Chris Low of the Apostles

From DIY Conspiracy
August 13, 2025

An in-depth conversation with The Apostles’ drummer, Chris Low, on the band’s militant roots, rejection of pacifism, and place in the history of the UK’s anarcho-punk scene.

From 1979 onward, Crass reshaped punk and its connection to the anarchist movement, as well as the very nature of protest music and subculture worldwide. Their impact is undeniable. Yet it was also clear to many that they came from a largely middle-class and art-school liberal background. As the often-controversial music journalist Garry Bushell once remarked, “being middle-class, they think that class doesn’t matter.”

The Apostles were cut from a very different cloth. Formed in 1980 in London’s working-class Hackney, they came from a real proletarian background. After a run of gigs, lineup changes and early demo cassette releases, their first EP, Blow It Up, Burn It Down, Kick It ’Til It Breaks, arrived in 1983. Where Crass Records’ sleeves favored stark black-and-white minimalism and Cold War obsession, The Apostles’ first EP featured an eagle wielding both a machine gun and a machete. A “1985” emblem served as a pointed riposte to Crass’s fixation on Orwell’s 1984. Inside the sleeve, listeners found a heady mix of comics art and unapologetic rants against “plastic pacifists,” sharp commentary from an angry prole perspective, and highly practical advice—including guides on squatting into empty premises and even building incendiary devices.

They pushed even further with their second EP, tackling the surprisingly taboo theme of anti-fascism at a time when the anarcho-punk discourse was still dominated by fears of nuclear annihilation. Songs like “Class War” and “The Stoke Newington 8” openly embraced militant action, defending property damage and expressing solidarity with those jailed for the Angry Brigade bombings.

After Crass disbanded in 1984, bands like Conflict, Icons of Filth, and Liberty abandoned the strict pacifist dogma once prized in the scene, partly out of necessity when faced with National Front (NF) bonehead violence at their gigs. Some members of Crass would later revisit and rethink earlier positions, but four decades on, history has shown that pacifism rarely holds up under sustained pressure, and perhaps The Apostles were always better placed to see that than many of their anarcho-punk contemporaries.

We first spoke to The Apostles’ drummer, Chris Low, in 2021 about the history and importance of anarcho-punk fanzines in the UK. The following interview was conducted in April 2025 and first appeared, in German translation, in Ox-Fanzine #180. We’re publishing the original English-language version here at DIY Conspiracy for the first time! Questions by Joachim Hiller; answers by Chris Low.

Chris, please introduce yourself. How and where did you grow up, how and why and when did you get into punk rock and drumming?

I grew up in Stirling, a town (now a city) in Central Scotland. The house I grew up in overlooked the car park of the local disco/club, so I first became aware of punk in 1977, when I was eight years old, though obviously I didn’t get into it quite then. By 1978 there were local punk bands who would rehearse there that me and my friends used to go and watch practice, so it was that year I started sticking safety pins in my clothes and identifying as a punk. Our next-door neighbour was Jamzy, the bassist in Stirling’s premier punk band The Fakes, who released one amazing EP called Production, which you can find on YouTube. They were the first band I ever saw live and, also in early 1979, I attended the Stirling Punk Festival, which The Fakes also played alongside several other Central Scottish and Glasgow bands. I started religiously listening to John Peel around then too, and he would always play the latest punk records on his show, which I’d tape. The first “big” gig I ever went to was Sham 69 at the Glasgow Apollo shortly after the Sex Pistols had split up, and Steve Jones and Paul Cook joined them on stage for the encore—which, as you can imagine, was a monumental moment for a young nine-year-old punk.

I think, at that age, punk just felt like having some sort of identity or being in a gang. All the Stirling punks would hang about outside the local shopping centre on Saturdays, and being part of that alone seemed incredibly grown up. One episode I remember from then was spying a cassette of the first Clash album in the local Woolworths and skiving off school on a mission to nick it, prizing it out of the plastic display case with a screwdriver, but being really disappointed when I heard how melodious it all was. This wasn’t really what I had expected they would sound like by their appearance and the reputation of their gigs ending in riots. Soon after, I managed to acquire a copy of Never Mind the Bollocks by the same nefarious means, and that was a lot more like it—especially “Bodies,” which sounded angry and nasty, precisely as I had expected punk would sound!

But I think the first time I ever heard anything I would regard as ‘defining’ was hearing Crass’ Feeding of the 5,000, which, at long last, was a record that sounded 100% like I had always imagined punk would and should sound—no cheesy Transatlantic vocal affectations, rock’n’roll riffs, or wanky guitar solos like many of the ’77 acts. It was discordant, atonal, and relentless all the way through, an absolute sonic and sensory assault leaving barely a moment to breathe from start to finish. I’ll never forget the power and impact that Feeding had. Getting it home, putting it on our old Bakelite record player with the speaker in the lid, folding out the lyric booklet that came inside, sitting down listening to it and following the lyrics—I was ten years old then. After getting to the end of side two, it was like a bomb had gone off in my head. A year later, in 1980, I saw Crass live for the first time when they played a local venue, The Albert Hall in Stirling. Bizarrely, only a few months before I’d been taken to the same venue to see a production of the Christian musical Joseph and His Technicolour Dreamcoat as the primary school Religious Education Christmas class outing!

But to return to Crass, the fact they came across so intensely on stage just compounded what was already an incredibly strong and powerful image. An image that also somehow seemed very accessible, from the fact the lights they had on stage were so basic and unlike the ‘lighting shows’ other bands I’d go and see, like Stiff Little Fingers or The Damned, had, and the fact the band members were milling about the crowd with a bucket of badges and leaflets they were giving out broke the audience/rockstar division down even further. Obviously, this wasn’t something I was conscious of at the time, but it must have made an impression if I can still remember it all today, forty-five years later.

