JD Twitch and Chris Low document anarcho punk with an inspiring compilation of radical music to raise funds for Faslane Peace Camp

It will begin again. Two hundred thousand dead and eighty thousand wounded in nine seconds. Those are the official figures. It will begin again. It will be ten thousand degrees on the earth. Ten thousand suns, people will say. The asphalt will burn. Chaos will prevail. An entire city will be lifted off the ground, then fall back to earth in ashes.

Hiroshima Mon Amour

Sombre words from Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour warning against humankind’s capacity for self-destruction. A cinematic response to the horrors of the atom bomb, the film is contemplative in its anger, avant-garde in its deconstruction of meaning – something that might be said about the pacifist, anti-nuclear movement documented on Cease & Resist – Sonic Subversion & Anarcho Punk in the UK 1979​-​86. The worst of history repeats itself and the continued nuclear occupation of Scotland with the Trident missiles at Faslane naval base is a horror waiting to happen. All profits from Cease & Resist raise funds for Faslane Peace Camp, who have been protesting Trident since 1982. 

There’s nothing remotely reductive about the punk rock that burns throughout Cease & Resist. The music is free, unbound by the dictates of rock n roll history. This writer was admittedly unfamiliar with the anarcho punk genre, but once again putting my trust in Optimo Music has paid off. JD Twitch and Chris Low document the scene in inspiring fashion, throwing the listener in at the deep end to capture this music without boundaries. It’s the sort of compilation that is not only a window into another world, but makes you feel as if you’re living it as the record spins.  

I happened to be rereading Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life, his classic study of the 1980s US indie underground, and in the Minor Threat chapter Azerrad mentions that John Loder, who recorded anarcho punk legends Crass and ran their label, caught a Minor Threat show in New York which led him to press and distribute records for Dischord. Indeed, it’s difficult not to draw some comparisons between what Ian MacKaye has done with Minor Threat, Dischord and Fugazi on one side of the Atlantic, and Crass and the anarcho punk movement on the other. Genres are of course malleable and none more so than anarcho punk it would seem. Cease & Resist presents a radical form of punk rock that takes on avant-garde elements along the way, its sonic expressionism akin to post-punk and no wave. 

The assembled tracks certainly paint a varied picture. Take “Bloody Revolutions” by Crass and imagine an avant-punk opera about Burroughsian anti-capitalist agents infiltrating the English countryside to the sounds of the French resistance. Or Annie Anxiety’s musique concrète “Hello Horror”, a frightening reconfiguration of “Revolution 9” that exudes a feeling somewhere between Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Hiroshima Mon Amour. The lo-fi, bass-throbbing “Underbitch” by Poison Girls is almost violently up close and personal, Vi Subversa’s snarling delivery a rallying cry for the disenfranchised, whereas Hagar the Womb’s “Idolisation” stakes territory where The Slits meet hardcore and prefigures riot grrrl in the process. Elsewhere, Jean-Luc Godard’s factory study as critique of capitalism Tu Va Bien is brought to life on “Revolution” by Chumbawumba – hearing it may well change your whole perspective on the band (it did mine). As Twitch points out in his liner note, “Chumbawamba sadly are much derided by many, based on that one infamous hit single” – “Revolution” presented here is a welcome course correction. Cease & Resist goes out on a high with The Mob’s “No Doves Fly Here”, a slow-release angular anthem that sounds like Mission of Burma making a torch song about the end of the world. Let’s make sure it doesn’t get to that.

Cease & Resist at Optimo Music Bandcamp

Monorail Music edition with exclusive zine

Stewart Gardiner
Latest posts by Stewart Gardiner (see all)