening playing the piano forte… And plots his return

INTRODUCTION by Ian Bone

RUCK, RIOT ‘N’ ROLL

Wapping February 1987

The Wapping News International printers strike was, like the miners’ strike before it, lost when it could have been won. To be blunt, more violence could have won it. More violence was the only way it could have been won.

Adrenalin surging after the defeat of Scargill’s aristocrats of the proletariat, Thatcher threw every resource available into supporting Rupert Murdoch’s move of his Fleet Street papers - The Sun, The News of the World, The Times - to Wapping. The unions were threatened with every legal action from sequestration of funds to the banning of secondary picketing. The union leaders being of an upright, conservative mindset spent more time protecting their funds than organising effective picketing.

The main resources Thatcher provided were the police. Thousands of them for a year and thousands more when required. Not just in London but protecting Murdoch’s distribution chains and TNT lorries throughout the country. The printers were facing a ruthless and successful adversary but the union leaders acted as though they were facing ol’ Ted Heath and ‘one more heave’ could achieve a Gates of Saltley Coke Depot-style re-run victory.

The union leadership – SOGAT’s ‘Lady’ Brenda Dean and the NGA’s Tony Gubbins - thought the battle could be won by winning over public opinion. This was a mistake. Public opinion had not won it for the miners and would not win it for the printers. Public opinion was a busted flush and the fight to win it a millstone around the printers’ necks. Thatcher was quite prepared to face down public opinion whenever necessary. The union leadership perceived that the printers were seen as greedy dinosaurs benefiting from restricted practices, earning £50,000 a week and producing sexist right-wing tabloids like The Sun. Many on the left thought the same, believing that the printers - now calling for solidarity - had been the same ones who churned out Thatcher’s propaganda in The Sun during the miners’ strike.

So the union leadership failed to organise proper picketing at the Wapping site for fear of violent scenes which might discredit the printers further. What they did organise were protest marches - not picketing. Every Wednesday and Saturday there would be well-stewarded peaceful marches to Wapping gates from Tower Hill. At Wapping they would be a brief pause at the gates; then on to a hot air rally addressed by left reformists; then go home. To make their image even less threatening there were special family marches and women’s marches. These were then passed off as though they were some form of mass picketing. It wasn’t.

Throughout the dispute Murdoch did not lose one nights’ production. From the front gate you could see Murdoch’s lorries moving out from other entrances unhindered. The union leadership hoping everyone would have been bored rigid by speeches and gone home by then. Union stewards would even liaise with the police by phone as to when it was safe to bring the lorries out. They sought to create a relationship with the police which was not antagonistic - as if they were somehow neutral parties. Wapping Post editor Keith Sutton talked of “the aggro being softened by humour across ‘enemy’ lines”. The delusional jokey-friendly relationship was further developed by football and cricket matches between official pickets and coppers on the green opposite the gates.

But blame cannot just be levied at the union leaderships - as the left would like us to believe - thereby making a change of leadership toward a more leftist variety the simple key to success. Influential among the printers, politically, were the ‘Tankies’- the Stalinist political remnant of the old Communist Party, which remained loyal to the Soviet Union. For years the Tankies had exercised a political stranglehold over the print workers through their control of the NGA and SOGAT union chapels. They were respected by the printers for the work they put in and the protection of their exalted position in the workforce. At grassroots level the Tankies - exemplified by arch Stalinist Mike Hicks - wished to ‘respectablise’ the printers in a way that even Lady Brenda Dean might have felt unnecessary.

Orderly pickets, useless protest marches, ‘mind your ps and qs’ were the order of the day - a counsel of disaster. Hicks even arranged with Met commander Wyn Jones for them both to autograph a copy of The Wapping Post to be auctioned off to help the strike fund. When one night The Wapping Post proposed a front page with the word ‘Fuck’ in its headline the SOGAT Tankie thought police went ballistic and had the word removed. “Fuck,” they claimed “would offend working class sensibilities.”

Hovering over the Tankies was a carrot; that a leftist Neil Kinnock Labour government might repeal all the anti-union laws. So best not to rock the boat or get the unions a bad image ’til that great day dawned. As the months dragged on with no visible change in tactics, the spirit of the sacked printers inspired a radicalism well beyond that of their trade union leaders and the Tankies. Luckily forces other than the trade unions started to make their presence felt on Wapping Highway. When they joined up with the radicalised print workers imagination began to seize power…

Throughout 1986 all you had to do if you hated Thatcher – and a lot of people did – was to take a balmy summer’s stroll down to Wapping Highway and throw a brick at a copper. If Wapping was too far away then brick one of Murdoch’s TNT distribution lorries on its way to a town or village near you.

For our pre-brick throwing liveners, Class War would gather in the White Hart in Whitechapel High Street every Friday and Saturday night. Best fun in town. During the early weeks of the strike you could lean by the White Hart door, brick a passing TNT lorry and resume drinking ’til the next one came. I was on a traffic island opposite the White Hart one night, brick in hand, when the TNT driver spotted me. He drove his fucking huge pantechnicon straight at me - at speed - demolishing the traffic island and attempting to flatten me. My addled brain cells didn’t clock his attempted assassination ’til the last second when I hurled myself headlong to the side. Then back to the pub. What the fuck? The scab drivers were going to fight back weren’t they? Fair play.

Arriving at Wapping Highway was a shock. There were loads of leftist paper sellers and stalls lining the road and even stalls touting miners strike ‘memorobilia’! Apart from the first big march at the start of the strike, with our ‘Murdoch you are Scum’ cover, we never sold Class War at Wapping. We were too mindful of the stories of the SWP trying to flog papers to fleeing miners at Orgreave for that. Wapping was for fighting the cops not paper flogging. By this time Alex Russell, son of film maker Ken Russell, was well into Class War. He hated leftie parasites. One night at Wapping he picked up an entire WRP stall and threw it over a hedge with a manic ‘C’mon then you fuckers’ look in his eye. Bit of a wild card was our Alex.

February 15 saw the first big ruck as dissatisfaction with the union/Tankies softly-softly approach boiled over. Every Thatcher hater in town seemed to be there and played their part in bricking the coppers to good effect. It was great fucking fun and payback for the miners’ strike. Afterwards the police, union leaders and Tankies parroted the same line:

“We saw honest well-intentioned union members being joined by diverse elements whose only interest was in causing as much trouble as possible.”
Wyn Jones Deputy Assistant Commissioner, the Met

“Unfortunately we had a handful of people who joined this march who did not carry out the instructions of the stewards.”
Mike Hicks, Sogat’s Tankie Chief Stalinist

“Fringe people were responsible for the violence. We appeal to everyone to have peaceful picketing.”
‘Lady’ Brenda Dean, Sogat

There would then follow the risible one-script police press conference, which Wyn Jones – the rising star of the Met – conducted regularly. There would be a pile of bricks and stones assiduously gathered by the cops from Wapping Highway – or brought out of the Met’s Black Museum in nearby Leman street. Then a piece of railing, which Wyn Jones would deadpan announce, “had been hurled like javelin at his men”. All this would be topped off with pictures of a wonky faced copper sitting up in his hospital bed with his arm in plaster. Oh how we laughed. Jones was eventually booted out the Met on corruption charges. Presumably taking the iron railing in his locker with him.

Our aim throughout the year was to spread the fighting away from the main gates, to stop the lorries coming out of the other entrances and spread the rioting to the local housing estates and gangs of kids. Wapping was in the frontline of the gentrification of East London. A link up with the local residents could extend the action beyond the parameters of industrial struggle. By-passing the platitudinous hot air rallies outside the gates, we’d get ourselves in the local boozers ’til 2.00am when the first lorries would come out. Spotters would relay information back from the other entrances and off we’d charge. Quite why the coppers left the boozers open ’til all hours was a mystery.

By now we were a mix of printers, Pete Gold’s Print Casuals, Class War, other up-for-it anarchists and every other feisty fucker in the area. In the first weeks it was possible to attack the TNT lorries once they’d left the protection of Stalag Wapping but the cops wised up and escorted the lorries ’til they were well away. There were then key ambush points spread throughout London. Particularly at The Angel, Old Street, Archway and Liverpool Street. Masked up gangs - learning from the miners’ hit squads - would attack the lorries at traffic lights, often forcing the drivers to flee, and then ripping the papers out the back. TNT distribution depots ’round the country were attacked in similar fashion by masked-up hit squads. The tactic we spread in Class War was to grab bundles of Murdoch papers from outside newsagents at 4.00-5.00am in the morning. All over the country piles of copies of The Times and The Sun were floating around street gutters. It was fucking delerious fucking fun.

Our mobs at Wapping consisted of tons of people we never knew, drawn by the boozing, the laughter and the action. One night Kevin Allen was having a party in Clerkenwell. We gathered in the Metropolitan pub beforehand. It was apparent that a load of arty farty types were invited to the party. So me and big Dave Braithwaite decided to charge a fee to get in on the door - only to selected trendies you understand. Dave looked the part of the huge black bouncer and after half an hour or so we were quids in. In particular a load of pretentious wankers from ‘The Grey Organisation’ were relieved of a lot of their spare change.

Just as we were contemplating what a great little earner this was, a TNT lorry came by. It was completely trashed. In all we trashed four lorries before radio communications stopped any more coming our way. High on adrenalin, boozing and class hatred by this time, The Lucy Parsons Class War Death Commando had discovered four luxury cars on the forecourt of a nearby garage and set fire to the lot of them. The cops arrived and we dived back into Kevin’s party leaving a mystified Kevin to innocently answer the door to the riot squad. We jangled our way back home. Pockets bulging with donations from the newly gentrified. Top night out.

There were two positive developments at Wapping on the newspaper front. The sacked printers and locked out journalists produced their own newspaper The Wapping Post. In addition a mate of ours – Arnie, a printer himself - produced a weekly magazine called Picket distributed free at Wapping. It was only two sides of A4, produced late on Saturday afternoons and contained that day’s football results taken off the television video printer. It was a neat idea because there were no Saturday afternoon football results papers in London. I stored the idea away in the back of my head for future use.