You were part of the so-called anarcho-punk scene. What are your memories of where that term came from, who used it, what it meant to you and others?

My first real engagement with the scene was through the fanzine I started after being inspired by Toxic Grafity and Kill Your Pet Puppy and the Crass DIY ethic in general. Funnily enough, I only discovered recently that one of the very first ever uses of the term anarcho-punk in print was a review of issue three of the fanzine I produced, Guilty of What?

I produced three issues of the zine in 1981–1982, when I was twelve/thirteen. The name I chose for the zine was an unconscious attempt to “synthesise” anarchism and punk, given Guilty of What? was both the slogan on a Sid Vicious badge I had following his arrest for murdering Nancy Spungen and also the title of an article I had seen in a copy of Black Flag anarchist journal about the Persons Unknown trial of defendants facing imprisonment on bomb-making conspiracy charges after writing off to all the addresses on the sleeve of the Bloody Revolutions / Persons Unknown single. From starting out as a fairly generic punk zine covering Discharge and the Apocalypse Now Tour along with local bands, by the third and final issue it was focusing nearly exclusively on the anarcho-punk scene and its themes—articles about vivisection, the arms race, conscription, apartheid, etc., together with interviews with Crass, Conflict, Flux, The Alternative, and the other big-name anarcho bands of the day, plus smaller acts including one of the original Napalm Death’s first ever write-ups.

In terms of what anarcho-punk meant to me and others at the time, it’s probably worth establishing some facts that recent historicizations authored by those who weren’t directly involved have perhaps clouded. While the term anarcho-punk came by combining punk with the anarchist ethos most of the bands espoused—the name alone suggesting that the message was every bit as important as the music—the origins of anarcho-punk developed years before it became a recognized subculture and style of music. The first Bullshit Detector LP on Crass Records gave the embryonic scene a sense of cohesion, and I think that stunning record is without doubt the greatest expression of the DIY punk aesthetic ever pressed on vinyl. It acted as a clarion call to many dispossessed youth who may otherwise have remained geographically and culturally isolated from all the other like minds forming bands and starting zines across the land, so I’d say that was the absolute genesis of the scene that became anarcho-punk as we know it today. The importance of the “Mental Liberation” issue of Toxic Grafity fanzine cannot be underestimated, as its contents informed so much of the embryonic anarcho scene.

While Crass, other bands on their label, and those featured on the Bullshit Detector and associated zines gave anarcho-punk an identity, it could also be said that it was the Wapping Anarchy Centre and the squatted Centro Iberico that ran as gig venues and social centres from 1981–1982 that provided the bricks-and-mortar foundation to the movement. It was the politicized punks and squatters who congregated and played there who introduced the concept of activism to what had hitherto been a predominantly music-focused scene and thus gave it that vital characteristic that remains integral to the scene as we know it. Also, very significantly, many of these same activists, musicians, and writers introduced anarchist thought to the scene, as it’s not entirely accurate to say Crass’ politics were ever anarchist in any real understanding of the tradition. Later, as more bands were released on Crass Records and those other labels such as Spiderleg and Mortarhate that it inspired, anarcho-punk came to be a simple way to identify bands who had a similar musical approach, visual aesthetic, and ideology. Before then, the terms used to demarcate Crass-type acts from the more mainstream bands playing commercial venues and gracing the pages of the music press, or the sort of bands posthumously labelled ‘UK82’, were Peace Punk or even just Crass Punks. Contrary to what many seem to think, crust didn’t exist during the early ’80s anarcho-punk era, so you never heard of anarcho bands described as crusties until the late eighties when crust culture developed as an amalgamation of a DIY punk approach with a metal-inflected sound and a monochrome adoption of heavy metal’s biker-inspired visual tropes such as cut-off battle jackets covered with band patches.

If that scene has any failing today, it’s perhaps that this balance has slipped in favor of it being increasingly ‘just about the music’ with the politics being relegated to slogans on patches. But I would still maintain that the resounding legacy of anarcho-punk is that, nearly a quarter of a century on, it is still the unifying soundtrack to a culture of resistance that spans England to Indonesia in one form or another. It is still as removed from mainstream music and as oppositional to conventional culture as it was back in the early 1980s and shows no sign of changing—quite the opposite, in fact, as the more DIY, underground, and self-supporting the anarcho-punk scenes I have observed in Europe and Japan become, the less they have to engage with the music establishment and those who would seek to dilute the movement’s message or, as is the case with all these “it’s all about the music not the politics” labels, distros, and festivals that claim to be ‘DIY’, milk it for money and exploit it for gain and peer status. To paraphrase Flux: punk should “belong to the punks, not the business men.”

How did you end up in The Apostles? You were very young then—not old enough to drive or vote but old enough to play in a well-known band!

I started drumming at 11, and my first proper band was Distraught, who played a few local gigs and had a couple of tracks on the 1982 Twisted Nervous Breakdown compilation put out by my old mate Miles Ratledge, the original Napalm Death drummer. We later changed the name to Political Asylum, with whom I recorded the Fresh Hate demo and drummed for their first handful of gigs before leaving. I joined The Apostles in 1983, though the previous summer I had gone to see The Apostles play with Conflict, Omega Tribe, and the Icons of Filth at the Centro Iberico with Miles and the other Napalm Death founding member, vocalist Nick Bullen, both of whom I had got to know through doing fanzines and tape trading. After that, I started corresponding with Andy Martin of The Apostles and, in summer 1983, shortly after I had turned 14, I went down to London and stayed with him in the squat he shared with Ian ‘Slaughter’ Rawes, who produced the infamous Pigs for Slaughter fanzine, and Larry Peterson, who ran Cause for Concern Records and had put out the first Apostles EP.

