The Redskins: BBC Sessions (Or: "I Joined a Communist Front Group")

It was back in 1988, the dark, dark year when Conservative leader Brian Mulroney set about selling a divided Canadian electorate on a Free Trade deal with the U.S., that I began attending the meetings of a political action group named Youth Against Free Trade (Y.A.F.T.).

It was lead, not by a youth but by a mustachioed middle-aged man named Nigel, who eventually turned out to be not just some Bizarro leftist version of a youth pastor but a card-carrying member of the Communist Party of Canada. (If you're of a certain age, you may read "card-carrying member of the Communist Party" words with that McCarthyite Southern slur).

Now I was young, idealistic blah, blah blah but I was not a communist. To begin with, it was a little late to be jumping on that bandwagon, what with the wheels clearly coming off in the USSR. More importantly, the Communist nations contempt of human rights made all their rhetoric less than useless to me. Nowhere was this more obvious to me personally, then in the pages of the impossibly well-packaged (read: Kremlin-funded) Communist Party free paper which regularly contained bald-faced denials of the Ukrainian famine (The Holodomor). As a wanna-be historian and a proud Manitoban (our province was built by different groups fleeing Russian malfeasance) this Orwellian revisionism was truly deplorable. Plus, I'm just a contrarian by nature and not much good with party lines.

Nonetheless, in the election campaign of '88, I fought for what I believed in, alongside guys with nicknames like "Trotsky" and "Lenin". Really, they were just kids my own age, kids who listened to lots of Billy Bragg, Dead Kennedys and The Redskins (but not SNFU who'd dared to slam the postal union in one song) and were into politics. We confronted Mulroney himself at two Conservative rallies. ("The only good Tory is a Supposi-tory" the man nick-named Trotsky shouted out during a pause in The Big Chin's speech and, at another, a picture of me and "Trotsky" screaming at some Tory lackey made the front page of The Winnipeg Free Press). But we, and Y.A.F.T. was just a tiny group in a very broad-based opposition, lost that election due to vote-splitting by the two left-leaning parties.

Mulroney, Bush the Elder, Thatcher et al - dark times, readers, dark times.

Then, in 1992, after the Tories suffered the greatest defeat in electoral history, came a Liberal government, who, with all their attendant faults, were not content to just auction off our natural resources, our banking system and our social safety-net to the highest bidder. So, as a result, some of our darkest fears about this Free Trade Agreement were kept at bay for the next thirteen or so years.

While I may not grown much wiser during this interim, I did come to see that resistance to the corruption inherent in power is a human necessity and one not beholden to any single ideology. After all, world developments after the collapse of the Soviet Union muddied the ideological waters far more then the Reaganites have ever let on. Capitalism hardly made Russia a safe, open democracy and communism didn't stop the Chinese march towards becoming an economic superpower. I came to be less worried about the specific ideology of those who seek office and more concerned with what actions they took with whatever power they did have.

Now, Stephen Harper's Conservatives has brought the darkness back to my country. Here in the 21st century, tariff policy seems less significant when compared with this government's intolerance towards the weak, its deliberate attempts to divide the people, its rapid concentration of power in the Prime Minister's office and its creep towards plutocracy. It is this sort of skullduggery that makes this regime repellent to me and not their public commitment to the ideals of conservatism (individual responsibility, smaller governments, lower debts et al) which is merely a fig-leaf.

So in these bleak times, even those of us who will never be Trotskyists or pamphleteers can agree that eighties British band The Redskins kicked up a righteous soul-punk racket that evinced one of the universal principals of the never-ending fight against the darkness of corruption - don't mourn - organize!



Peel Session 09/10/1982

The Peasant Army
Kick Over The Statues
Reds Strike The Blues
Unionize & Pickin' The Blues (Outro)

* Chris Dean (Guitar, Vocals)
* Nick King (Drums)
* Millicent Martin (Hewes) (Bass)
* Steve Nichol (Trumpet)
* Lloyd Dwyer (Saxophone)
* Dagenham Pete Pixie (Backing Vocals)
* John Mekon (Backing Vocals)
* Colin Car (Backing Vocals)


Peel Session 08/08/1983

Young And Proud
Hold On
99-And-A-Half
Take No Heroes

* Chris Dean (Guitar, Vocals)
* Nick King (Drums)
* Millicent Martin (Hewes) (Bass)
* Steve Nichol (Trumpet)
* Lloyd Dwyer (Saxophone)

Kid Jensen Session ???

A Plateful of Hateful
It Can be Done
Keep on Keepin' On
Complete Control (Bonus Track)

* Chris Dean (Guitar, Vocals)
* Nick King (Drums)
* Millicent Martin (Hewes) (Bass)






Holy Hell, that was laborious. Some COMMENTS (where the BBC Sessions link can be found) on The Redskins, political activism or Punk-Soul Brothers checkin' it out now would not only better the world they might inspire me to unleash the (almost) full force of The Redskins discography upon you...


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