Picket had straightforward class combative politics and went down a storm with the printers, showing, once again, a simply produced paper can be just as useful politically as a lavishly produced one. The good response Picket was getting from the printers and their increasing frustration with the Tankie/union counsels of moderation emboldened us to take the Stalinists on politically.

The last Saturday in April saw us waiting outside the main gates for Mike Hicks to spout his usual megaphone rubbish. I heckled Hicks continually – seemingly louder than him even without a megaphone. A few weeks earlier any heckling of Hicks would have met with grief from the printers but things were changing rapidly. Finally exasperated by the heckling, Hicks thrust the megaphone in my direction shouting, “If you can do better come up here and do it smart arse.”

He didn’t think I’d take him up on the offer but his Stalinist cronies sensed the mistake. I eagerly grabbed the megaphone and with some booze induced sarcasm took the Tankies and ‘Lady’ Brenda Dean to bits. Everyone was roaring their approval as Hicks vainly attempted to regain the megaphone. Sensing my time was running out I praised the hit squads attacking the lorries; called for aggressive picketing to smash our way into the plant; said the police were Thatcher’s goon squads - and the enemy - and called for a full-scale riot the next Saturday when a bigger than usual march was planned for the Mayday weekend. The place erupted in cheering and applause and I was actually hoisted on to a couple of printers’ shoulders for a few seconds. At every pub I visited later that night along the Highway there was backslapping and I was plied with pints. Fucking brilliant.

I Woke up Sunday morning fucking ecstatic. A week later on Sunday May 4 I woke up early again. This time I wasn’t quite so full of myself. In fact I was shitting it. As soon as you arrived at Wapping Highway on May 3 you knew it was going to kick off. There was a tangible air of menace in the air. The rattled Tankies – in a lame attempt to forestall trouble - had pathetically arranged for a stage to be placed on the green opposite the gates so a band could play to entertain the strikers! As if people had travelled from all over to listen to a fucking ‘pop group’. Jesus fucking Christ – how low could the Tankies sink? But - hold hard me hearties - some enterprising elements had turned the stage over to prevent the band playing! Top fucking work comrades. It was a bizarre sight, as the later battles raged around them, to see the Tankie/Sogat/NGA leaders arguing furiously about who should pay for the stage damage. Never had they been more out of touch with reality.

May 3 duly kicked off with some of the most sustained attacks on the coppers to date. We awoke the following morning to the news on the radio that a police inspector been seriously injured during the previous night’s riot. ‘Outside elements’ were as usual to blame by the police. Sean Kenny from Southampton Class War gleefully came into the bedroom clutching a copy of The Sunday Mirror exposing Class War as being behind the Wapping violence. It featured - prominently - a photo of me taken at Wapping.

Only two weeks before the same paper had led on its front page with the headline ‘Royal wedding riots planned’ - planned by Class War of course. ‘Well we’re certainly back in the news again,’ I thought, disguising considerable unease about being identified as a leading Wapping outside agitator on the same day a policeman was seriously injured. This might not be good for my future well-being. Sean came rushing back into the bedroom with a copy of Sunday Today – Eddie Shah’s shortlived national newspaper - containing a four-page expose of Class War and my actions at Wapping.

I’d been followed around Wapping all night by an undercover reporter and cameraman. Unfortunately the night in question was the previous Saturday when I’d incited a riot over Mike Hicks’ megaphone. There it was in glorious technicolour. Me surrounded by Class War’s elite brick throwers - Tall Chris and DW from Cardiff - and a detailed account of my Mike Hicks megaphone rant. Could the timing have been any better from the police point of view? They were looking to avenge their hospitalised copper by finding the outside agitator behind the violence. Shouldn’t take fucking Sherlock to work that one out. I pulled the sheets over my head and quaked at the non-stop ringing of the phone. When I woke up it was not the police feeling my collar – it was the cavalry.

From 1980-1990 Thatcher’s Britain was the riot capital of the world. Thatcher may have ruled in Parliament but out on the street it was a different matter. From the first eruption of inner city rioting in St Paul’s, Bristol in 1980 through the July rioting across the country in 1981 to Brixton and Broadwater Farm in 1985 someone, somewhere was lobbing a brick or petrol bomb at Thatcher. If it wasn’t the inner cities it was the year-long miners’ strike or the Warrington and Wapping printers’ picket lines or the new age travellers at Stonehenge. Thatcher’s subjects were revolting.

There weren’t any outside agitators. No ‘three people on motorbikes going round the country stirring up trouble’ as the Daily Mail had it in 1981. Well that’s not quite true. There was one outside agitator. He’d come all the way from Australia to stir up trouble in an already seething Britain. And boy did he succeed. From 1986 until 1990 Darren Ryan was at the centre of every Ruck, Riot ‘n Roll in the country. As history now shows Thatcher lost and Ryan won.

There were two antagonistic political trends battling to oppose Thatcher. Many on the left saw the election of the left-wing firebrand Neil Kinnock as hope that a radical Labour government could yet come to power. Kinnock did not want fighting in the streets. He wanted radicals to back the Parliamentary road to socialism and many did. Kinnock condemned ‘toy town revolutionaries’. More pertinently he blustered that “rioting on the streets won’t get rid of the poll tax or Maggie Thatcher. Only the return of a Labour government will do that.”

The defeat of the dockers, the steelworkers, the miners and the printers - for Kinnock - meant strikes and direct action had failed. Leaving the Westminster path to power open to him…

He was wrong. The miners and the Wapping printers were defeated for sure. Thatcher’s politicised police force carried the day. Miners, printers, rioters and travellers found themselves before the courts on conspiracy charges. But they didn’t stick. Jury after jury threw the charges out as ordinary people came to give their verdicts. Thatcher should have paid more heed to the decisions of ordinary men and women. Yes the miners and printers were defeated. But they didn’t walk off the stage of history as Thatcher hoped. They festered and seethed and waited and dreamed of revenge. Thatcher had been able pick off miners, printers rioters, travellers one-by-one. Isolating them from each other, depriving them of solidarity. But what would happen if one issue came along to unite them all?

It did. The Poll Tax. On that day in Trafalgar Square the motley crew struck back and Thatcher was gone.

From 1986 to 1990 Britain smouldered resentfully and bitterly and one man had toiled ceaselessly to fan the flames of vengeance into rebellion and insurrection. The Botany Bay Boys had come back to claim what was theirs. And Wat Tyler smiled as the dispossessed struck back and seized the city. The toytown revolutionaries had got rid of the poll tax and Margaret Thatcher. It was Kinnock who walked off into the dustbin of history.

CHAPTER ONE

Sydney, Australia 1985

Sydney, Australia. A hot, sweaty afternoon. Real humid, intense heat. Not exactly the kind of weather that would inspire you to wear the sort of clobber I was sporting back in 1986. Blue Levi’s cut off and neatly folded at the top; a pair of 14 hole steel-capped Doc Martens with red laces; a black studded jacket with the slogans ‘Bash the Rich’ and ‘All Out Attack’ scrawled on the back in white paint and a spiked haircut that looked like someone had welded a bag of 3 inch orange nails to my cranium. I was clearly not your identikit bronzed Aussie heading for Bondi Beach to crack a few waves.

That’s how most people in Australia had fun. Not me. To me they were just sheep on their way to the slaughterhouse in life. Fun to me was riding the trains and walking around the city streets finding people to abuse, intimidate and harass for voting in the Conservative government or putting up stickers on rich peoples cars before slamming my boot into the polished body work.

I was an angry young man in the process of defining exactly who to aim all that pent up aggression at. But I wasn’t some mega-psycho on the loose. My fight was for some sort of social justice. It had an angle, a reason. Somebody was gonna have to hold these bastards to task and that someone was gonna be me.

I’d seen nearly all my friends fuck themselves up on heroin and other drugs and vices that the system uses to blunten the edge of discontented youth. To sideline them and render them harmless including, I thought, girlfriends.

Girlfriends? You must be fuckin’ joking! Everytime one of my mates got one of those surprise bags they turned into a fuckin’ handbag. No more punk haircuts. No more hanging around the city streets. Just domestic arguments and compromise. Turning them into a diluted version of what they once were. It was like someone waved a magic wand and they were transformed from a pitbull into a fuckin chihuahua.

Girlfriends? The only two fucks I’d had so far didn’t exactly register on the Richter Scale. My first fuck, Sandra, picked me up from my parents joint on her horse and took me up to the local park, fucked me, then took me home. All in the space of a very short time let me say.

The very next day at school she dropped me like a sack of spuds. Consequently the immortal moniker of ‘diamond shag’ will not appear in these pages. That throbbing nuisance in the front of my pants would just have to be ignored and redirected to more confrontation on the streets.

The trouble was that girls had just discovered g-string bikinis and the memory of my first sighting of one such gem on Cronulla Beach haunted me every fuckin’ night! I was constantly torn between the primal instincts in my pants and the anger and resentment I felt every time I walked the streets. Everytime I had a collision with one form of authority or another.

My reality overload. My desires. Total fuckin’ denial. It would take many years of frustration and loneliness before my back was put so hard up against the wall that I could deny my instinctual yearnings no longer. But for now there were bricks to be thrown and trouble to be caused.

Besides none of my heroes were out chasing skirt. Or so I thought. They were fighting coppers, rioting and robbing banks. My role models were hardened street punks, skinheads, hoodlums and bank robbers. Anyone who stuck their fingers up at the establishment in one way or another was a star in my eyes.

I would of included political extremists in this list except I didn’t know any. I had began flirting with the politics of anarchism, mainly through my love of the English punk band ‘Conflict’ and the violent stance of my other two favourite bands, ‘Blitz’ and ‘The Last Resort’.

I didn’t read much except for lyrics of the songs I liked but a good mate of mine, Colin Diamond, had given me a copy of an English newspaper called Class War. It was violent, anti intellectual and totally anti-authority. I fuckin’ loved it.