Prior to me joining The Apostles, they had been using Razzle of Hanoi Rocks as a fill-in drummer (him and Dave Fanning used to squat together), but Andy Martin asked if I wanted to fill the drumming stool after we had a jam in the studio while the Assassins of Hope were recording their second demo, and he was impressed by how well I could play along with all Apostles tracks. Once I was a member of the band, whenever we had a record to record, I used to bunk the overnight train from Scotland down to London, where, as I was still a kid, I’d find a likely-looking couple on the train and hide under the table where they were sitting, or spend the night in the toilets, and if a guard came along I would tell them I was feeling sick and my parents were further down the train with my ticket. Once I got to London, we would usually have a single day’s practice to learn whatever songs Andy had chosen to record before going into the studio.

The Apostles were extremely vocal through their use of direct action and had links with the militant anarcho-punk fringe. Can you recall what actions they employed at the time to push forward their messages?

We were the militant anarcho-punk fringe! Around 1980 to 1983/84, there really were no others who espoused insurrectionary, direct-action anarchism other than us (plus Andy Martin’s various offshoot acts like Black Cross, Libertarian Youth, Luz Y Fuerza, etc.), the Assassins of Hope, The Sinyx, Ian Bone’s Living Legends, and Ian ‘Slaughter’ Rawes with his fanzine Pigs for Slaughter. And, of course, Conflict when they became more vocal and pro–direct action slightly later. You could certainly never have imagined anarcho-punks being involved with something like antifa back then. Also, we were involved with the Anarchist Youth Federation (AYF), which was an attempt to unite all the non-pacifist bands, fanzines, and activists affiliated with the anarcho-punk scene at the time to coordinate direct actions and share resources such as printing. The AYF disbanded in 1983, and two of its organisers, Ian ‘Slaughter’ Rawes and Sean Mason, in due course amalgamated the group with the original London Class War Collective, as it was obvious that would have a more populist and less marginalised (i.e., punk-associated) appeal.

With reference to “actions we employed to promote our message,” most are probably best not repeating, but one decidedly Citizen Smith-esque escapade I can [mention], as it was before I joined the band and, as I found out from a third party after its main perpetrator sadly died a few years ago, was the attempted fire-bombing of a number of London punk clothing boutiques in 1981 that had dared to defile the anarchy symbol by printing it on their garments. The incendiary devices were all in place for coordinated detonation, but their fuses failed to ignite as the wannabe Angry Brigadiers were too stingy to buy Marlboro cigarettes and had instead used scraggy roll-ups, which had gone out promptly after being lit! Laughably absurd Boys’ Own urban guerrilla bollocks in hindsight, but it goes to show how fanatical The Apostles’ immediate circle were back then. I suppose, given the band’s slogan was “Blow It Up, Burn It Down, Kick It Till It Breaks,” they had to walk the walk to back up the talk!

Glue the locks of all the banks and butchers or kick them in / Spray a message of hate across a Bentley or smash it up / sabotage the meat in supermarkets: poison them all / Go to Kensington and mug a rich bastard of all his wealth / We’re knocking on your door / We’re taking no more / For this is Class War / Put sugar in the petrol tank / Deflate the tires with six inch nails / That’s the way to wreck a Rolls so get stuck in, it never fails! / We’ll smash it up and we’ll burn it all down / Blow it up, burn it down, kick it ’till it breaks!

—The Apostles, “Pigs For Slaughter”

Perhaps a bit more constructive was members of the band joining up with East London Workers Against Racism in 1982/83, when they organised what were basically vigilante patrols around Brick Lane and the surrounding area at a time when there was a high incidence of racist attacks on the local Bengali community, to give any Nazis caught causing trouble a taste of their own medicine and “robust and unequivocal encouragement” to desist from such activities in future.

You put together the There Can Be No Spectators compilation of The Apostles’ early EPs plus extra tracks that was recently put out by Grow Your Own Records. In 2022 you also worked on the Best Forgotten collection of early (1980–1983) practice recordings released by Horn of Plenty Records. Who came up with the ideas, and why? There was a hint that the fact that Ty Segall mentioned your band had something to do with it?

I had always carefully kept my copies of the original tapes taken from the studio desk when we recorded the records (the only copies in existence, as Andy famously destroyed all the other Apostles master tapes decades ago), and I’d always wanted to have them reissued somehow, as the original vinyl EP releases just sounded so abysmal due to Andy insisting on cramming an entirely self-defeating amount of music on each side. This meant the grooves were so close together the music lost all its dynamic range and just sounded a tinny mess, as well as speeding up the tracks slightly, which is most noticeable on the first single. About fifteen years ago, I gave the tapes to a friend who was playing in a band with ex-members of Stereolab and had access to a proper mastering studio. Tragically, he died unexpectedly a short while into the process, so that kinda stopped the project in its tracks, as proper remastering is not something that’s done on a laptop with free software. It’s a laborious and quite expensive process, and I’ve always subscribed to the ethos that if you’re going to do something well, you should do it as well as it can be done or not at all. And if it was going to happen, I wanted it to be the highest quality possible—especially with the shitty MP3s taken from crackly old vinyl copies (and, again, bizarrely speeded up) to be found on YouTube and hawked online.

