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Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistence Since the Sixties
Welcome to the social and environmental devastation that is Britain in 1996. Welcome to interchangeable political parties and their chattering media jesters pulling together to make Johnny Rotten’s dream come no future. But despite their best efforts, fear, cynicism and the National Lottery aren’t the whole story. Protest hasn’t disappeared during the last twenty years, and nor have solidarity and imagination. They have simply taken new forms; they have moved out and moved on. More and more people, young people especially, are making a virtue of necessity and living outside Britain’s rotting institutional fabric. Travelers, tribes, ravers or squatters, direct-action protesters of every kind, DIYers. This book is the first attempt to write their history, to explore and to celebrate their endlessly creative senselessness.
George McKay looks back at the hippies of the sixties and punks of the seventies, and shows how their legacies have been transformed into what he calls cultures of resistance. His journey through the undergrounds of the last two decades take us from the Windsor Free Festival of 1972 to the Castlemorton Free Rave Megaparty exactly twenty years later, from the anarchopunk band Crass via Teepee Valley and Glastonbury to today’s ever-intensifying anti-road protests, and to the widespread opposition to the Criminal Justice Act.
Drawing on fanzines and free papers, record lyrics, interviews and diaries, Senseless Acts of Beauty gives a vivid, insider account of countercultures, networks and movements that until now have remained largely unrecorded. At the same time, George McKay analyzes their effects, and gives his own answers to the questions they what are their politics, their aspirations, their consequences? One thing is certain, he if there is resistance anywhere in Britain today, then it is here, in the beat-up buses, beleaguered squats and tree-top barricades, that we should start to look for it.
George McKay looks back at the hippies of the sixties and punks of the seventies, and shows how their legacies have been transformed into what he calls cultures of resistance. His journey through the undergrounds of the last two decades take us from the Windsor Free Festival of 1972 to the Castlemorton Free Rave Megaparty exactly twenty years later, from the anarchopunk band Crass via Teepee Valley and Glastonbury to today’s ever-intensifying anti-road protests, and to the widespread opposition to the Criminal Justice Act.
Drawing on fanzines and free papers, record lyrics, interviews and diaries, Senseless Acts of Beauty gives a vivid, insider account of countercultures, networks and movements that until now have remained largely unrecorded. At the same time, George McKay analyzes their effects, and gives his own answers to the questions they what are their politics, their aspirations, their consequences? One thing is certain, he if there is resistance anywhere in Britain today, then it is here, in the beat-up buses, beleaguered squats and tree-top barricades, that we should start to look for it.
- GenresNonfictionMusicHistory
224 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1996
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 2, 2013
I have developed a consuming interest in the 1960s London counterculture and have read a great many books on the subject by participants in the scene, nearly all of which claim the counterculture dried up by 1971 or so. In Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties, George McKay claims that the counterculture has persisted in the decades since, through the 1970s, the dismal Thatcher era and the early 1990s. McKay squatted houses, followed punk and was an anarchist activist, which makes him especially qualified to describe more recent UK cultures of resistance.
McKay focuses on five alternative cultures which are to some degree interrelated: 1) the free festivals of the 1970s and early 1980s (cultimating in police brutality at the last Stonehenge Festival), 2) New Age travellers i.e. people living out of their vans and moving all over Britain, often after festivals, 3) the punk/DIY era of the late 1970s and early 1980s, 4) the rave scene, techno music and ecstasy as resistance or escape, 5) eco-warrior protestors. It should be noted that the chapter on punk is entirely concerned with the anarchist band Crass; unlike the Sex Pistols, whose resistance was mainly marketing gimmick encouraged by their management, Crass was truly committed to changing the world.
On nearly every page there is a mention of some new personality or event that will send you off trawling Wikipedia for hours, so I'm happy I purchased this book Still, I was disappointed by many aspects of it. 185 pages, many of which contain photos, is not enough space to explore over two decades of activity. Some books on the 1960s counterculture run to more than double the page count, and the heyday of that movement was only about five or six years.
Furthermore, in spite of McKay's insistence that the counterculture never died, he doesn't conclusively show any continuity between the Sixties and the later cultures of resistance. The book opens with the free festivals scene in 1973, two years after books on the 1960s say it was all over. What happened in those two years. Penny Rimbaud of Crass had in fact been active in 1960s alternative cultures, but McKay doesn't mention any of his activities that span both the Sixties and Seventies.
McKay focuses on five alternative cultures which are to some degree interrelated: 1) the free festivals of the 1970s and early 1980s (cultimating in police brutality at the last Stonehenge Festival), 2) New Age travellers i.e. people living out of their vans and moving all over Britain, often after festivals, 3) the punk/DIY era of the late 1970s and early 1980s, 4) the rave scene, techno music and ecstasy as resistance or escape, 5) eco-warrior protestors. It should be noted that the chapter on punk is entirely concerned with the anarchist band Crass; unlike the Sex Pistols, whose resistance was mainly marketing gimmick encouraged by their management, Crass was truly committed to changing the world.
On nearly every page there is a mention of some new personality or event that will send you off trawling Wikipedia for hours, so I'm happy I purchased this book Still, I was disappointed by many aspects of it. 185 pages, many of which contain photos, is not enough space to explore over two decades of activity. Some books on the 1960s counterculture run to more than double the page count, and the heyday of that movement was only about five or six years.
Furthermore, in spite of McKay's insistence that the counterculture never died, he doesn't conclusively show any continuity between the Sixties and the later cultures of resistance. The book opens with the free festivals scene in 1973, two years after books on the 1960s say it was all over. What happened in those two years. Penny Rimbaud of Crass had in fact been active in 1960s alternative cultures, but McKay doesn't mention any of his activities that span both the Sixties and Seventies.
September 10, 2011
A very interesting look at the history of protest. It would make good reading for a lot of you youngsters now.
April 21, 2022
I read quite a lot of this with a lump in my throat, feeling my age a little, but also aghast at how much worse things have become. The author pulls a few punches, and in all honesty I can’t share his passion for Crass, but these are minor cavils: it’s a really good overview of several decades of “cultures of resistance” in the uk. The book ends with the CJA and there’s very likely a sequel or two to be written about the 25 years since.
Sadly, the chokehold on British culture has tightened still further since this book was written, and the advent of fascistic social control measures post-2020 and the frightening ratcheting up of propaganda are shocking in their accumulative oppression. absolutely anyone daring to demur from dominant ideology can be attacked, mobbed, rendered unemployed, marginalised, and everyone else cowed into silence.
I do own a copy of How Does It Feel To Be The Mother Of A Thousand Dead btw 😉
Sadly, the chokehold on British culture has tightened still further since this book was written, and the advent of fascistic social control measures post-2020 and the frightening ratcheting up of propaganda are shocking in their accumulative oppression. absolutely anyone daring to demur from dominant ideology can be attacked, mobbed, rendered unemployed, marginalised, and everyone else cowed into silence.
I do own a copy of How Does It Feel To Be The Mother Of A Thousand Dead btw 😉
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews