We’ve been trying to get Graham Burnett to answer a few questions about being an anarcho-punk in the early eighties since May, but he keeps traveling around the world giving lectures on sustainable living and whatnot, which is as good an excuse as any, I suppose.
These days, Graham has taken his radicalism to its logical conclusion and runs Spiral Seed, an independent enterprise started in 2001 to promote permaculture education and earthright living, the mission statement says everything you need to know about the kind of guy he is. It’s pretty clear that much of his ethos today is derived from the ideas he presumably first developed as an anarcho-punk in the eighties.
I stumbled on Graham’s archive of photos on a routine search for 7 inch crust records, I’m no radical myself, not even an armchair one (I actively spend a lot of money on Nike footwear, I fucking love meat and I get paid from money made off beer companies that advertise here), but I love that stuff, it’s the sound of truly pissed off youth. Only dickheads complain about ‘the kids today’, but in the eighties to be radical was more than buying Adbusters, listening to Radiohead and lecturing other people, it was about changing the entire way you existed, which is a better way of saying ‘I fucking mean it’ to ‘the man’ than signing an online petition.
The whole of the archive is here. But here’s a few shots that I borrowed from it to make you all feel guilty for not squatting (the two bands mainly featured here are Flux Of Pink Indians and Chumbawamba):