It openly called upon the punks to turn their anger on the rich and the cops. It was me to the bone. I read and re-read it until it permeated the darkest recesses of my brain. I had found my calling in life. I was gonna be a Class War anarchist! Everywhere I went I scrawled those two words on the walls.

The punk movement was my launch pad and Class War my fuel but I had no destination. There was nowhere here that I could put it into action. Sydney was too slow for a bloke travelling like me back then. The punk scene was changing. It no longer took its orders direct from England.

The Americans had arrived with their skateboards and long hair and their own watered down version of punk called Hardcore. It was for people who also belonged to the Star Trek fan club as far as I was concerned. But it was a pivotal moment in the Sydney punk scene. It was the moment when the street punks and skinheads faded from the scene and were replaced by people who had no power to their convictions.

They stood for nothing and, as such, fell for anything. Passive consumers who happened to like thrash music. As US Hardcore took over, the punk scene became impotent. Its only strength was the anarchist punks who were heading in a different direction.

For the sort of action that I needed to satisfy my redirected urges, either London or Belfast were my only options. I’d seen the miners’ strike and the violence associated with it on the TV and I wished I could be there to throw those bricks and rocks and run wild with the mob.

I’d seen the undercover soldier-cops get stranded in the middle of a demo in Belfast, then get dragged from their car and get their heads kicked in before being shot dead and I wanted to be there to join in.

I’d seen the football hooligans running riot on the terraces and streets and I wanted to be smack in the middle of it. All this I’d only seen on TV. The street drama I’d been involved in in Sydney was just a snack compared to that meat and potatoes stuff. I wanted the whole fucking menu.

Up ’til then these were the powerful forces of influence in my life along with my grandfather. He was an old scallywag from way back. A staunch union man who hated the bosses and did all he could to fight them anyway he could. He also hated the Royal family and all they stood for. He loved the IRA, family life and his mates. He was constantly in my ear about politics and badgering me to keep my head down and bide my time. Something I just couldn’t do.

His ideas infected me as I saw society for what it was. The rich at the top with all their property and privilege keeping the rest of us at bay with an army of coppers, courts, judges, prison wardens and social workers. And their media doing all it could to turn us all against each other so we never turned on them.

What a comfortable arrangement for them. He taught me all this and his rorts and fiddles as well. He put me up to a few good ones that came in a triffecta for me. He didn’t understand or agree with punk. It was beyond his comprehension. Mohican haircuts and Dr Martens boots may as well have been a fashion statement on fuckin’ Mars as far as he was concerned.

You might say he initiated me into what a social worker would call a ‘life of crime’. Nothing violent cos he was not a violent man. Just your average scams and rip-offs where ‘the man’ paid the bill. He taught me how the forces were drawn against the working man and that you had to have your wits about you. You always had to stay one step ahead of the game or it would eat you alive. It was my street life that taught me the need for violence and that stealing from the ‘other side’ was never a crime but a commendable act of survival in an undeclared war of attrition between those that owned and ruled and those that did what they could to get by.

I didn’t, at this point, see it as a romantic gesture or a politically motivated action. It was a pure act of defiance.

This was the person that stomped through Sydney’s red light district, Kings Cross, on a sultry May afternoon and this was when I chanced upon something that would bring me closer to the battlefield I needed. It was an ad. An ad. In the window of a backpackers hostel. For a ticket to France for $500.

France was close to England wasn’t it? I had my destination…

CHAPTER TWO

Wooloomooloo, Australia 1985

When something that is about to shape your entire future collides with you, you don’t always, at the time, realise the importance of the event. There are exceptions of course. Those cataclysmic moments before you get arrested, bashed, dumped or shot at are the ones I remember most.

When I wrote down the address for that ticket on the back of a fine I’d just been given by some fuckin’ inspector on the train - the significance of the domino effect that began that very instant escaped me. The ad gave a phone number and the name ‘Robert’. No date of travel, no airline details - all the hallmarks of a dodgy deal.

Not that that bothered me. Quite the opposite. The dodgier the better as far as I was concerned. I proceeded through Kings Cross and down to Woolloomooloo. To a warehouse squat called ‘The Gunnery’ a few of us had opened right on Sydney Harbour, in Australia’s first and oldest ‘white settlement’ neighbourhood.

The Gunnery was a mix of punks, outcasts and about five art students who’d squatted a part of the squat, so to speak. Their space was the only part of the building that bore a lock. Everything else was open and easy going. The students contributed nothing to the common good. There had already been a few arguments with the students but unfortunately I hadn’t been there when they happened.

We had recently broken into a construction site and taken a hundred sheets of expensive plywood. We’d formed a human chain to take them out and bring them into The Gunnery to build the local kids a skateboard ramp. We put all the ply in a part of the building called ‘the Dome’ and within a day some of it had vanished. No problem. We’d nicked more than we needed and we’d planned to use the stuff left over to build a bar.

Then word circulated that some of the liberated ply had found its way into the students’ ‘Fort Knox’. Fantastic. An excellent opportunity to have a straightener with these snobby bastards. I didn’t know that much about students, I’d never been to college or university and I’d cheated my way through school since the age of ten. Turned it into an artform, almost, to the point where I manipulated my 4th class teacher, Mrs Weldon, into ‘cheating’ my exams for me. I loved school for the closeness between mates but I had no interest at all in learning at school.

My first real contact with students had been on an anti-nuclear march through Sydney in the early eighties. Back then there were massive marches and all the punks would turn up with their bottles of beer and cider and turn it into a big day out. On one of the biggest the conservative Liberal Party turned up on the corner of Liverpool and Park streets to unfold their banners calling for more nuclear power and bombs and waving the Aussie flag in our faces. The thing is, we were the true patriots not them. They couldn’t care less about their country. They’d sell it to the Yankees for a couple of cents if it meant that big business could continue its destructive path unopposed.

These short term thinkers hadn’t expected direct confrontation. The punks argued with them and some bottles were thrown. Colin Diamond and me had a great time arguing and attacking the conservatives and as the first bottles began to fly I had my first meeting with students.

From behind we were heckled by some snotty North Shore accent saying we were just as bad as the conservatives. We were attacking them because we were violent. What the fuck! We turned simultaneously to confront our critics and bore down on them with the same venom that we had been directing at the conservatives.

In their own way it was them that were the same. They both wished to pacify and re-direct anger away from our REAL enemies to something that fitted their own political agenda. I couldn’t fuckin’ believe it. The idea that anyone would question us attacking the conservative Liberals was light years beyond my comprehension. I remember carrying on about it for weeks.

Back then, I didn’t have an educated argument for either of these parasites. My response was a series of threats and ‘fucks’ and ‘cunts’ before a volley of punches and a kick or two from a steel capped Doc Marten boot followed by rapid movement elsewhere-ish!….

Time has not altered the validity or necessity of such a response.

Colin and I did what we could to melt into the crowd to avoid either the students or the liberals pointing us out to the cops. Did what we could! How the fuck can you alter your identity when you have a head covered in 3 inch peroxided spikes and your wardrobe looks like remnants from the Mad Max set?

Colin had less difficulty than me. He’d just emigrated to Aussie land from England and he looked more like a football hooligan than a punk with his Union Jack tattoos and cropped hair. The lesson on dress sense was there to be learned but it would take a few more brushes with the law before the penny dropped into my cranium on that one… Fuck I wish I had learnt to learn better!

We were lucky for a number of reasons back then. The cops didn’t have the cameras monitoring the crowds like they do now. There was no CCTV cameras and the only things you really had to fear were dobbers, snatch squads or the police wading in with their truncheons cracking heads. Give me a truncheon to the head any day over 2 years in court fighting CCTV footage and phone intercept evidence for charges of riot, affray and conspiracy.

It pains me that in today’s revolutionary circles there is still no call for a ‘Smash a CCTV Camera Day’ action or that information is not made more readily available on how to neutralise DNA from weapons, clothes or person or on how to quickly immobilise CCTV cameras.

This is the stuff the people on the cutting edge of society want to know. Survival info’ for the 21st century’s urban warriors - young and old! Start givin’ ‘em info’ like this and they’ll listen to all the other stuff you’ve got to say. When you live by duckin’ and divin with no financial security as a parachute what the resistance fighters are up to in Chile or Mozambique is not as important to your immediate survival as being prepared for what’s happening in your own street or housing estate or how you are gonna make it thru the next week.

Class War was an attempt to redress this situation. It was on this demo that I saw the possibilities outside the punk movement. As the march trudged at a snail’s pace through the city, some young street urchins began grabbing bricks out of the Hyde Park Gardens and breaking them in half to hide in their jacket pockets. The good thing about looking like a punk back then was that other people KNEW you were against the coppers and the system. So when you approached strangers and kicked off a conversation they never put their guard up because you could be an undercover cop.

Cops hated punks in Sydney back then and it was widely known. So it was easy to ‘gate crash’ groups of people and start winding them up and not cause their alarm bells to ring. Anyways, these young hooligans were busy arming themselves when I approached them and said that was a great idea.

They responded by telling me that this march was far too well-behaved and that we should start bricking the cops. None of ‘em were a day over 15 years old and they didn’t know a thing about punk other than ‘that haircut makes you stand out too much’! They hated the cops and had that class anger in its purest form that some spend a lifetime writing and hypothesising about yet never see cos they never set their feet in the sort of places where it actually exists.

Straight away I realised that the organisation we needed to fight the bastards with had to have these people in it. It couldn’t just be full of punks and skinheads. It was a defining moment. A moment from which I couldn’t return. Suddenly punk wasn’t quite as important. Other people felt like me and they didn’t HAVE to have a mohican to feel that way. But I was a punk to the bone and, like I’ve said, the penny hadn’t dropped for me - yet.

Besides these young street terrors the students had my attention. I had a new enemy. An enemy that burnt me even more when they annoyingly harrassed everyone to buy their papers. There isn’t many things in this world more annoying than some Jehovas Witness banging down your door some enchanted Sunday morning but I challenge anyone to handle some upperclass brats, complete with plumb-in the-mouth accents, courtesy of the best private schools money can buy, giving it the carnival/street spruiker routine to flog some dodgy papers to even dodgier school teachers on a fuckin’ peace march… It made my blood boil. And it was in this mode that me and two of my loyal sidekicks, Carole and Yolanda, confronted the students at the Gunnery.

