DESCRIPTION:
Just prior to the start of another free tour in 1978, Here And Now recorded a John Peel radio session following a chance encounter with him at an open air gig at Meanwhile Gardens.

The Peel session captures the essence of Here And Now well.

Two songs are from the 'Give And Take' album and the ‘space punk’ style is much more in evidence than on the 'Floating Anarchy' album, yet the importance of trying to capture the moment meant that two of the tracks were jammed ‘there and then’ in the Maida Vale studios.

Much to the surprise of the BBC engineers!

Jonathan Barnett - Weird Tales, and roadie for Here And Now and Zounds.

On 7th June 1977, Sex Pistols took a trip down the Thames, manufacturing much media outrage in their wake.

On the same day, Here And Now played a Jubilee Street Party at Bristol Gardens. Bristol Gardens was a squatted street near to Warwick Avenue tube station, one of a network of similar squats which had grown up across London as part of the radical counter culture.

Squatting communities grew up all over London at Bristol Gardens, Charrington Street in Kings Cross, Tolmers Village in Euston, Longfellow Road in Walthamstow, and many other places. A few similar communities occurred outside the capital, too. There were communities in Hebden Bridge, Bristol, Brighton, Norwich, and many other towns across the country.

Each squat was different depending on its size, the conditions of the property, the amount of security, and the people attracted to them. Some were made up of people from predominantly middle class backgrounds; others were almost exclusively working class. Some, like Prince of Wales Crescent in Kentish Town, shared a hippy ideology which never truly “adapted to overcome social or political problems.”

And they all invariably changed rapidly, responding to external and internal pressures. But common to most was a sense of identity seldom found in towns. People had a sense of living somewhere special, symbolised by the street carnivals and parties which became a regular feature of squatting life. For some people, albeit only a small minority of squatters, squatting began to be more than simply finding a roof. It became fun; it offered new freedoms, a sense of community. Squatting was almost a way of life in its own right.

Listening to the relaxed atmosphere of Here And Now’s 30 minute long ‘Now’s The Time To Live’ in contrast to the frenetic sounds Sex Pistols were making that same day brings out the sheer surreal strangeness of it all.

Now we know that Here And Now would tour with the punk band Alternative TV the next year in 1978, and later with The Mob, Zounds and Androids Of Mu. But on 7th June 1977, how far apart were the worlds represented by the two simultaneous events?

Well one was a high profile media spectacle, which has been sampled and repeated to the point of recuperation, a set of sounds and images locked into all subsequent popular reproductions of the Jubilee and thus the Sex Pistols have become part of the mystique of monarchy. As if saying “Here are all these quaintly revolting punks being rude to the Queen but punk has come and gone and she still reigns over us”.

The other, was not.

When Here And Now played at Bristol Gardens, the event was so far underground it has taken thirty nine years to surface. Does this mean Here And Now were more subversive than Sex Pistols?

If there is a cultural / political unconscious (see Frederick Jameson:’ The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act’ from 1981) the answer is YES. And although Kenneth Grant (Outer Head of the Typhonian O.T.O) would substitute subconscious for unconscious; since Grant argues that nothing is truly unconscious, in the unlikely event that he would ever consider such a question, he would also agree.

It is the squatting that makes the difference. In the book ‘Capital Vol. I’, chapter 27, ‘Expropriation Of The Agricultural Population From The Land’, by Karl Marx, Marx advocates squatting as the most effective method whereby the urban industrial proletarian descendants of an agricultural workforce driven off the land and into cities by enforced enclosure can overcome the alienation of people from the land and the resulting fetish-isation land ownership, still embodied in the figure of the monarch as feudal owner (by divine right) of all land across the country.

Here And Now were based in squats at nearby Latimer Road and Stoneleigh Street in the Notting Hill area, and at Grosvenor Road in Twickenham.

Thus on 7th June 1977, Here And Now and the Bristol Garden party were actually more subversive than Sex Pistols and their boat trip in the media spotlight along the Thames.

Al Puppy - Kill Your Pet Puppy.