A couple of years ago, my enthusiasm for the project was sparked again after I helped with the production of the double album of the more experimental Apostles works from 1980–1983, which was entitled Best Forgotten and was released by the wonderful Horn of Plenty Records. While that is actually my personal favourite Apostles material and period of recordings, I always knew there would be a demand for an album of the songs from the Apostles EPs—especially sounding how they could and should have done! It was fantastic that my first choice of record label to release it, Grow Your Own, said they were up for it. Especially as it is run by old friends Gary of Anthrax and Steph of Hagar the Womb, so, as well as being without doubt the best punk label going today, it is also run by people who have a history of involvement in the scene and are a genuine DIY operation doing it for the right reasons, releasing fantastic records by great bands old and new—which is something I thought was very important for the project too.

With regards to Ty Segall, it was all quite a surprise to see “Ty Segall brought me here” posted as comments under some of the old demo tracks that had been uploaded to YouTube, and to be sent links where he had been enthusing over the band in interviews or on TV shows. We exchanged a few emails a few years ago, and he expressed that he would love to write a sleeve note when I told him things were up and running with the No Spectators album. I did message him again when I was working on the sleeve, etc., but didn’t hear back, and I didn’t want to hassle him as he’s a big artist who will be crazy busy and probably has enough people on his case. I must admit, when people first started telling me, “Hey, Ty Segall mentioned The Apostles in another interview!” I don’t think I’d ever heard his music, but I went to see him when he played the Roundhouse in London last year and he was brilliant. It is quite an honour to have someone that famous saying how much he loves some band I drummed for when I was at school and probably never played a gig to over a hundred people! Thurston Moore is another well-known and respected figure who has supported my work and events and, of course, Nick Blinko and my old pal Justin Broadrick are big Apostles fans. So we must have been doing something right all those years ago!

The release comes with a compendium of the Pigs for Slaughter—“the paper for the militant anarchist punk”—fanzine, which was published by a close associate of the band. Tell us more, please.

Pigs for Slaughter was always an integral part of The Apostles for me. Think of the first—and best—Apostles EP and what do you think of? The title track, “Pigs for Slaughter,” and the brutalist graphics and articles from the fanzine that the cover reproduces. Though there were only three issues of Pigs for Slaughter fanzine and it may not be the best known from the era, its influence is incalculable. It remains, in solely political terms, the most influential anarcho-punk fanzine ever. The editorial to issue one opened with the lines, “At the moment there is no fanzine for anarchist punks,” and, surprising though it may now seem, back then this could be viewed as accurate. By the time the final Pigs for Slaughter dispatch signed off with the insurrectionary call to arms, “The only language politicians understand is that of Molotov cocktails burning police cars,” this situation was starting to change.

Together with The Apostles, Pigs for Slaughter was the first voice to emerge from the anarcho-punk scene that injected a revolutionary, class-struggle anarchism into what at the time was a predominantly pacifist, non-confrontational movement. It was received with horror and revulsion for doing so. Ian Slaughter (real name Ian Rawes, the son of an engineer and a secretary from Hammersmith), the sixteen-year-old publisher of the fanzine, was vilified and denounced as “dangerous” and “a nutter” by such punk figureheads as Crass, Annie Anxiety, and Flux of Pink Indians. As standard bearers of the anarcho scene, they enjoyed universal adulation. Ian derided them in his pages as “wet-arsed pacifists” and their “non-violent anarchism” as “the contraception of revolutionary change.” While most other fanzines were printing recipes for vegetarian meals and reports on foreign punk scenes, Pigs for Slaughter featured recipes for incendiary devices and reports on businesses that had been sent letter bombs.

I first met this “dangerous nutter” at the door of the Centro Iberico squatted anarchist centre when I went to a gig featuring The Apostles, Conflict, Omega Tribe, Icons of Filth, and Riot/Clone in summer 1982. I was a bright-eyed and spiky-haired thirteen-year-old punk when he handed me a photocopied sheet as I paid my entrance fee. It was entitled “Why Punk Is a Total Failure.” Given his reputation, I was too nervous to argue. The following summer I joined The Apostles as drummer, and Ian was sharing the North London squat where I stayed with Apostles’ singer and guitarist Andy Martin (Ian had previously contributed sound-collage backing tapes to four tracks on The Apostles’ fourth demo, Topics for Discussion) and Larry Peterson, a prime mover within the London power electronics and industrial scenes who had funded the first EP and released The Apostles / The Mob Live at the LMC split LP. Ian’s ivory-white Sergio Tacchini tracksuit top impressed me as much as his claim to having seen Joy Division live, and certainly made him stand out from the rest of the scruffy punks around the scene. We bonded over an appreciation of New York electro, Moroccan hash, and video nasties. His sharp observational wit and unique sense of humour never failed to have me in pain with laughter.

Even after I left The Apostles, we remained in regular contact. I was overjoyed to have him inform me in one of our regular telephone conversations that he had decided to move up to Scotland, where he was a regular visitor to my home in Stirling and became like one of the family. When I turned sixteen and moved to Edinburgh to start college, Ian again became a guest most weekends and soon moved into the flat I was sharing with Deek of Oi Polloi and Murph, former drummer with The Alternative. We remained close friends over the years up till his tragic death from a brain tumour in October 2021. In recent years, he had become internationally acclaimed as a sound recordist through his pioneering work with the London Sound Survey website.