We stomped up to the level where their room was and found the door locked. As usual. We kicked the door in. Then competed with each other to see who could jam the most swear words into a single sentence to describe these anti-social bastards.

When we found the missing ply leaning against one of the inside walls the air crackled with that spark of imminent violence and confrontation that you ordinarily get before a riot or street clash. I loved it. The two girls were far more vicious in their plans for the students than me. I was just happy to punch them out but Carole wanted to throw boiling herbal tea at them whilst Yolanda considered torture an appropriate punishment.

These weren’t your average bikini girls from Bondi Beach. Both were hardened anarchists and we’d already kept the Sydney glaziers busy for years smashing up shops, businesses and the cars of people involved in anti-social activities of one sort or another. We’d been up on a massive list of charges a few years previous. Possession of 21 offensive weapons, stolen car, five Molotov cocktails and some other equally sobering charges.

We’d all given false names and held our ground well under cop interrogation. I remember, when they finally gave me bail and released me from jail with a file a half an inch thick of charges and a stern reminder that I had to report to Kings Cross Cop shop daily as a bail condition, that the enormity of the trial before me didn’t sink in at all.

It wasn’t because I was incredibly brave. I’d been to court plenty of times but I’d never been to trial before. It was a combination of ignorance and punk hatred for authority that acted as a shield between me and the charges. If you’ve ever been in trouble as a young person then looked back on the situation with hindsight years later you recognise that owning little and having fuck all to lose is a great weapon in your arsenal. That was me. In fact it was most of us back then. We should have pushed the envolope a fuckin’ lot harder come to think of it. Things like rioting, bank robbery and smashing things up were fucking easier back then. Or so it seems.

We all only had Legal Aid for support except Yolanda. She got herself a real lawyer. What a smart move that turned out to be. He found a mistake the cops made when they questioned us at the station and the whole thing got thrown out when it came up for Mention. We celebrated with a night out paid for by our mates with plenty of beer and an awesome vegetarian feast at this restaurant on Oxford Street run by this old hippy.

This was Oxford Street before it was overrun by yuppies. It was boarded up shop fronts, junkies and old alkies, punks and skinheads. It was a great place to hang out and meet people at good pubs and the clubs that played decent music. Then the property developers moved in and used the gay movement as a smokescreen to run all the low rent people out and slide the new-money upper middle class types in.

This manoeuvre occurs all around the world in working class neighbourhoods close to city centres when cops and property developers work together against a mutual ‘problem’. Like a troublesome working class community that is occupying space that could be tarted up and sold for some exorbitant price to stock brokers and upper middle class types who want the convenience of close-to-work accommodation without having to rub shoulders with any of the original inhabitants.

Just let the place get as rundown as possible. Let the drugs and anti-social crime go unchecked for a while ’til everyone wants to go. Offer them a pittance for their home in the middle of the rundown area. Then ship them out to the souless suburbs. The cops are happy because out in the suburbs these people are less able to form the close community ties that cops hate. They can’t find the common ground they once had in the city and are less able to back each other up in disputes with the authorities and they can’t develop the culture of resistance that existed in their previous neighbourhood. Thus they are divided and conquered and aren’t occupying a space that some scummy property developers can turn into a private metropolis for the rich.

After we left the restaurant and pubbed it for a while Yolanda asked me if I wanted to come back to her place for a couple of er, drinks. My response typified my state of mind at the time and to this day has me kicking myself for my mind boggling daftness.

“Nah, I’ll go back with Colin…”

Fucking hell. What did this poor girl think? Perhaps she thought that me and Colin were getting it on? I mean she was a sexy looking woman and I’d known for a while that she fancied me. But for some fucking insane reason I’d rather go back to Colin’s joint at Bondi with his wife Juliet, I must add, and re-read the same two issues of Class War that I’d already read a thousand times rather than spend the night shagging her.

Yolanda had come from the skinhead movement and still looked the part with the cropped ‘feather’ hair style that skinhead girls wore. But she was an anarchist. A real one. She hated authority with a vengeance and possessed that love for everything exploited and oppressed that all real anarchists have.

She had cut her teeth with the Hell Fire Brigade Skins. And by this I don’t mean she hung out with a bunch of label twitching student types with cropped hair who wished it was 1969 all over again. This was early eighties Australia and there were thousands of English immigrants who had come here and a lot of ‘em had bought their shaved heads, tattoos and violence with them. It caught on big time with the locals and resulted in every major city having big skinhead gangs.

In Sydney Yolanda went out with one of the most notorious skins of the facial tattoo variety. As a result she was hardened to trouble and violence. Not that she said she suffered violence within the relationship - she could fight like a pitbull on crack - but that the daily violence and drama of skinhead life had made her tough and fearless. Anyways, she cashed all that in to hang out with a bloke who lived the drama and excitement of street life but didn’t take her home and fuck the shit out of her as, for some reason, he would rather go back to a mate’s place and spend his last hour of the night awake talking Class War with Colin fuckin’ Diamond!

What a confusing situation for the poor girl. A casual observer of this situation would simply have deduced that I had the testosterone level of a eunuch. Not so I’m afraid. I think during those years I kept the makers of Sorbelene hand cream and Kleenex tissues at the top of the share market whilst the near arthritis in me left hand from shakin’ it so often almost ensures me a future compo claim for repetitive strain injury!

Poor girl. Fuckin’ hell. It may have been a blessing in disguise that I never got a leg over her. For starters if I had managed not to splash the inside of my jeans before I got ‘em off - a sad affliction that had impeded my performance on a few previous occasions - it would have been over in in two or three frantic thrusts and I don’t think Yolanda would have been the sort of girl that would have taken premature ejaculation too lightly. I might have been beaten up and thrown out of her bedroom!

Obviously sex was not a priority item on my daily agenda then. Certainly not the sex that two willing combatants engage in anyways. Back then I didn’t look at women as something I wanted something from. They were just people like me. It wasn’t a well gleaned, politically correct thought out action. It’s just how I was.

Women like Carol and Yolanda were exactly the same to me as Colin and other blokes. I didn’t see the girls in any way as potential shags. They were mates. They were people I wrecked rich people’s cars with, grafittied with, fought alongside of and attacked anyone
in the animal abuse trade with.

We were strict vegetarians who were forever scanning the ingredients label on the back of pre-packaged food for animal products - to the point of obsession. Back in those days in Sydney being a vegetarian was not the upper class health trend it has become. There were no exquisite health food boutiques that had a hundred and one variations of tofu on the shelf like there is now. And we weren’t avoiding meat because of the individualistic and self-centred health trend it has become in middle class society. We did it because of empathy with the animals that were butchered. Simple as that. We just didn’t eat meat. Full fuckin’ stop.

Health? We were busy watering our livers with Coopers finest ales and Strongbow cider every other day so the very idea of weighing up your pulses with your legumes was a bit alien to us. Well me at any rate. Besides we weren’t important. I didn’t see myself as special or an integral part of anything that society had to offer. I saw myself as part of the resistance to this disease called capitalism. A mob mentality was far more important than the phoney choices and quirky hedonism of consumer society.

The only time an individual’s choices came into it, as far as I was concerned, was what food you ate, how you dressed, what politics you had and how much damage you could cause to the other side and not get caught. The vegetarian side of my life would in time be placed on the same back burner as punk. A lifestyle choice but not a necessity in the class war against the rich and all who protect the

And it seemed to me,after my first altercations with students,that there was no doubt which side they were on.They helped the cops by trying to dob us in for attacking the very people they constantly whinged about - but never did anything about - and the reason they didn’t do anything about them was they were from the very class that owned,exploited and wrecked everything.They were just having a temperary break from their role in the upper class by having an ‘adventure in poverty’ experience as they flirted with left wing politics,before they resumed there task of grinding us lot into the ground.Fucking students-boring us to death with what we should be doing and thinking-dobing people like me into the cops,and fleecing plywood off people who stole it righteously…Well,back at the gunnery,just when the plans for throwing a pot of boiling hot camomile tea into the students faces were taking on a life of their own,they showed up.Brilliant timing.Straight off they began lecturing us on how out of order we were for kicking their doors in.Sounding like fucking school teachers telling off naughty kids.For me,it was all a bit comical,and I couldn’t stop laughing at them;like watching Hale and Pace except it was a male and female lecturing act.Then it was our turn.Carol and Yolanda stepped up with all the enthusiasm of a pair of prize fighters.It was spectacular viewing-you won’t ever see this sought of entertainment on reality TV ,let me tell you!I didn’t say a word,as the two students were poked,prodded and threatened into submission.I didn’t say nothing-but I wore the fucking response nice and proper.The woman student plastered a scolding hot, brown rice and spinach pastie on my face.Needs salt-I remember thinking during the searing pain.Although I immediately wanted to administer the thrashing of a lifetime to the pair of them-I got beaten to the punch.It remains one of my fondest memories as Yolanda and Carol bashed the two students to the ground before they gently removed my organically vegan face mask and gave them both a facial scrub they’ll never forget.Magic.They say revenge is a dish best served cold-well,not always.We took everything out of their roomwe needed,and threw the rest in a skip.We never saw them again.But they went straight to the cops,whose brief investigation tumbled at the first hurdle-when they were told to ‘Fuck off’ at the door of ‘the Gunnery’-and they threw it straight into the ‘too hard basket’.You just gotta love that punk attitude to authority!I thought I’d ring this ‘Robert’ bloke about the plane ticket at night; thinking he’d might be working during the day.So,Iwalked up to ‘the cross’ that night to use a public phone.I couldn’t use the one directly outside ‘the Gunnery’,cos it had been turned off;the telephone company got so sick of us making reverse charge calls from the box that they shut it down.They had to put it back on,in time,though,as a girl O.D’d and we couldn’t call an ambo,and she died.

