Whatever happened to that Asian punk band?
In 1980 they were the scourge of Thatcher, alienated punks fighting to be heard in a land that had rejected them. Thirty years later the three Asian members of Alien Kulture are well-off businessmen. Did they sell out… or was it our society that changed for the better?
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(reportagem por Sarfraz Manzoor, The Observer,Sunday 10 January 2010)
It is 1979. In a cafe in Wimbledon, south London, three young Asian men are deep in conversation. The Conservative victory of a few months earlier has left them dejected; the anti-Nazi demonstrations, the involvement with Rock Against Racism, the rallies against the National Front – none of it prevented the Tories from getting in. This is not a good time to be Asian, and things are, the men fear, about to get much worse. Margaret Thatcher, the new prime minister, has already voiced concerns, in a television interview the previous year, that "people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture".
The men are frustrated and impatient; protest has not worked, so what is left? Punk, that's what. The friends decide to form a band, an Asian punk band that will talk about their lives and fears as second-generation sons of immigrants. The longer they talk the more exciting the prospect seems; the lyrics and music will come later but right now they need a name. It seems obvious: if Thatcher thinks they are an alien culture, then Alien Kulture is what they will be.
An Asian punk band? Even today the idea seems rather absurd, so how much more strange must it have seemed 30 years ago when Ausaf Abbas, Azhar Rana, Pervez Bilgrami and "token white" Huw Jones decided to form Alien Kulture. Abbas and Rana had been friends since they were both six, living in south London, children of middle-class Pakistani immigrants. By the late 70s, they had wound up studying the same course at the London School of Economics. "I was always political," recalls Abbas. "I was going on demonstrations as a teenager and the arrival of Margaret Thatcher just electrified everything – it gave us even more to rant and rave about."
The Pakistani community in Balham was tightly knit so it was perhaps inevitable that Abbas and Rana would run into Bilgrami, another young Asian who shared their twin loves of politics and punk. "I remember the first time I saw the Sex Pistols on So it Goes," Bilgrami says. "It was 'Anarchy in the UK' and I was half-asleep; hearing the song was like an awakening. I didn't have a place in this society and it suddenly hit me that this was music that I could play, something I could be part of."
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This was a time when Asians were largely invisible in popular culture. It was the emergence of punk, with its ethos that anyone could be in a band, that inspired the young Asians to believe they could emulate their musical heroes. "The band was formed in response to punk," confirms Abbas. "It meshed so well with the politics of the time and I remember watching as the white kids of punk began jamming with the black guys doing reggae and thinking we brown kids don't have anything."
Rock Against Racism, set up with the explicit aim of countering the electoral threat of the National Front, largely consisted of well-meaning white bands alongside some black musicians; out on the streets, it was Asians who were being stabbed and killed. "Our story of being second-generation Asians was not being heard," says Bilgrami. "There was no one else saying what we wanted to say."
The decision to form the band was made. Bilgrami would be the lead singer because he loved singing. Rana had played drums in a school band so he would be the drummer. Jones was the most accomplished member of Alien Kulture so he would be the guitarist. Abbas took up the bass because "if you can't play an instrument you always end up playing bass as you only need to play one string at a time".
Rob Beasley, a school friend of Abbas and Jones who had been heavily involved with Rock Against Racism, offered to be the band manager. The first band rehearsal took place above a hi-fi shop owned by Rana's father. "I loved singing," says Bilgrami, "and Jonesy could play the guitar, but Azhar could only play basic drums, and the first time Ausaf had even picked up a guitar was at the first rehearsal. We sounded rubbish."
It did not matter. The importance of Alien Kulture was never going to be in their musical ability but in their lyrics. "The songs were about us and what we were going through," says Rana. The song titles give a flavour: "Arranged Marriage", "Culture Crossover" and "Asian Youth". "Britain felt like a racist country," says Bilgrami. "When I was at school, I had to hide ever playtime because there was a gang of 20 boys going around Paki-bashing."
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News about Alien Kulture spread quickly. "The band obviously had a novelty value," says Beasley. "They played their first gig for Rock Against Racism in Oxford and there was a lot of interest from the few Asian TV shows that were around at the time." Alien Kulture played 30 concerts, most linked to Rock Against Racism; many were chaotic affairs with Bilgrami sometimes dressed in traditional kurta pyjama and not so traditional Dr Martens boots. The band's punk ethos led to pandemonium at the end of the concerts. "I believed that the whole reason for forming a band was to prove that anyone could do it," explains Abbas, "so we would urge the audience on to the stage. By the end of the gig, there would be more people on stage than in the audience."
