Sanguis Mortem played at the Love Metal gig (pic: SanguisMortem on facebook)
For the second time in six months, anti-racists in Islington, north London, are building the fightback with music.
Socialist Worker spoke to activists in Islington Stand Up To Racism (SUTR) and Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR) about their Love Metal Hate Racism gig last Friday.
Maia is a student and anti-racist activist who was instrumental in organising an LMHR gig earlier this year. She explained, “We organised the first LMHR gig in Islington in quite a long time in
May of this year and it was a really good success.
“We re-mobilised a community that needed to get organised again.
“We’ve got a new confidence from the success of the national demonstration on the 16 May and from our Islington gig later that month. Because of this, we wanted a big push to get a new layer of young people involved,” she said.
“Hopefully this event will pull in people who want to get organised against the growing far right. We want to create a scaffold to hold the anti-racist movement together.”
Owen is another activist in Islington SUTR and LMHR. “I’m a big metal fan,” he told Socialist Worker.
“When I first pitched the idea, I definitely got some reactions from people who thought that metal fans wouldn’t really be accepting of anti-racism.
“But I know that it is an amazing and diverse community and we’ve gotten a really positive response,” he said.
“We started planning this gig before the events in Dover and Portsmouth.
“But after seeing that, it’s highlighted how important it is to build a network of people that can really respond to something like that if that happened here.”
Maia agreed. “This is a grassroots way of organising,” she said.
“It’s about getting people to meet around a common interest.
“After the last gig, we were able to quite successfully keep in touch with people. From this, we had people joining us for leafleting and joining demonstrations.
“We’ve got an upcoming north London unity demonstration on 14 November and this gig will help us grow that and actually get people involved in building for it.
“At our May gig, we had speeches from the stage from the organisers of the event and from affiliated groups like SUTR who talked about politics between the sets. We also had an SUTR stall at the back of the venues where people could engage more politically with us.
Owen added that, “The most important thing is that we’re going to be building towards the unity demo.”