CHAPTER THREE - TICKET TO LEAVE

I didn’t worry that the ticket may already have been sold, the cost or the date of travel.Minor details.That would all get sorted in the wash,as far as I was concerned.Just get the fucking ticket and get to England to cause as much trouble as possible.Straight off the bat,Robert was on the level.A Cockney in Oz on a working holiday,he invited me over to Bondi for a beer and to discuss a”few details about the ticket he didn’t want to discuss on the phone”.Sounded great to me.Since Colin also lived in Bondi,I arranged to pick him up on the way,and we’d get a few take away beers,and check this Robert fella out.I all went well.Robert was a laugh,and like a lot of English people in Oz,hated Margaret Thatcher,liked punk,reggae and football.There was a common theme amongst every Brit. I’d met so far in my life,and that was that they all hated the police,all had tattoo’s,and all seemed to have a political edge back then, that was absent in most Aussies I knew;Northern Ireland,the Miners strike,football hooliganism,riots,punk,and crime had influenced their outlook.They all seemed to be in on some dodgy scam or another,and they all had some relation who was either a punk,skinhead,or been to prison.Robert was no exception.By the time we were all well oiled,and he was certain we weren’t coppers or ‘dogs’,he began revealing the ‘details of the ticket’.The ticket had been stolen by a mate of his.It was a ’round the world ticket’,and Robert had already used it to two of its designated destinations safely,and all that was left was the third leg of the journey back to Paris.”$500 and the ticket is yours”,he said.”I’ll take it,I said.About an hour later,a ‘minor detail’ of this dream deal had me thinking.”Robert,who’s name is this ticket in then,cos it would have to be different to the name on my passport wouldn’t it”?Incredible the way alcohol stimulates the old cerebal muscle.“That part’s a bit tricky”,he replied.Turns out “all you have to do is present the ticket to the check in and get a boarding pass.Then,when you pass thru customs,you have to present the boarding pass UNDERNEATH your passport as you go through the inspection,and they probably won’t notice the different names”.Almost bullet proof.Almost.

Worth giving it a go, I shrugged at Colin.After this initial meet up with Robert,we had drink ups with him quite regularly.He was an easy going character.Colin and him became close mates.And years later,whilst I was in England,Robert got his head properly kicked in walking home from a night out.He got brain damage,and was locked into a sort of asylem.Colin and the anarchists weren’t prepared to accept the State’s verdict on Roberts condition and fate,so they broke into the joint and rescued him.They tried to help him for quite a while,but he was beyond there abilities.They had to reluctantly give him to some people who were better able to help him.Not the asylem though,where ‘dealing’ with patients meant dosing them up on largactyl and other equally zombie creating drugs.The price of the ticket was good,and was raisedby ‘rolling’ two businessmen outside the Hyde Park Regent on Elizabeth Street on a Saturday night with two skinhead mates from the Mathew Talbot hostel,and a simple B&E(break and enter)in Paddington.’Rolling’,or mugging as it’s also known,was popular amongst the punks and skins at the time.We chose the Hyde Park Regent because it was so expensive to stay there that anyone coming out of the place was always loaded.It was also well placed strategically,being across the road from Hyde park,and had plenty of ‘doorways’.By doorways,I mean recessed entryways into shops,which were of course closed at this time of night,that provided the cover of darkness to drag our marks into to strip search them.By the time of these acts of wealth redistribution,I was well versed in anarchist slogans and threats.My favourite during ‘rollin’ missions’ was to rip the watches and rings from these rich businessmen,and wave them infront of their eyes whilst I recited the words I had read on the back of an ‘Apostles’ record,which went something like;”How dare you flaunt such wealth before those whose poverty you perpetuate”.The fear you saw in the eyes of these parasites when they were at our mercy-without their coppers and laws to protect them-were truely revealing moments to me.It also taught me a lesson I’ve maintained ever since-don’t ever let your guard down.

.Different things had happened to me that hardened me violence.Countless beatings at the hands of the Police,street fights,and seeing people die in front of me ,had an effect.A bloke I was sharing a squatted Catholic Club with,suffered a beating from a skinhead one night and died in front of me on the floor.He travelled around Sydney with two large suitcases that contained everything he owned.He slept in the projector room at the Club,and some skins broke in one night and went through his stuff whilst he was asleep.He woke up because of the noise and went beserk when he saw what they were doing.One of the skins bashed him once on the side of his head.His eyes rolled to the back of his head in mid air,and it looked like he was dead before he hit the floor.Me and another skin tried to revive him,but he was gone.We had to wheel him out in a shopping trolley.We didn’t know what to do with him.So we wheeled him up to a public phone and rang an ambo.To anyone watching it looked like a punk and a skin were wheeling a passed out guy in a pair of filthy white overalls up the street-only the bloke was dead,not passed out.We left his body with his beloved suitcases next to him at the phone box-then we fucked off.He was dead and there was nothing else we could do for him-I didn’t even know his second name.And we didn’t want to get done for a big one we didn’t do. As a consequence of living like this,and everything I’ve seen and done since,I’ve shyed away from getting blotto in the street.It just makes you a target.In this day and age you have to be careful how and when you cut loose.And that brings in the new factor of CCTV camera’s everywhere.They have contributed to the insecure,paranoid, non trusting world our class live in.I didn’t then,and I don’t now,figure the other classes into this nightmare;THEY planned it and made it this way.THEY are the ones who have deliberately corrupted,exploited and ‘illegalised’ all the great things about working class culture.I didn’t consider ‘rollin’ or break and enters as ‘revolutionary’ acts.It was done to assist my own survival.But it was increasingly done as a form of social justice.I took more and more pleasure in doing it to correct what I felt was unfair for the majority of people.During this time,we done plenty of robberies where we broke in through a window or through someones roof,only to walk straight out the front door cos we thought it totally wrong to take from someone who seemed to be in anything like the situation we lived in.And the more the cops stopped us-bashed us-gaoled us;the more we got harrassed on the trains by ticket inspectors;the more we got grief from straight society;the more injustice we saw on TV-the more we rebelled.And the more vicious it got.I gave Robert the money,and after he gave me the ticket,I spent a couple of weeks experimenting with covering the name on the ticket with similar patterned paper,so as to cover the other persons name,and perhaps put my name on the ticket.That didn’t work to the degree that I thought passable.So next I tried going out to the Airport and getting discarded boarding passes from the International terminal dustbins,and tried doing the same to similar boarding passes that I would get on the day,so that I could,on the travel day,quickly apply a pre-perfected stick on forgery over the other persons name on the authentic boarding pass.After over two weeks solid work on this project,I decided that it would just come down to luck on the day.It wasn’t worth fudging a forgery,and coming unstuck over it, when running with it as it was ,had the same chance of success.Like a lot of ‘criminal’ actions,too much planning is some times a bad thing.Whether you are robbing a bank,or burning some bastards BMW or factory-you case it a couple of times,have your side working as one-then just fuckin’ do it!So,I went back to punk life,anarchist direct action,and the complicated contradictions of supplementing a sexless existance with more and more risk.My life revolved around stomping the streets of Sydney with the words to particular songs being played back and forth ,over and over again, in my head.It made me more committed,and less likely to slip by way of distractions towards the opposite sex.I would be using the words to Conflicts,’The Battle Continues’,Blitz’s‘Nation on Fire’.The Last Resorts ‘Violence in our Minds’ or the Apostles ‘Mob Violence’ as fuel to my class war street life,and as an attempt to block out those images of girls in G strings on Cronulla Beach OUT of mind.What a struggle it was.The more I would think about the ‘distractions of the flesh’-the more I would do out in the street to take my mind off it.Me and a few of my mates must of been the making of some of the glazier businesses in Sydney.Whole streets we’d wreck-throwing bins and bricks through expanses of glass whilst screaming out the ‘Class War’ battlecry.I loved the music with an absolute passion,and looking back on it all,the whole way we dressed,was very sexual.The 14 hole Docs.,the leather jackets,the studs,the short haircuts and spikes-it was all a subcultural combination of sex and violence.The punk look was a very carefully constructed style in its own way.The jeans had to be cut and rolled up above the jeans just right.The Mohicans and spikes had to follow the shape of your head perfectly.The colour and the spontanaity of punk life was extremely attractive to young people who desperately wanted to express themselves.

It wasn’t materialistic and it wasn’t selfishly individualistic to the extent that all that mattered was yourself and your fuckin’ style.The undercurrent of genuine anti-authoritarian culture that coursed through the arteries of the punk movement,created an army of people like me that were fuelled by its rebellious sentiments,and pretty much received a life education via the bands;their lyrics and stances, and the political movements and causes that entwinned them.All these years later,the global forces from the world wide underground,that are trying to fight the rich and powerful who want to enslave our class forever,have a lot of their roots in the punk movement.And it wasn’t just the mohican and tattoo brigade that punk influenced.It became like a beacon that attracted the pissed off and alienated,and gave them something REAL to belong to-a cause-a battering ram for justice and change.A fuckin’ lot of people,that went on to do some amazing things,began it all singing along to ‘Banned from the Roxy’ and ‘Do they owe us a Living’ by Crass.And,if you weren’t there and it all sounds like a mass of contradictions that defy critical interpretation,then all I can say to you is exactly what Ned Kelly said before they hung him by his neck for taking a stand in the class war…”Such is Life”!So,I had the ticket,and about three weeks to kill before I either took the fight to a higher level,or ended up in Mascot Police Station,being asked some very awkward questions.I don’t think I lost a wink of sleep worrying about the negative of these two possibilities,though. ….So,I had the ticket,and about three weeks to kill before I either took the fight to a higher level,or ended up in Mascot Police Station,being asked some very awkward questions.I don’t think I lost a wink of sleep worrying about the negative of these two possibilities,though. Looking back at it,there was so much laid down to chance in my life,it is a fuckin’ miracle I didn’t end up as a statistic. Of the Inner City Punk scene in Sydney,over half ended their life with a drug or alcohol related death certificate.A sizeable percentage died a violent death on the pavement or done some serious time in prison.An unfortunate consequence of living life for the moment and not letting fear hold you back-was that you could end up as a page 9 article in the daily newspaper…I decided not to tell any of my family about my planned journey.Not because it could be all over before it began,but because I knew my Pop would try and talk me out of it,and I didn’t want to have a blue with him over this.We had a major scam running at the time,with him calling the shots from the sidelines and me making the plays. I knew that we could take time out from it and pick it up later on,but it was the comeraderie of us working together that we both loved,and the fact that we were taking down one of his most hated class enemies-insurance companies.He revelled in every step we took in the scam.Every time we took more money off these bastards,the happier he was.He was a rocket scientist at working ‘the man’ every way he could.He’d cut his teeth in the trade union movement,getting young blokes out of National Service during the Vietnam War,by getting them to drink jugs of bulls blood and swallowing bits of silver foil to fake stomach ulcers.They’d go to a ‘quack’ and complain of stomach pains,do a piss test and take a few X-rays,and you’d get a discharge from National Service on medical grounds.A mate of his told me that when he was working the abatoirs,he saved hundreds of young mens lives after they’d got there enlistment papers during the Vietnam War.The bond we had was the same that I would have with Ian Bone later on.We were united in our hatred for the enemy,and our determination to do what we could in our lives to fuck the rich up any way we could. But running scams and breaking a few windows wasn’t enough for me anymore.What I needed you couldn’t get on the streets in Sydney.Like a desperate junkie in need of a fix,I craved street confrontation with the forces of law and order on a scale like I’d seen in the riots in England. On the day of my plane trip,I purposely avoided contacting family.The only people I wanted coming to the airport,were my mates from the punk scene.It wasn’t because I didn’t want family seeing me dragged thru the airport in handcuffs if things went ‘belly up’;It was simply because my mates new the score and would do what was necessary if I was nabbed.I didn’t take the punk look to the airport with me.I filled my bag with my street uniform,and gathered together all the contact info I’d need;Class War’s P.O.box number,a solicitor’s number from Pommie Colin,and as much cash as I could scrape together.Colin reckoned that plane food didn’t cater for vegetarians,so I cooked up the only thing I thought I would need for the 24 hour plane flight-a huge bag of lentils and boiled eggs.I truely don’t know what possessed me to combine such an explosive mixture.Fuckin’ Col and his food for thought suggestions;it’s a wonder we weren’t both necked for attempting to transform a perfectly good airplane into a mobile gas chamber.It could of been the Hindenburg part 2.Basically,it was all gonna come down to organised ‘chance’.Getting the boarding pass wasn’t a problem-all I had to do was show the plane ticket to the counter girl.That done,it was all hugs,kisses and ‘good luck’s’ from the Sydney anarchists as I headed for the the customs desk.My last gesture to Colin as I moved through the barriers was a wink and a clenched fist salute,and then it was all or nothing. A deliberately haphazard presentation of passport on top of boarding pass along with some ‘wide boy’ banter about the south of France this time of year,distracted the customs boys enough to guarantee a casual walk straight thru the ‘wall of steel’ that the Feds’ call customs departure point Sydney….more like a stroll through the checkout at Woolworths if you ask me.On the plane I got a primo window seat with a ’suit’ next to me,and a list of in flight movies ready for my critical eye.Not being one for a high degree of sophistication,I had simply poured about two pounds worth of cooked lentils into a shopping bag along with a dozen hard boiled eggs.This explosive mixture held ranking postion on my lap.I had the handles tied in a knot to keep the contents as warm as possible,cos I had pre-heated it before I left in the morning.What I didn’t figure on was that by tieing the knot on this concoction whilst it was still hot,it had retained all ‘gases’ in a balloon like sealed vacuum.In laymans terms-a potential stink bomb.And that’s before it was eaten!The take off from Sydney gave me a view of Botany Bay that had me wondering about the nature of my journey.Two hundred years previously,my convict ancestors had been transported here in chains by the British upper class and their courts,for nicking a loaf of bread or whatever.The first place they shackled us to ground in a lion chain was 1000 feet below me on the shores of Botany Bay.The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on me as I took upon a reverse journey to exact some sort of revenge on the same class who had shipped our lot out here in the first place.For the first hour or so of the flight I thought about how I’d get from France to London,and if the ticket situation would present any further problems at stop over points in Singapore and Dubai.I spent about an hour wondering what Dubai prisons would be like.Amazingly,all I thought about was if anyone in them would know about Class War…never mind some fuckin’ Ayatollah Khomeini type running the gaff and sticking some cocky Ozi punk in the morning porridge cauldron for a bit of extra protein. The air hostess offering drinks,ended that train of thought.A few beers and a shit movie had me making a few trips to the khazi just to break up the monotony of a 26 hour plane trip.I noticed with relish,increasing looks of distain on the mugs of my seat companions every time I undertook another dunny trip.I couldn’t find anyone who looked interesting enough to talk to on the flight,so out of having nothing to do,I decided it was time to sample my pre-heated feast.I undid the knot and whoofka!…egg gas…The suit wrinkled his nose up,and the hard headed business woman next to him threw a frown my way that let me know in no uncertain terms that she thoroughly disapproved….excellent!Never mind the tut-tut’s from the gallery-it was nose bag time-literally.I hoed into my tasty morsals straight from the plastic carry bag with a spoon.It must of been quite a sight-an off duty punk rocker tucking into lentils and boiled eggs from a plastic bag,whilst the ’straights’ next to me looked on absolutely horrified.Bits of egg and lentil flew from my mouth everytime I came up for air,and when I realised I had an audience,I decided to ‘ham it up’ a bit.I yelled out to the hostie for a beer,resulting in a airborne assault of deadly egg ‘n’ lentil spitfire from my gob all over the snobby suits next to me.I began ‘question time’ at the suits;evacuation proceedure…”what was it we do again if this bird starts goin’ down…”;movie talk…”you’d think they’d give us something better to fall asleep to than this fuckin’ shit…”;food talk…”yeh,I bought me own food-heard this airlines’ got a major salmonella problem…”;booze talk…yeah,don’t mind a beer-gives me bad gas though…” I was having fun with this,and Singapore came and went and my Dubai concerns were as much a distant memory as my lentil and egg feast-or so I thought….Just after the Dubai stop,my guts started cranking out murmers of discontent.And just like my guts,the penny dropped-lentils,boiled eggs and beer were not comfortable bed mates.The result was gastronomical, in more ways than one.If this had of happened after 9-11,I swear that the aircrew would of panicked thinking that terrorists had released toxic gas on the plane.The ’suits’ were not amused.Another request was made for ‘more appropraite seat allocation’.All this did was encourage me more.More trips to the khazi just when another explosion was immenent-timing was crucial here,I had to have my arse aimed precisely at their faces when I nudged past them to get to the aisle.Attaining such precision came easy to me on this occasion..!More beer requests…more volumous conversation about who was responsible for that attrocious odour….was it a gas leak??….was this plane in trouble??…..stopping by those passengers in the aisle adjacent and pointing at the straights whilst holding my nose in full view of the horrified accused…My coupe de ta for this enchanted journey,was to loudly ask the hostie if they had any de-odouriser back stage there as “someone around here has an obvious bowel condition”.I could barely keep a straight face,and the hostie had trouble as well,as the business woman totally lost it,waving her pointing finger at me,whilst screaming that this was the worst trip to Europe she had ever made,and that this lout had ” made hers and every one else’s trip a misery” and that I was resposible for the smell.The male suit nodded along with her tale like the wimpering ‘yes’ man he was.I conjured up the best innocent ‘who-me ? face’ I could muster under the circumstances without falling on the ground in side splitting laughter.The hostie simply promised to attend to the situarion the best she could-I mean what could she do-make a full announcement for all on board to put their oxygen masks on cos one passenger had a bad case of rotten egg gas?Poor girl was caught between a rock and a hard place and the best she could do,for more reasons than one, was keep busy at the other end of the plane.Some other luckless soul could deal with the dilemma in our windy aisle.We’d arrived at Paris before long,and we were all happy to get off the plane.I had already decided to deliver the final blow.In her self promoting way,the woman suit had spent a bit of time patting herself on the back over her involvement in the Evian bottled water company.It was almost as painful for me to listen to her verbal diaharrea as it was for her to breathe my toxic fumes.so,as soon we were given the green light to get our gear out of the overhead lockers,I charged out of my seat,trod on the suits toes as hard as I could,and pretended to drop a bag on the floor in the aisle closest to the business woman.I raised my head a few inches from hers and after breathing my fetid breathe over her,I growled menacingly,”listen you fuckin’ louse,the only reason your fuckin’ toff water is makin’ it, is cos your class poisoned the world’s water in the first place….”…I then poked her on the forehead with MY pointing finger and issued the threat…”Class War’s gonna get you”!,before exiting the plane.I was in France. France.What did I know about the joint?Jacques Mesrine,one of my heroes-bankrobber,prison escapee and threat to the establishment.Fuckin legend.This guy had style,class and determination.If we had a few of his type on the team we’d be really goin’ places….I wondered if there were any Jacques Mesrine types in Class War?…Jules Bonnot,another French legend:,bank robber,total rebel-the sort of bloke I would of loved to have met….and my favourite of all them all Marius Jacob;Pirate,professional thief,arsonist…I was hoping Class War had a few modern versions of Jacob in their crew…What else did I know?,the Eyefull Tower,the French ate frogs and snails and copius amounts of garlic and their governments agents were responsible for sinking the ‘Rainbow Warrior’ in New Zealand…and they exploded nuclear bombs in the Pacific-fuckin’ cunts…I’d never met a French person,so I breezed through Customs and and decided I needed to meet a few of ‘em.After about five minutes I hated the joint.They didn’t speak english,and because I was not well versed in the eccentricities and sophistication of modern communication,it seemed me and every French person I spoke to, missed each other by a good mile.We just couldn’t find common ground.Twenty odd years later the communication problem became somewhat clearer to me.My limited line of spiel consisted of “any good French punk bands around…(I’d never heard of any)….Where do the Rich people live in Paris??….You ever heard of Marius Jacob??…Take a step backward mate ,you stink of garlic…!”…French-Australian public relations were already strained as it was, because of the nuclear testing the French Government were conducting around the atolls in the Pacific-I don’t think I did much to improve those relations with the Parisians I met. I wouldn’t blame ‘em a bit for thinking Aussies were all fuckin’ mad,if I was anything to go on.I went for a walk round these really old streets in Paris, continuing to unintentionally confuse everyone I spoke to.I did find something about Paris that I really liked;you could buy weapons over the counter there that I had only previously dreamt of.I had once seen and tried on a set of brass knuckles,and a Skinhead mate of mine had a real flick knife for a while,before he had it taken off him by the cops(and jailed for it),but I wasn’t prepared for what you could legally buy and carry in France.The most vicious looking knucle dusters with sharpened spikes,CS gas canisters,awesome looking flick knives in varying sizes,stilletto knives and all sorts of stuff.It was like a fuckin street warriors wet dream.I knew not to buy anything cos I still had some travelling to do,but I salivated over the glass cabinets they were kept in.It looked to me that you could get everything bar a Tiger Tank over the counter…Imagine what you could get under it?So here I am excitedly bouncing around this shop talking a ‘mile a minute’ to the totally confused shop keeper about how good this gear was and how I wished you could get it where I came from…”yeah I’m from Australia-you know,near where your cunt of a government’s letting off those bombs….you heard of Class War…I love punk music…you heard of Jacques Mesrine…we got Ned Kelly over there….fuck I’d love to throw one of these gas canisters into a porsche at a red light….you understand anything I’m sayin’…. “.Add,if you will, to this sceario, my pitiful attempt at looking normal so as to blend in to attract as little attention as possible whilst travelling under someone else’s stolen airticket;I didn’t own a single pair of jeans that went the full length to my ankle.They were all cut off and neatly folded in a half inch turn up to fit exactly at the top of a pair of either 10 hole or 14 hole Dr.Martens boots,depending which I was wearing.With my slightly ‘out of skew’ sense of exactly what entailed looking ‘normal’,the 10 hole jeans seemed more appropriate to me.On top I wore a 4-skins t shirt,covered by a denim jacket and a olive green bomber jacket.The jeans looked like I’d run out of home with my little brothers pants on-calling them ankle freezers is an insult to good ol’ fashion ankle freezers-they were more like calf freezers-and as icing on the cake, I had white socks on with trainers which only served to make an aweful fashion statement worse.I had very obviously, flattened, bleached hair-demonstrating to all and sundry that this was NOT the way I usually wore it-basically,I looked like I had sprayed myself with superglue and run through a second hand clothes shop-a bad second hand clothes shop.I wasn’t exactly undercover.With the benefit of hindsight,it may have been a godsend that the geezer in the weapons shop didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.I found out later that a few of such shops in Paris had connections to the extreme right.And with me mouthing off about ‘Class War’,'punk’ and such,things could have got ugly.I then decided it was nosh time,so I dived into a cafe for a feed and to calculate my next move.Ordering the food was a problem.There was nothing on the menu I liked.It was all bread and cheese.Fuckin’ concentration camp food as far as I was concerned.”You got any beans on toast,mate,..”;I might as well have been talking Swahilli….I just couldn’t get my head around the fact that this place was a stones throw away from the joint that invented the English language,yet no one understood it!!!!….It was like I had just got off a rocket ship from bloody Mars,not an airplane from Australia.Out of sheer frustration,I told the waiter to “fuck off” and stormed out,complete with bags,bad wardrobe,bad hair,and bad attitude.I plead total ignorance.Dumb cunt.I’d had enough of this place.I was hungry enough to grab and eat a low flying pigeon;I couldn’t seem to explain anything to anyone;and what’s more, I was wearing clothes I didn’t feel comfortable in.I’d been on the loose in Paris about for about two hours and I was ready to get the fuck out of the joint.I’d seen a few punks and skins,but because I was dressed the way I was,I had a hard time explaining to them ,that I was on a mission and was undercover,so to speak.This didn’t work either,as even they walked away shaking their heads and laughing as they did.Also, no one seemed to know who Marius Jacob,or my other heroes were.I mean,the fact that they were all a hundred years dead(except Mesrine) didn’t help.I stormed the main trainstation,got some local currency from Bureau De Change,and caught the first available train to Calais,for a connecting ferry to England.So far my luck had been good.Upon my arrival at Dover,some of that luck ran out. As it was,I caught the last ferry to Dover.Crossing the channel,I looked down into that dirty looking water and wondered if there were any sharks down there incase I had to take a jump in the drink as an escape route.I concluded that any shark choosing to swim in that soup would have to be a desperado,and that he’d be one to avoid.Still, if it was a choice between a ‘collar’ and a late night dip with a ‘noahs ark’,a dip it’d be.I didn’t make that choice lightly I can tell you either-as apocalyptic and unlikely as a midnight ‘collar’ seemed.I’d nearly been taken by a shark when I was a kid in a Sydney. My dad had chucked me off the back of a boat into this deep bay south of Sydney,and just as I was climbing back onto the gunwhale,a fucking huge shark swam right between my legs,clipping my calf with its fin….a fuckin’ bone chilling nightmare-my dad just laughed.I don’t know why the fuck I was even thinking about having to jump overboard anyways,everything had gone smooth as silk so far.Dover wasn’t far off,and I started to get a bit cocky-like a dog about to be let off it’s leash after a long spell restrained.I was sick of looking like an escapee from a nut house in these shit looking ’straight clothes’.Fuck it-I put my boots on,and wrapped a studded belt around my waist.I then put on a black beanie,and checked myself in the toilet mirror-that was a bit more like it-now I did look like someone who was gonna cause some damage,rather than someone who had been damaged!I was so amped up that I was pacing around the boat jawing it big time to anything with an ear about the Miners,the riots,the punks and skinheads,the football hooligans,Class War,the fuckin’ rich…and the most amazing thing about it was that everyone seemed to agree with me…I’m thinking,”Fuck me,everyone in this joint is up for it;Fuck waiting at Customs when we dock,lets steam straight through-we’ve got the numbers..”….Everyone did end up walking straight through the Customs checkpoint-everyone except me that is. There was a lesson here to learn for a bloke like me about throwing your hat up in the air before your race had been won.Like everything else,I had to learn the hard way…It was late,cold,and we were the last boat for the night-perfect circumstances for a hassel free ride through the usual formalities.Ahead of me everyone was chatting and waltzing through-then my turn came.”You look an interesting fellow, Darren,why don’t you come over here so we can get to know you a little better”.As I was sitting in this little interview room on my own,I was thinking ,”where the fuck did this come from”,I caught my reflection in a two way mirror they had in there.Question answered.I looked like a cross between a punk and a cat burglar.I was then pondering if any of those people I had thought were “totally up for it..” had grassed me up.Fuck I wished I had of kept my head down for just a bit longer.Trouble was,I just didn’t really know how to do that properly yet.I thought ,”I’m in England now-nearly everyone here likes chucking bricks at coppers and wearing steel capped boots”.You live and learn,as they say.They went through all my gear in front of me,looking for drugs,I thought.Then they started questioning me about why I was coming to the U.K.,who I was staying with,and how long I intended staying.The answers rolled off my tongue sweetly,except they didn’t accept my reason for coming to England.”People who come to our country to visit Trafalgar Square and see Big Ben,don’t usually come wearing steel capped boots”,they reasoned logically.They then said they’d like to do a full background check on me from Dover Police station.As they were loading me in the back of a cop meat wagon,in my head I heard a song by the only band I’d ever known to come from near Dover,’The Sedated’,a skinhead band that played a raucous brand of street rock,and the words to their song,’Take him away’ played in my head, as the cop van went up the hill from the port to the cop shop.Right then,I thought this might be all over before it even began. In situations like this, its important to be aware of the worst case scenario,but not to let it overide your mindset or blunten your edge.By the time they got me into the cop shop,I was preparing myself for another 26 hour plane trip,more shit movies,and seeing Colin Dimmond a fuck of a lot sooner than he or myself expected to….so much for heeding my own advice and not getting ahead of myself!Fuckin’ hell I thought,I never even got to London-never mind a riot or two…The Coppers were fussing around,making jokes about my clothes,but they hadn’t got serious with me yet.I just stretched out on this chair like I was in a lounge room and wasn’t phazed one bit by them.Like I usually do when I’m in a cop station,I wondered how many people had been through this joint and had their entire life turned upside down by these bastards,and they had never recovered-just ended up as statistics-living as emotional and psychological cripples from that moment on…”just doing there job”..,fuck that lie;coppers were spineless weak cunts-bullies-whose ‘only doing their job’ one liner falsely absolved them from the devastation they are responsible for in individuals and communities.Neighbourhood watch,crime stoppers-that was a fuckin’ laugh-they’d done more to divide communities and make people weak,and turn them into grasses than they’d ever done to make society a better place.After wondering about the lives forever ruined,I pondered the other side of that coin;That being the ones that came through that door in hand cuffs or on the receiving end of a coppers boot or truncheon,only to be made harder and more hateful towards authority and the system.That was who I felt on common ground with.These were the ones that I felt were the real class warriors.Because that is what in part had happened to me….And there were millions of us…..A copper came in and shuffled some paper work in his hands,trying to look like he had a brief on me,”You’ve got a bit of history,Darren..” straight off the bat I knew this was bollox-they couldn’t have gone through ‘Interpol’ that quick-this was the Eighties,the cops were using a communication system that was the equivalent of two empty soup tins and a length of connecting string compared with the computer systems of today.My slouched,relaxed demeanor didn’t exactly put me on his Christmas card list,and I did nothing to increase my chances of being a privileged member of that shitlist by retorting,”You treat all tourists you take a fancy to like this or what”?What I had going for me was this:It was late,cold,and coppers are lazy cunts when it comes to a bit of hard work.I had most of my bases covered;I was gonna stay at backpackers hostels in London’s West End;I had enough coin on me to justify staying for a while;I only came up short with no return ticket and my dodgy reasons for travelling to the ‘Old Dart’.I suppose the coppers weighed it up as such;We can’t prove he’s here for anything other than what he’s said,and if at worst he’s here to see a few punk bands and get his photo taken on the Kings Road,then big deal…I walked out the front door of Dover Police station feeling like I’d just up’ed the other side a little and didn’t have to spend a night on some vomit stained mattress to achieve it.I was cocky,wired on adrenaline and expectation,and totally up for anything.I celebrated by quickly glancing over my shoulder at the copshop front door, to ensure a green light,then proceeded to deflate the back tyre of a cop car outside the station.Never mind that I had just escaped possible deportation-I’d forgotten about that 5 seconds after exiting the filth station.Blitz’s classic ‘Never Surrender’ was blarring in my head…”never surrender ,never give in,never let the enemy win…”I stomped down the road revelling in the cold, still of the night.I had arrived.I was in England.Those coppers were gonna wish they had sent me back to Botany Bay in lion chains after I was through with this joint…I asked a young couple the way to the train station, and with Blitz still playing at full bore in my head,I rolled up the road to the station like a bloke on his way to pick up a winning Pools ticket.There was one train left for London-the last of the night-so I snapped up a ticket and prepared for the train journey that would put me smack in the middle of everything I was dying to take part in.With my ‘inner head stereo’ cranking out ‘Conflicts’,The Battle Continues’,adrenalin threatening to send me into the stratosphere,and the realisation that I was about to have a head on collision with destiny,well,it was all too much for a young bloke like me-fuckin’ annoying erections-there was no Cronulla bikini girls on Dover station to blame for this predicament;fuck, they’d be a bit frosty if they were-it was colder than a witches tit-so it was time for deflective class action-but what could I do?The train was due in in five minutes,I didn’t have a spray can,a felt pen…fuck it,I’ll go and engrave ‘Class War’ on some dunnie doors.Straight into the khazi like it was bolthole;coin out and off I went.Two doors later-job well done-flacid cod piece-mission accomplished; and I’m ready for the London Train. I remember thinking as I boarded the train,”I must do something about my sex life…”Fucking brainstorm or what! Because it was dark,and my imagination in overdrive,my train ride to London was a combination of trying to clock passing town signs so I could try to remember if I knew any punk bands from there,and wondering if there had been any riots in this town or that.As a teenager in the early Eighties,I’d travelled to London on my own,and spent a couple of months travelling round the country seeing punk and skinhead bands every night.Now,in 1986,a very different creature once again graced these benighted shores.Seeing Oneway System,Crass or the 4-Skins wasn’t my number one priority this time round. As we passed through Brixton,I looked down onto those dark alleyways and streets and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.Some punks briefly crossed my line of vision,and I straight away pondered whether they’d been in the Brixton Riots.These cold,mean streets were the battle ground.It wasn’t enough anymore to LOOK like you hated everything about the Establishment,you had to act out the words and feelings in the streets;it had to be REAL-This was what I had come for.To join up with this Class War mob,and roam these streets and take the fight to the enemy.To take all my frustration and dissatisfaction with life and direct it at the REAL culprits as a MOB-something we just didn’t have back in Sydney.As I jumped off the train at Victoria Station,I considered for the first time what the fuck I was gonna do now that I was where I wanted to be.I had to find somewhere to crash tonight.Colin had given me a copy of a book called ‘Alternative London’,and it had a few bedsit addresses in it,so I quickly redirected myself to Earls Court,and some poor bastards door coped a midnight hammering.A dreary,half asleep bloke answered the door to a dodgy looking Aussie punk wanting a room.”Next door-this ain’t a drop in centre”.So I attacked the next door with similar intensity for a good five minutes before a Pakistani fella gingerly opened the door a few inches as I demanded frustratingly,”I need a room”.To my surprise,he smilingly opened the door with a “You have a fuck?.I couldn’t believe it.I looked behind me to rest assure he was actually talking to me.”What the fuck are you talking about”?Realising he had jumped the gun, he complained about the time,and I quickly followed up with a further request for a room.There was one available,and I quickly said “I’d take it”, and some money changed hands before I retorted,”What are you runnin’ here,a knock off shop or something..?,”…He played dumb,and I just thought he was some kind of fuckin’ weirdo.I didn’t bother with it that much.I banged my head on a pillow and my last thoughts were about what my next move would be.How was I gonna meet the Class War crew…Where was I gonna get a squat…???? Little did I know that the very next day I would meet a bloke that would do more than just ’show me the ropes’ on the streets of London-he’d get me in more trouble in one day than most people get in a life time.

