Hassan Mahamdallie in his new play Punk Days (Photo: Rehan Jamil)
Kambiz Boomla: What made you decide to write the play?
Hassan Mahamdallie: A friend invited me to write a series of blogs about punk rock. And of course, because it’s me—ex-Socialist Worker journalist—it had to be political.
In 1976, when punk first arose in Britain, this was a massive time of upheaval—with the collapse and disintegration of the Labour government, of Jim Callaghan.
And obviously, although we didn’t know at the time, the ushering in of Thatcherism. It was a period of high struggle, high stakes and very dangerous politics.
I had this in the back of my mind that it was a time when struggle was everywhere, whether that struggle against National Front (NF), the struggle of trade unionists or on the international stage.
Then I wrote an essay in a journal which I helped to edit called Critical Muslim. Basically it was looking at that entire era. And I thought, this could be a play.
About a year ago I contacted this superb working class director called Steph O’Driscoll, and asked her to collaborate and she said yes.
When I first started writing it, it was more about the music. The focus shifted because we’ve had the rise of Reform UK. We’ve had Tommy Robinson put tens of thousands of people on the streets of London. We’ve had the anti-migrant riots. And we know now we’re in this era of struggle again against the far right.
In one sense, the far right now is potentially more dangerous. Although the NF did have their big backers, it is nothing compared to the supercharged nature of the far right, domestically and internationally under the influence of Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
The narrative of fighting fascism in the 1970s, has such obvious parallels with what’s happening today. There was something about the fight against fascism in the 1970s, which in Britain was incredibly successful. And that was because of the Anti Nazi League (ANL), Rock Against Racism (RAR) and the role of revolutionaries.
KB: Can you say a little of what it looked like being in a large mixed-race family in the 1970s?
HM: I was born in 1961 in south London into the beginnings of a very large Indo-Trinidadian/white family. Because there were 12 children, we were quite poor growing up.
At that time there wasn’t the Muslim presence in Britain like there is now. It was more spread out, there weren’t necessarily in massive communities. And my mum was white working class from south London.
Growing up, you could definitely feel the hostility that you didn’t fit in, that you were looked down upon, that your existence was illegitimate.
It does have a psychological toll on you, because racism is such an irrational thing and it’s very difficult when you’re a child to understand.
It made an already alienated society more alienating. And also what I thought was, and this is important, is that London was a very grey, monochrome place which was trying to pull itself out of the Second World War.
And the political elite were an elite, in a very old-fashioned kind of patrician way. Society was, or London for me, a dead place. And the diversity—London has always been diverse—was dampened down by this fog of patrician boringness. It was an incredibly regulated, class-divided society.
KB: So it was about breaking out of that?
HM: Punk music came along, as I experienced it, at the end of 1976 with the infamous interview between the Sex Pistols and Bill Grundy. Grundy was such an objectionable character.
No one knew about punk or what it sounded like. But I saw this group of kids doing what I wanted to do–kicking back against that grey, horrible society and throwing a hand grenade into the middle of it.
I think that was what Malcolm McLaren, who kind of formed the Sex Pistols, was trying to do–throw a revolutionary hand grenade in the middle of this suffocating, horrible, stratified society.
It certainly threw a hand grenade into my head. I thought, ‘Oh, wow. This is something else.’ These people, they’ve got attitude. They don’t defer to this silly old man who’s sneeringly interviewing him. They’re swearing at him and calling him a dirty old man and clearly have no respect for him at all and don’t give a damn about it. They have nothing to lose. And they want to smash everything up.
KB: You talked in the play about punks’ appeal to the right wing, racist skinheads on the one hand and a more radical youth on the other.
HM: Yes and that’s I think kind of where RAR comes in. You had the rise of the NF, the rise of the skinhead movement. Skinheads actually didn’t start out as a racist youth subculture, quite the opposite really.
But by 1976, there was this huge effort on the part of the NF to recruit young white men by adopting a skinhead persona and distorting it into a fascist movement. They would go around multicultural areas, terrifying minorities and trying to put their stamp on it.