Though Ian may not have achieved the anarchist punk revolution that Pigs for Slaughter called for, his writing ignited an inextinguishable spark within the anarcho-punk movement, which nearly half a century on burns brighter than ever. And though his name isn’t as well known as many of the other pioneering figures from the anarcho-punk scene, it certainly deserves to be. On a personal level, I think of him and miss him every day.

I helped with numerous obituaries to Ian and his work following his passing, and this is probably my favourite. It also features a lovely photo I took on one of the last occasions I accompanied him on a field-recording expedition.

Back in the days no one really cared about copyright, publishing rights, or even archiving recordings. How painful was it to put together these re-releases and get all this right?

It’s funny you say that, because something that I’ve always been bewildered by is the number of so-called anarchist punk bands who were shouting “Smash the State” and “Fuck the Law” from the stage back in the 1980s, but now seem to be scared of reissuing their own records because they were frightened they would somehow be found to be in breach of contract! Not that half those records even had contracts to begin with! I actually learned enough about music contracts and copyright when I was working for the management company of indie band Suede, and later drumming for a Portuguese band they also handled, to know that most contracts aren’t worth the paper they’re written on and, more importantly, that if a label has failed to keep a recorded work available to buy in any format, the contract would generally be invalidated anyway.

So, in answer to your question, that side of things wasn’t a problem at all. It was actually the cover design that was the greatest brain damage, as I’m a total perfectionist when it comes to graphic design. But thankfully, I had an excellent designer in Paul Davies to help with the digital and print-ready side of things. Photoshop and digital design didn’t even exist when I studied graphics at college and, frustratingly, I’ve just never found the time to apply myself and learn them.

Musically The Apostles—especially in their later years—turned out to be musically quite open-minded. The same can be said about some of the releases on Crass Records. It seems that the understanding of what punk can be musically has very much narrowed down in later years compared to the time back then. How accepted were these “other” punk approaches compared to the more typical sounds?

The major differentiation between the anarcho-punk acts and the more traditional punk outfits was that, for the former, song structures were often dispensed with in favour of a relentless lyrical polemic accompanied by a similarly uncompromising and abrasive aural assault. Notably, the initial embryonic anarcho acts who shared a similar approach—many of whom were featured on the seminal Bullshit Detector compilations (which, again notably, became more formulaic as they progressed)—sounded more like angular and lo-fi versions of early post-punk and experimental acts than the majority of their spiky-haired peers within the punk scene at the time. This should not be surprising, given that while the majority of the 1977 punk bands could only have referred their lineage-hungry fans back to ’50s rock’n’roll or ’60s garage, the diverse musical palette Crass performed and promoted propelled avid listeners towards everything beyond the parameters of punk. Acts as disparate as Björk’s first band K.U.K.L, power electronics pioneers Whitehouse, and Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound roster often shared stages with anarcho-punk acts in their early days, and the cross-pollination was reciprocal.

But to return to your question, I must add that all were pretty open-minded when it came to music, and as the band developed, I imagine more of these influences were incorporated into the band’s sound. Apart from bands we tended to be friends with, none of us really listened to much punk music of the time. Andy and Dave were into Alternative TV, Crisis, The Pack, The Afflicted, Third World War, 12 Cubic Feet, Alien Kulture, The Electric Chairs, Hawkwind, Gong, Here & Now, The Groundhogs, The Pop Group, The Fall, Velvet Underground, Throbbing Gristle, and Joy Division/Warsaw. I had pretty much lost interest in punk bands by then and was just into electronic music and electro/hip-hop at the time I was a member, though we all liked Rudimentary Peni, The Mob, and Part 1 out of the better-known acts.

Also, during that period in the early 1980s, when the whole anarcho-punk scene was becoming a bit stale and the music largely stuck in a shouty stasis, we found the emerging industrial and power electronics scenes (acts like Whitehouse, Ramleh, Consumer Electronics, SPK, Lustmord, Nocturnal Emissions, Maurizio Bianchi, etc.) to be the most exciting and vibrant thing going. Along with Larry Peterson, who ran Cause for Concern Records (and had put out Throbbing Gristle albums and a compilation featuring Chris & Cosey, Test Dept, Attrition, and others associated with that scene), we set up The Recession Club in Hackney as a sort of base venue for experimental acts to play. Most notably, this was where Coil debuted with their first-ever live performance. Andy was good friends with Genesis P-Orridge when Throbbing Gristle were based just a few streets away from where The Apostles had their squat—they would meet up to play chess regularly—and before I joined, we had covered a couple of Lemon Kittens tracks on our fourth demo tape, for which Ian Rawes, who went on to international acclaim as a sound artist and for his London Sound Survey site, recorded backing tapes. But we were never completely seen as fully subscribed members of the industrial scene either, and always a bit outside that too. I’ve remained friends with the Whitehouse, Ramleh, and Consumer Electronics guys since back then. I used to run clubs with William of Whitehouse, and in recent years have done the cover photography for Gary of Ramleh’s Kleistwahr solo project.

Your lyrics were quite direct at times, with lines like “Napalm the NF” and “The only good Nazi is a dead one.” Is that something you would repeat today?

Indeed it would be, though I’d add a lot more names to the list, as the extreme right in Britain today is a damn sight stronger and more dangerous than the cranks, cat stranglers, and synagogue arsonists of the NF ever were. But, to return to the era the song featuring those lines was recorded, The Apostles were based in Hackney where, at that time, the National Front and British Movement were a formidable threat on the streets. It was pretty obvious that pacifism was all well and good when you lived in leafy Epping Forest, but not so practical when you risked getting a kicking off skinheads walking back from a punk gig—let alone being the wrong skin colour. When we were voicing what seemed an almost heretical stance in opposition to the hippyish “Anarchy, Peace and Freedom” mantra of a cult who almost seemed like black-clad Buddhists, we were reviled as “dangerous” and “nutters” by many of the principal voices within the scene. But it’s what we were promoting back then that has become the backbone of the movement now, and that backbone should—and always should—be anti-fascism before everything else.

Some lyrics have aged well, others not, like “The Stoke Newington 8” where some notorious RAF (Red Army Faction) killers were praised. It took the German left decades to understand how wrong the RAF were and how wrong it was to sympathise with their agenda. Your thoughts?

Haha. That was my “vocal debut,” reading out that list of names of Angry Brigade and Baader-Meinhof members, and I’m still quite proud of that. But, yea, The Apostles’ adulation of terrorists and urban guerrillas was all pretty juvenile, though I suppose it was also in reaction, and probably provocation, to the pacifism of the scene.

As the verse preceding the roll call of names goes, however: “Some of you were locked away and some of you have died / What separates you from the rest is at least you tried / Anarchists and activists and nihilists and all / You each have your own part to play to make the system fall.” Which I’d still stand by. Not that I envisage “the system” falling any time soon, of course. I generally wouldn’t agree with the RAF’s politics, or even the vanguard elitism of any terrorist actions that didn’t have grassroots support.
DIY is another term used a lot in the punk context. The Apostles were—in your band biography—co-running the London “anarchy centres” Wapping and Centro Iberico. Please tell us about this.

Every UK music scene has had its spiritual heartland. From The Cavern to the Wigan Casino to The Roxy to the Blitz Club to The Hacienda, there has always been a venue and a hard core of musicians, writers, and “faces” who congregated and performed there that became intrinsically linked with their respective subcultures and scene. For the scene that became anarcho-punk as we know it today, that original focus was the two London Anarchy Centres that ran in 1980–1982; those that frequented, rehearsed, and played there were the Anarchy Centre punk bands and the true progenitors of anarcho-punk.

The first anarchist centre in Wapping, better known as The Autonomy Centre, funded largely from the proceeds of the Crass / Poison Girls split single Bloody Revolutions / Persons Unknown, was actually based below the anarchist print works Little @ Press, where Andy and Dave worked, and it was they who suggested the location. Along with some more traditional anarchists, including Ronan Bennet, Vince Stevenson, and others who were arrested on terrorist conspiracy charges in the Persons Unknown trial, they were instrumental in setting up the centre alongside Ian Slaughter, Tony Drayton and the Kill Your Pet Puppy collective, and some others from associated bands like Grant of Rudimentary Peni and members of The Mob, Assassins of Hope, Flack, etc. When that location closed for reasons I can’t fully recall—but I think were largely just due to the initial financial injection drying up—the organisers moved to the squatted Spanish anarchist Centro Iberico in Notting Hill. It had been founded by anarchist legends like Miguel Garcia, who was originally sentenced to death (commuted to life imprisonment) under the fascist dictator Franco, and was at this time home to a vibrant assortment of agitators and artists, including the musician and future Madonna producer William Orbit and Eliseu Huertas Cos, a friend of Throbbing Gristle and Catalan surrealist Jordi Valls (aka Vagina Dentata Organ), which is how Throbbing Gristle came to play there, and later Whitehouse—who, maintaining the link with avant-garde art, had the Neo-Naturist Cabaret as support act to their show, featuring future Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry amongst its performers.

My resounding memory of the Centro was that it wasn’t anything like the venues I’d seen The Clash, UK Subs, Stiff Little Fingers, or any other punk bands in before. It wasn’t even like the church halls and scout huts I’d seen Crass play! It was like one might imagine a venue would look post-apocalypse—smashed-up furniture, a stage assembled from beer crates and old doors, and mouldy old carpet hanging on the walls, whilst malnourished hippy types flitted about barefoot amongst the sprawled punks and broken glass. It was quite a place. More Macbeth than music venue! And certainly nothing like I can imagine existing today, though it’s remarkable just how many amazing, pioneering, and creative people emerged from that scene and milieu.

Crass are generally considered as the centre of this part of the punk world. How important were they back then? And what were some other bands from back then that should not be forgotten?

Crass’s influence can never be downplayed, and obviously they laid the foundations of the scene. But what people who weren’t around then fail to recognise is that their true legacy went far beyond them as a band/art collective. There is a lot of bollocks people believe about them now, which back then wouldn’t have even been considered important either way—such as thinking there was some conspiracy to keep their records out of the charts. They sold in respectable numbers, as reflected in alternative chart placings at the time, but they were hardly going to give Duran Duran, or even Gang of Four, any sleepless nights. Also, I think the largest crowds they ever played to weren’t even much over 600. Most notably, their attitude to racism, class, and other social factors that were genuine causes of oppression was lamentable, though to their credit, some former members have now acknowledged this.

I cringe when I see dolts on Facebook anarcho-punk pages parroting the ill-considered lyrics from the songs “White Punks on Hope” and “Bloody Revolutions” as if they’re some Papal edict. Or, worse still, right-wing Third Positionists co-opting certain lyrics to give their reactionary agenda an edgy credibility. If it’s all “Left wing, right wing, you can stuff the lot,” why did every single one of Crass’s lyrics engage with left-wing themes, and why was every single gig they ever played a benefit for a progressive, left/liberal cause? And as for “Pogo on a nazi / Spit upon a jew (…) Left wing violence, right wing violence all seems much the same”—that’s such a ridiculously false equivalence and so patently absurd that only someone devoid of common sense, let alone critical faculties, or someone with an interest in rehabilitating racism and anti-Semitism, would ever give that guff any credibility.

But no one can deny they were the spark that lit the fuse. What they did do was inspire thousands of punks who would previously have been fairly apolitical—or at best “anti-establishment” in a vague “get pissed, destroy” type way—to question how society is run, and by whom, for whom, and, very importantly, to think they could affect change in society through activism and dissent. Furthermore, whilst I would actually argue that Crass, given their profile, were quite right not to promote illegality or militancy amongst their followers, it became evident to anyone who looked further than the lyrics and slogans that direct action and active resistance more often than not were the only ways to effect change. Crass became largely marginalised and irrelevant to the anarcho-punk movement they had inspired by the latter part of 1983.

Personally speaking, I’d pretty much lost interest in Crass by the end of 1982. I don’t think I even bought Christ, The Album or any of the later singles, as bands like The Apostles, The Sinyx, The Ex, The Assassins of Hope, Lack of Knowledge, Cold War, The S-Haters, Verbal Warning, Terminal Disaster, Flack, Fallout, the original Napalm Death, and many others who have never received the acclaim they so rightly deserve seemed to be infinitely more politically progressive and also more interesting musically. So, in summary, Crass were immensely important as a band in themselves and, just as—if not more—importantly, put out the Bullshit Detector albums, which gave the embryonic and at the time unnamed and undefined anarcho-punk scene a focus and identity. But as the anarcho scene itself grew and developed organically and from within, their importance within it lessened—as I’m sure was exactly what they wanted at that time. Though sadly, you only have to look at all the fawning Facebook “fan pages” to realise “Who is your leader? To whom do you flock?” is one significant lyric most of today’s Crass fans appear to have ignored.

What was your definition of “anarchy” back then? It feels like that in 2025 many first think of the Argentinian president Milei when that term comes up.

It’s safe to say that, in terms of bands back then, The Apostles introduced many who had got into anarcho-punk to what “real anarchism” was through the lyrics and the publications we produced: Andy produced the zine Scum, I produced Angry! (a copy of which was meant to have accompanied our fourth EP on Mortarhate but didn’t get printed in time), and of course Ian Rawes’ Pigs for Slaughter zine contributed to this education immensely.

For all their failings, it was obviously Crass who introduced me—and most others within the scene at the time—to the concept of anarchism per se, and motivated me to read up about the history of the movement, its protagonists, and fundamentally what the theory behind the anarchy sign [circled A] I had painted on my leather jacket actually represented. Needless to say, the more I did it, the more it became increasingly apparent that, contrary to what many believe, Crass’s politics weren’t even anarchist in any traditional understanding of the ideology—though admittedly what they espoused did contain elements of Kropotkin’s “gentle”/collectivist anarchism. If anything, it was closer to a sort of self-styled secular Quakerism, particularly in regard to their general asceticism, pacifism, vegetarianism, and heavy-handed evocation of the Judeo-Christian concept of “morality.” But really not anarchism at all, as they refuted the concept of class, which is fundamental to anarchism, and class struggle is anarchism’s very lifeblood—as is resisting capitalism and fighting fascism, which keep that very lifeblood pumping.

But for all the political naivety, Crass certainly prompted me—and I’d hope everyone else with an active brain and critical faculties—to look beyond the lyrics, and for most, that propelled them into actively challenging and physically countering all manifestations of right-wing, reactionary politics and manifestations of the state apparatus wherever they appeared, as that is the only way they can ever be opposed and defeated. The best and most worthwhile thing anarchists can do today is devote their energies to fighting the very real and very threatening rise of fascism—both on the streets and, now, just as importantly, in the battle for hearts and minds online—and also getting involved with grassroots community struggles, because you can bet both right-wing and left-wing opportunists will, and will do so solely for their own self-serving ends.

I wouldn’t regard myself as an anarchist any more, as the more you see of life, the more utterly inconceivable a society run according to the candy-coloured dream of anarchist principles appears. However, there are still core beliefs I hold—and always will—that were informed by anarchism. I’m not too familiar with Milei other than what I read in the press following his election, but he certainly can’t be any worse than the loathsome right-wing “libertarian” anarchism [anarcho-capitalism] that seems to have become popular in recent years, which is basically just Third Positionist/Strasserite fascism dressed up for our post-modern age and rebranded with an edgy, post-modern image.

Did you experience a lot of police pressure back then?

Not really. I was just 14/15 when I was in The Apostles, and after I left I moved away from the anarcho-punk scene. Even when I was involved with Class War (I wrote articles and contributed graphics to several early issues), I don’t think the cops really took it seriously enough for it to warrant any heavy-handed surveillance—though I understand after the Poll Tax Riot in 1990 that did change for a while.

I think about the only times I had any problems with the police during the time I was in The Apostles, apart from getting arrested for daft stuff like vandalising posh cars and leading an attack on a Young Conservatives stall that, of all days, had set up when an Edinburgh Punks Picnic was being held, wasn’t exactly anarchist-related. I’d gone round to a squat with Dave [Fanning] and, obviously, unknown to us the place was under surveillance for drug dealing. When the cops raided the place they pulled me as, being 14 years old, they thought I had run away from home and got in with bad company, when the reality was my parents had long given up trying to control me and just left me to my own devices—for good or bad. I got taken away to the local police station, where they tried to contact my parents, but they were on holiday at the time. So, embarrassingly, they then contacted the headmaster of my school, as they had to find a “responsible adult” to verify who I was. I was then put on a train back to Scotland, but as I was down in London to record an Apostles record and didn’t want to miss that, I just got off at the first station and bunked the next train back to London, returning to Andy [Martin]’s squat—which, obviously, he wasn’t too pleased about. Thankfully, there was no follow-up, though I got a right walloping off my folks when I did eventually return home!