The next day was bright and warm-something I hadn’t expected.I sprung out of bed like a dwarf shot out of a cannon at a circus-ready for action.I ditched the trainers and pulled on a pair of 14 hole steel cappers with red laces;cut off and neatly crease-folded levi’s-I never tucked my jeans into my boots-you couldn’t run in them properly-and a studded black jacket with a picture on the back of a copper,a priest ,a soldier and a businessman lined up and the slogan “All lined up for execution” painted loud and proud underneath.I then set to work on my hair.Fuck the flattened and peroxided ‘incognito’ look of the ride over here-by the time I’d finished with a cake of soap I’d transformed myself into a human mine head.It was a very precise look.But to the unintiated,I would of looked like someone who’d just had the fright of their life whilst getting a bucket of glue dumped on their bonce.I packed my stuff up and charged straight up for breakfast.Toast,egg,and beans copped an absolute thrashing before being washed down by the best tea I’d had in ages.I’d been told about the ‘Advisory Service for Squatters’ up in Islington,so I made my way there,after leaving my bag of clothes in ‘Left Luggage’ at Victoria Station.I hated carrying anything in my hands whilst walking the streets.I needed to feel free-in every way-but particularlyincase of confrontation,or a need to move fast..On the way, I passed a newstand and noticed with relish headlines about suspected outside agitators in the weekend before’s riot at the Wapping newspaper plant-They were blaming Class War..I loved it…!.Straight away I decided to take a look at this Wapping issue.This was exactly what I had come for.I was practically cumming in my pants at the thought of rioting.Getting the basic nessessity of a roof over my head suddenly seemed like a fuckin’ annoying little diversion from what I really wanted to do.I started almost working myself into a right state by realising all the other realities of starting a new home.A bed,blankets,a fridge,some where to cook-Fuck it-I was giving myself a fuckin’ migraine just thinking about all that boring shit.I reminded myself of times past when I had opened squats,and cut every corner imaginable to avoid ’setting up house’,and how fucked up I’d got from not looking after myself.I took a deep breath-it didn’t work-and considered my immediate situation…where the fuck was this Wapping joint..?.I almostcatapulted myself from the Tube up to Islington High street and the Squatters Shop was there and open.The anarchists there were very helpful;giving me a rough guide to which London Borough’s had the most empty flats.I said I wasn’t fussy, I just wanted a roof and a front door.I started quizzing them about Wapping,Class War,Conflict,etc..They told me that one area where there was loads of empty flats was quite near Wapping,”Limehouse-it’s called…just up from Mile End Tube”.I knew where that was.I’d been there years before with some skins from the Last Resort.They didn’t seem too comfortable talking about Class War,and at the time I put that down to them not knowing who the hell I was.Years later,I realised it was because they were shit scared of the backlash after the

