1983 AND ALL THAT

12-10-2007

Could a Birmingham reggae band really have kick started the Northern Ireland peace process? That's what Pete Millington reckons.

1983 was a scary year for bleeding hearts and lefties like me.

One main reason it was such a scary year was because it was the year before 1984 and expectations were running high.

These days authors have probably learnt the lesson about not setting futuristic novels too close to the time of writing.

But the future is all so relative, that's the problem.

Had Orwell called his book 2084 there might not have been such a high level of paranoia, people would have had 100 more years to digest and analyse the message and, a bit like old Nostradamus with his cauldron, realised that he was probably prophesizing in the wind.

But there was something about the prelude to the real the real 1984 that was very unnerving, Orwell seemed to have struck a nerve with his level of accuracy.

I could bang on about the context of the era for another page, but why bother when one word encapsulates the atmosphere of the time so well…

THATCHER

It's hard to believe that the doddery old dear who takes tea and scones with the socialist Prime Minister was once, along with Hop-along-Cassidy, the tyrant of the Western World.

If Orwell had got anything wrong in his fictional predictions, it was that actually he wasn't quite scary enough.

As 1984 approached, I was a 22 year old idealistic pseudo punk rocker living in an attic flat in Gillott Road in Edgbaston, I was on the dole, my walls were plastered with pictures of native American Indians, I had three glue-sniffers from Kidderminster as lodgers and every night we would open the window and repeatedly blast "Stand Down Margaret" by the Beat into the leafy Edgbaston Street below.

But my life was going nowhere fast.

Towards the end of 1983 I met a bloke who was to influence me greatly for the next two or three years, a secondary school teacher from Belfast named Paul Murphy

Paul was a bloke who abounded with positive creative energy, a pacifist, a musician and a spiritual thinker but with a simple doctrine on life no more complicated than to live in peace, love thy neighbour and try and have a good time along the way.

At the time Paul was working for an organisation called NAME, the National Association For Multi Racial Education.

Which, incidentally, changed it's name at a conference (in 1984) to the National Anti Racist Movement in Education … but maybe we'll go into that one on another occasion

Paul was based in Small Heath at the Birmingham Community Centre in Jenkins Street and at the time he encouraged me to get more involved in the activities he was developing.

In the early 1980s, Small Heath had the smell of revolution in the air. Almost as a direct response to the oppressive politics of Mrs T, a reactionary counter culture was bubbling away.

This was the era of Reaganomics; the proliferation of the arms race and a pinnacle period in the cold war; following her recent victory in the Falklands, Thatcher won her second term in office with a very depressing landslide victory; Labour were crumbling under Foot and the Unions; Cruise missiles arrived at Greenham Common; Thatcher appointed Ian MacGregor as head of the National Coal Board; the IRA were conducting a bombing campaign on English soil; the whole world seemed to be in a state of war; President Gas truly was President Gas again and to top it all, bloody Luxemburg won the Eurovision Song Contest

But as the ancient Chinese curse goes "May you live in interesting times" and the streets of Small Heath in 1983 were certainly that. Activities centred around a small shop known as Trinity Arts - a hotbed of creative community energy where people from all communities mixed, assimilated, communicated and created art together in a way I have never observed since.

Photography, fine art, pottery, drama, film making, music workshops, writing, poetry, sound systems, political discussion.

It was perhaps the last activity that led to the rapid demise of Trinity, West Midlands Arts pulled their funding around the same time that the Revolutionary Communist Party and various other groups with a more political agenda went into the ascendancy

Just a mile away in Sparkhill and Sparkbrook, Dr Moira O'Shea was about to be arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act and the waves were felt across the community.

It was in this climate that Paul Murphy, through NAME, organised a trip to Belfast for a group of around 20 community artists from the Small Heath area

The purpose of the journey was to explore similarities between racism and sectarianism, I was lucky enough to be a part of that journey which involved a whole crowd of Brummies loaded down with instruments, video cameras, etc, etc, getting on the overnight train to Larne from New Street Station.

The music went on into the wee small hours and the craic was good.

A reggae band from Handsworth called The Nomads, fronted by Irish man Tommy Martin, were part of the posse and played numerous gigs in both Nationalist and Loyalist areas.

These were folk who hadn't seen visiting live bands in years because everyone was too scared to play Northern Ireland in the 70s and 80s. I remember walking into a toilet in a club and spotting Nomads bass player Everton, surrounded by Protestant skinheads who were queuing up to touch his dreadlocks with the reverence they might have offered Bob Marley himself.

On another occasion our overloaded minibus was pulled over at two o clock in the morning on the outskirts of Belfast by an armoured RUC van. Approaching the minibus extremely cautiously, fingers no doubt poised over triggers, the RUC officers looked both relieved and surprised to see that the minibus appeared to be carrying the weary delegates of a United Nations conference home to their Irish beds.

It was a great experience and the issues we explored are just as relevant today as they were twenty years ago. Talking to each other across the barricades actually ain't missile science and never has been.

So if you ever hear a politician telling you that they started the Northern Ireland peace process, don't believe a word of it because it was started in 1983 by a big multi racial group of artists and bleeding hearts from our very own Small Heath!

Watch the New Homes New Roles video from 1983 on Paul Murphy's website at this link:

http://www.c21vox.tv/programmes/full.php?id=846

and watch a follow-up interview between myself and Paul twenty years later on the St Patrick's Day parade in Birmingham in 2003 at this link:

http://www.c21vox.tv/programmes/full.php?id=147

And make sure you explore Paul's site whilst you're there because there are some real gems of contemporary Birmingham heritage worth discovering.