The Apostles were involved in the queer rights movement while other punk bands at times used a rather homophobic language. Your memories?

I think Andy and Dave were possibly the first figures amongst the anarcho-punk scene who were openly gay, and I can’t even think of any others within the wider UK punk scene who were “out” back then either. Andy, who was always a bit older than most others on the scene, had already been involved in the Gay Liberation movement of the 1970s and had tried to organise a Gay Punk Festival with Wayne/Jayne County when they were staying in London back in Roxy Club days, which would have featured Chelsea and The Raped together with Andy’s band at that time, The Witches, alongside County as the only punk bands at the time featuring “out” gay members. But for one reason or another I can’t recall, it never happened.

Though I’m not gay myself, I was always brought up to hate bigots and bullies, and recall being really surprised and shocked by the amount of homophobia The Apostles received when I was a member—even from some within the supposedly liberated anarcho-punk community. And today it’s disappointing to see the transphobia that still exists within it, which from what I’ve observed just seems to have been insidiously manufactured and promoted by the American Christian Right to rehabilitate attacks on the lesbian/gay/bi communities, who are now largely assimilated into normal society and culture. If punk ever stood for anything, it was about inclusivity and opposing conservative prejudice. Bigotry is bigotry, and whether it’s against skin colour, sexuality, or gender—if you’re a bigot, or not actively challenging bigotry and prejudice when you see it, especially within the punk scene—you can get to fuck. And those who don’t are just spineless wankers and an insult to the ideas they once promoted.

Finally, what are your recent and current musical activities?

Since my time with The Apostles, I played for Oi Polloi (drumming on their first album Unite & Win and first European tour), then didn’t sit behind a drum kit for ten years, during which time I was running acid house/rave clubs, DJing, and recording techno/house music. One record I did as DJ Dexter, “Bang the Fucking Walls,” was a pretty big track in the late 1990s, with remixes by Chicago legend DJ Rush, amongst others—and funnily enough, a label messaged me about reissuing it only last week. Shortly after moving down to London, I drummed for a Portuguese band who the management company I was working for had just taken on, recorded an album and single with them—produced by the guy who has done the Spice Girls (so, say no more there!)—and played all the big European music festivals, toured Japan and the USA, and got to the top of the charts in Portugal. It was all quite an experience and very removed from the DIY scene I had only known before.

Then myself and some other drinking mates from around Camden formed a band called Quango, who recorded one (very rough but great!) record called Fatality, which basically sounds like all our shared influences—Six Minute War, Crisis, The Rondos, Rudimentary Peni, and Warsaw, etc.—and it did pretty well. I also drummed for the band Billy Rath (of Johnny Thunders and Iggy Pop fame) put together when he was in London, and most notably drummed for “Rudimentary Peni’s sister band” Part 1 when they reformed in 2013. I recorded one unreleased demo with them and played over Europe and America before everything sadly imploded just before we released the record we had recorded. After that, I moved to Tokyo for a while, during which time I DJed most nights and played with a noise/power electronics act featuring Genki models.

In recent years, making music has taken a back seat to other projects I’ve been involved with. In 2016, a friend who ran an art gallery in London suggested I do an exhibition of the photos I’d been posting on Facebook of the Tokyo punk scene I’d been documenting since moving there. I’d never even considered this before, as though I’ve taken photos since I was a kid, I have no training in photography. I chose about eighty of my favourite photos, and these comprised my first exhibition, entitled Up Yours! Tokyo Punk & Japanarchy Today, which was an immense success and was followed by a photo book and exhibitions throughout Europe, America, Japan, and Mexico, plus work with Vice and i-D amongst others. The i-D interview can be read here. Plus the exhibition catalogue and a selection of my other photos can be seen here.

More recently, I helped with the release of the fantastic double LP of early Apostles experimental demo and practice recordings, Best Forgotten, on Horn of Plenty Records (sadly now long sold out, though the digital files are still available).

I also put together the double LP of The Apostles’ seven-inch singles (plus extra unreleased tracks from their respective studio sessions) titled There Can Be No Spectators on Grow Your Own Records, which I think still has a handful of copies left.

I also co-curated the Optimo Records anarcho-punk compilation album Cease & Resist – Sonic Subversion & Anarcho-Punk in the UK, which features tracks by Crass, Chumbawamba, The Ex, Poison Girls, and The Cravats, among others. All profits were donated to the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Faslane Peace Camp.

Around the same time, I self-published the book Best B4 1984: Fanzine and Flyer Images from the Original Anarcho-Punk Underground, which collects together a selection of my favourite texts and graphics from my archive. It recently received a reprint and can be ordered here or from me direct.

Frustratingly, I experienced a setback which has caused a delay with the production of my next photo book, Beyond the Monochrome, which compiles the anarcho-punk-related photos I took between 1982–1985—not only of bands including Crass, Conflict, The Alternative, Oi Polloi, and many more, but also in punk squats, anarchist centres, DIY venues; at Class War events, Stop the City actions, CND rallies, miners’ strike pickets, Punx Picnics… and much more—showing the entire spectrum of what the scene involved back then. But it’s now all nearly redone and should be out towards the end of summer.

For anyone wishing to know more about any of the above, I can be found easily enough on social media, though I prefer Instagram to the increasingly toxic environment of Facebook.

The end.

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