riot,from the Cops and Media.At the time though,the Advisory Service For Squatters were unfortunate to have in their presence, a totally animated punk,oblivious to any repercussions or security precautions .Like I said,keeping a low profile wasn’t exactly my forte’.Strutting up and down the shop,I would of seemed like one of those wind-up toys that wouldn’t shut-up or stay still.I’d ask a question ,then start raving on about some other topic before anybody could answer the question I originally asked-and I did that about ten times in a row!.All the time gesticulating with my hands and fists;making threats to the class enemies as if they were actually there;waving my arms around like an octopus stranded on dry land-and all the time behaving as if I was addressing an audience of thousands-not two stunned hippy punks.If the Special Branch had of been listening in on that bit of enlightening entertainment,they of called for the lads in the white padded van before they called for the boys in blue!.So Mile End it was,and I took a bus straight there.All the way there I checked out all the Housing Estates,and everything that Class War carried on about all fell perfectly into place.Here was the areas where the rule of law mattered less.This was where we could fight FROM.I jumped off the 277 bus at the corner of Mile End Road and Burdett Road,and followed the squatters’ directions straight up Burdett to Limehouse.So far I hadn’t met anyone that I considered’Class War’.Just after I passed Bow Common Lane on my way up the Burdett Road,everything changed.I met ‘Mad Mark’

16 Comments

Paul Stott
March 30, 2007 at 8:49 am

Darren - Really looking forward to the rest of this mate.

At least we know writing will keep you quiet for a while…
Zonk
March 31, 2007 at 1:55 pm

Bloody excellent! Can’t wait!
Yonderboy
April 4, 2007 at 4:13 pm

FUCKING EXCELLENT MATE! its like theres someone else that feels how i feel about politics word for word, not just another liberal twat that preaches anarchism while there fucking mum buys them a nice flat to stay in up Clifton while they go get there degree in something totally useless to any community anywhere, fair play, if only there where more of us….

squee.uk@gmail.com
Doug Henwood Talks » Blog Archive » how to win a strike
April 8, 2007 at 1:29 pm

[...] http://ianbone.wordpress.com/i-fucked-thatcher/ [...]
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April 14, 2007 at 11:34 am

[...] the lot of ‘em. Come back Darren Ryan. All is [...]
DMarl
April 27, 2007 at 3:35 pm

Fuckin’ awesome bruv.
love and rage » Blog Archive » solidarity forever
May 1, 2007 at 12:24 pm

[...] the first time I’ve actively touched something tainted by Murdoch’s filthy hands since the printworkers strike in the mid-80’s). This is to promote the Support Antifa! site I’ve set up. I’ve [...]
tallchris
May 15, 2007 at 1:19 pm

Enjoying it Darren but don’t let on where all the bodies are “buried” eh? There a good chap….