Along with the chaos was the threat of violence hanging over the band as they sang. "I was often scared for my safety," says Bilgrami. There was one notorious gig at the 101 Club in Clapham Junction, south London, which had to be abandoned after a pack of skinheads turned up. "There were about 40 of them lurking around," says Rana, "and it all got very ugly and a huge fight broke out, the police came and the whole place got trashed."
Alien Kulture also antagonised the Asian community. "Some of the strongest reactions came from other Asians," says Bilgrami. "At our gigs, they would stand at the front stone-faced with their arms crossed and then walk off at the end. They were disgusted that we were talking about issues like arranged marriages and disgracing the community."
For other young Asians, it would be their first concert experience. "I still meet Asians who are now middle-aged who tell me they saw our band back then and it changed their lives," says Abbas. "It was that combination of playing loud guitar music and singing songs about things that the young Asian men and women who came to see us could connect with."
Thirty years on and reading the lyrics and hearing the songs, I am struck by how fresh they still sound. "First generation, illegal immigrants; second generation juvenile delinquents," they sing on "Culture Crossover", "torn between two cultures caught in a culture crossover." This was the only single Alien Kulture recorded. "The single was done in a small village in mid-Wales," says Jones, "and my strongest memory is of how long it took to get my one-note solo on 'Asian Youth' right." During the recording session, Abbas and Bilgrami delighted in winding up the studio engineer by asking if they could slaughter one of his goats in halal style. "We released the single on Rock Against Racism's record label," says Rana. "It was RAR1. There was never a RAR2."
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The band's manager sent the single to John Peel. "I still have the cassette," says Abbas. "I remember listening to the radio and taping John Peel when he said that he had been weighing up whether to play our single and he did not want to play it just because we were Asian but that he was going to play it because he actually liked it." Rana adds: "The most amazing part was that Peel had just played David Bowie. We were following David Bowie!"
Despite Peel's support, Alien Kulture failed to interest the mainstream music press. "The great white world and the music weeklies did not pay us any attention," says Bilgrami. "Reggae bands were feted but I don't think magazines like NME knew what to do with us."
Undeterred by the lack of media attention, Alien Kulture continued to perform throughout 1980. The Asian members were careful not to tell their parents the full story of what those shows were like. "My parents were horrified," says Rana. "They were worried and fearful and they always hoped that I would soon enough stop this nonsense." Abbas explains: "Asian kids get used to being one thing at home and another outside. If our parents had known the sort of crowd who came to our gigs they would not have been impressed."
Among the most memorable of the concerts was one where they performed on a lorry at a Women's Right to Choose march and rally, a gig at Kingston Polytechnic that was so hot that Jones fainted and fell off stage, and a concert in south-east London to an audience of none.
Alien Kulture had been formed to make a difference; for the band, punk was politics by other means. But by the start of 1981, it was becoming distressingly clear that it was going to take more than one chord and the truth to stop the Tories.
"The trouble was that no matter how much we railed against Thatcher, she was winning," says Abbas. "Times were changing; Rock Against Racism was fading and Thatcher was unstoppable." The band who had delighted in telling gig-goers to "prepare to be swamped" (an unsubtle reference to the origins of their name) now found they were swimming against the tide. In the spring of 1981, police in Brixton introduced a policy of stop and search which they named Operation Swamp. The riots that engulfed Brixton in protest spread across the country from Liverpool to Birmingham to Manchester. The soundtrack to the summer of discontent would be provided by the Specials, whose single "Ghost Town" was set for release on 20 June. The Specials announced a concert for racial unity in Coventry on that same day and invited Alien Kulture to play support. This was also the day that Abbas and Rana were set to sit their finals exams.
"The band was at a crossroads," says Jones. "Ausaf and Azhar wanted to pursue mainstream careers and me and Pervez wanted to stick with Alien Kulture." The exams won: Alien Kulture did not perform at Coventry Stadium, thus missing out on huge exposure that could have catapulted them towards fame and success. "Our band always had a short shelf-life," says Bilgrami. "Ausaf and Azhar were doing degrees and were going to get proper jobs – Alien Kulture was always going to be a bright star that shone briefly.' In the summer of 1981, Alien Kulture disbanded.
The story of Alien Kulture would be remarkable enough if it simply ended then. But I was keen to learn what had happened to its members 30 years later. Huw Jones moved to Leeds, where he went to university before working in local government. He now works for a not-for-profit company in Leeds that advises the council on housing. He says: "I chose to stick with working in the public sector, which I think was a continuation of my early political activity and wish to change things."