Unfortunately, punk wasn’t really a left wing movement. It was just a revolt against a horrible, dead society by the youth who’d been brought up to expect nothing.
Punk became this battleground. If you went to gigs, sometimes fights would break out or there would be skinheads lurking in the shadows, waiting to jump you. And then of course there was the NF on the streets and protected by the police.
KB: How did Enoch Powell influence the whole narrative at that time?
HM: I remember thinking that Powell was some kind of devil, he was this malevolent, mythical figure that had been sent into the world to terrify me. He looked the part as well—his slick backed hair, his pencil moustache, his cadaverous features, his horrible upper class drool, his stupid suits. I literally thought he’d just been put upon the earth to torment me.
Every time he made one of his speeches, you just had to wait to hear that someone had been murdered. And of course, he knew that. He knew that was going to be the effect of—that someone somewhere would be beaten up or killed or a community would be terrified by his skinheads or the NF. He had a quite profound effect on me growing up.
I was only six or seven when he made his Rivers of Blood speech, but I distinctly remember his face on our little black and white TV and growing up he fed into the revival of fascism.
He created the space for them to reassert themselves for the first time seriously, since the Second World War. He was a demonic figure. That’s the only way that I can feel about it because he knew exactly what he was doing. As much as Nigel Farage does when he talks about “pure cold rage.” That is a signal to violence and that’s what Powell did.
KB: How do you think that the ANL and RAR changed the narrative?
HM: There were a lot of other fights taking place. There was the black youth taking on the police in Notting Hill in 1976 and 1977. There were murders. There were the police murders of black people, which would trigger massive riots in places like Brixton and other cities around the country.
You needed both the ANL and RAR. You needed the ANL to pull together the mass movement and then you needed RAR to unify it around a question of culture. I think that changed the course of London and probably the future of the country.
In the play, I talk about Hoxton being a place which I knew, as a kid, that you shouldn’t go to. If you did, you’d probably get your head kicked in. Hoxton is now just a playground for people going out. So, what happened in between? What happened was that people got active—whether it’s through music or politics, all these different routes into the anti-fascist fight.
We did smash the NF as the slogan went and what that allowed was for London to turn into a completely different place.
The multicultural London that everybody loves, could only really begin to develop after the crushing of the NF. This cleared the path towards a different kind of society.
RAR switched the tracks.
If we play a thought experiment that the NF, Powell and the far right had gained power in London and across the country, what kind of society do you think we’d have today? It’d be so radically different.
But we’re not in that society. And it is because hundreds and thousands of people were organised and came together. They refused to be divided by racism, by far right politics, refused the politics of scapegoating. And they began to fight back. It shifted it, it really literally projected us into a different future.
KB: What are you hoping the impact of your play will be?
HM: I make political theatre. All my plays deal with the notion of history and what it means to us today. This play falls into that category of being about yesterday and today at the same time.
I hope people will come and see it a bit like when I went to the RAR Carnival in Victoria Park. I really went along for the music, but then I found politics at the same time.
What I’m hoping is that people will come and see the show, whether they’re people my age who are into punk, or young people who are into Amyl and the Sniffers and the big political punk groups that are around today, or it’s people who don’t know anything about RAR.
I want them to know—don’t be afraid, organise. We faced this before. We organised ourselves across all sorts of identities into this common cause. And we won.
It’s not inevitable that Reform will gain power. It’s not inevitable that the far right will run roughshod over Britain. None of this is inevitable because we faced it in the past and we faced it down.
That lesson of coming together and the power of culture and music to draw people together is something which we need to reassemble. I think we are reassembling it—the Together Alliance march was a fantastic celebration. It seems to me, humanity and music and culture were running through it like the centre of a stick of rock.
Understand that we’re doing it because we can win and we can set Britain off into a different future from the one that Farage and Tommy Robinson have got lined up for us.
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Punk Days will be at the Albany Theatre, Coventry, Friday 26 June & Saturday 27 June and will then tour across Britain in the autumn 2026 and spring 2027. For details go to the Dervish Productions