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Bilgrami worked at a housing corporation then set up a recruitment agency with his wife that was initially based in one room in East Ham. Today it is in Mayfair and Bilgrami lives in a six-bedroom townhouse seconds from Baker Street, has Noel Gallagher and Matt Lucas as neighbours and holidays in Monaco and Cannes. Rana is a partner in a firm of chartered accountants and lives in a five-bedroom detached house set in three-quarters of an acre. And Abbas is now the managing director of a large American investment bank.
All the children of the Asian former band members attend private schools. Bilgrami stresses that while his son's school is private it is not selective, before adding that one of the boys in his son's class is a member of the Saudi royal family.
Abbas and Rana were sharing their memories of Alien Kulture from the 14th-floor conference room of Abbas's bank's Canary Wharf offices. Rana is a slight, serious man who admits: "It is hard to equate what I am doing today – punk is extreme haircuts, Johnny Rotten and 'God Save the Queen'." Chartered accountancy is left off the list. "For me, the success I have had confirms that liberal democracy and capitalism is a pretty fantastic system," adds the rather portly and bald Abbas, who now credits the deregulation of the financial services by one Margaret Thatcher as a key factor in allowing him to move from relative poverty to vast wealth. "At the time, we railed against so much of what she was doing but when you look back you think thank God she did that."
Rana tells me that even during his Alien Kulture days he was not a Labour supporter, while Abbas says he was and is a card-carrying member of the Labour party. "I don't remember a punk bible being handed to me, saying this is what you are meant to think," says Bilgrami. "It was what you make of it. John Lydon is said to have a large property portfolio: there are no rules."
In their time as Alien Kulture the band revolted against the racist nation they lived in. The very fact that Abbas, Rana and Bilgrami have been so successful is a testament to the way Britain has changed for the better in the past 30 years. "When we were growing up all we had was programmes like Mind Your Language," says Abbas. "Today, whether it is novels and plays like The Black Album or the popularity of curry, Asians are in the mainstream, but back then we were seen as suspect."
How, I wondered, had being in a punk band affected their role as fathers? "The traditional Asian thing is that your children have to be lawyers, doctors or accountants," says Abbas, "but I want my kids to experience all that there is, so if they want to study something totally non-vocational I would completely support them. And if they want to sleep over at a friend's house, that is fine. If I wanted to do that when I was young it would have entailed a three-hour discussion."
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Bilgrami tells me his son has piano and cello lessons, another example of the evolving nature of that ancient immigrant impulse towards betterment. Even that most contentious of subjects – who their children would and could marry – was met with the sort of relaxed tolerance that would have been unthinkable 30 years ago and is depressingly rare even today. "I'm relaxed about who they marry," says Abbas. In his spare time the banker is involved in charities that encourage children from backgrounds similar to his that they, too, can aspire to the career he has followed. "Everything I achieved was done without any connections or family or school advantages," he says, "and I want to let young people know that if I can do it, then they can do it too."
He says he is frustrated by the militancy of some British Muslims. Alien Kulture might have been radicals but they believed in politics as an engine of progress. They did not, like some extremists today, reject altogether the suggestion that they were British. "We are British," says Abbas, "but we have access to a Pakistani Muslim culture and we need to draw on the best of both. You cannot reject one for the other. I would encourage today's young Muslims to take the best from both cultures."
In the brief time they were together Alien Kulture released one single and recorded one album, but their legacy outweighs their musical output. "Our tragedy was that we were ahead of our time," says Bilgrami, who still misses the feeling of being on stage. The band emerged when most Britons were not yet ready for the idea that Asians had stories to tell; Alien Kulture predated My Beautiful Laundrette and Midnight's Children, Cornershop and Asian Dub Foundation, Goodness Gracious Me and Brick Lane. "I think we changed a little of the world," says Jones. "We gave Asian kids a sense that they could find a voice, that they didn't have to remain subservient to the political orthodoxy."
"They were grey days for Asians," adds Bilgrami, "and people should remember us for trying to be a beacon, for standing up and saying we had something to say."
In standing up and speaking their truth, Alien Kulture gave hope to all who saw in them that it was possible to aspire to lives less ordinary and not take the racist beating lying down. And that, ultimately, is why Alien Kulture deserve to be remembered: as three young Asians and their white friend who, through punk and politics, did their part in helping others with a different culture feel less alien.
retirado de...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/jan/10/alien-kulture-asian-punk-band
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