OI POLLOI INTERVIEW


FIGHT BACK LP COVER
This album's really good. It's a reissue of some stuff taken from two different split LP's from 1986. Classic songs like PUNKS OR MICE, BOOT DOWN THE DOOR and AMERICANS OUT. Great Oi!/HC punk.
OI POLLOI ain't exactly my favourite band. In my opinion they haven't done any good songs in the last 10 years or so. It's all metal with a bit of folk music thrown in nowadays.

Anyway, no-one can deny their importance in todays punk scene, especially in the Crust community. Seems like everywhere I go there's people with dreads, patches and an OI POLLOI hooded jacket. It's become the uniform for the 'political' HC kids.

I thought I should ask singer/bandleader DEGZ a few questions on their politics. Don't know why, but I expected him to be kind of stupid, self important and only speaking in qoutes like most of the clones, but he wasn't.
Doesn't mean I agree with everything he says, though. I'll let you judge for yourself, without too many comments.

- Isn't calling other bands 'sell-outs' a bit silly, and a waste of your energy really? Don't you think kids who start with these 'sell-outs' can move on to the real stuff once they get into the scene?

- Of course we see that folk can be drawn into the underground political D.I.Y. punk scene through initially hearing commercial stuff.
That's how I got into it myself, through listening to bands like The JAM, on POLYDOR, and The COCKNEY REJECTS, on E.M.I., to start with - but there are already plenty commercial bands out there , OFFSPRING for example, who were never part of the D.I.Y. scene, without us needing bands that once were, like CHUMBAWAMBA, selling out.
We see the D.I.Y. philosophy that they once subscribed to as being very important and valueable - and the idea that we don't have to go with big business is to me something well worth fighting for.
When CHUMBAWAMBA then turn around and mock that philosophy as something they only believed in when they were 'young and naive' they send a totally negative message that there is NO alternative, that the D.I.Y. idea is just foolish and so on. It's quite right then that people like ourselves criticise them for this. That doesn't mean though, that we lie awake at night tossing and turning, just thinking of CHUMBAWAMBA!
We recorded one song out of seventeen on our last LP about them it took me about 5 minutes to write - the same with the track on the ''BLATENT HYPOCRISY SELLS RECORDS'' compilation 7''. We had something valid to say and we said it. That WASN'T a waste of time, and it didn't take much time and effort either.


- There's been a lot of stupid support for censorship in the swedish 'political' crust and HC scene. Would YOU like to see the state ban neo-nazis from promoting their ideas?

LET THE BOOTS DO THE TALKING 7'' EP COVER
- No, we never look to the state to provide answers to problems so of course we're not looking for more laws. Laws, which would of course, as on every other occasion in history, have a habit of being used far more rigourously against the anti-fascists than the fascists themselves once they came into force - see 1930's britain for example.

- It makes nazis end up like real political prisoners and martyrs. I think there's a big difference between people beating them up and the state censoring them.

Obviously we don't want martryrs. We agree with you, yeah, we encourage ordinary people themselves to sort out the nazis, not to expect the cops to do it for them. A kinda ridiculous idea anyway, especially in some areas where more than 50% of the cops ARE the neo-nazis!
It's up to us all to take on our responsibilities to sort things out ourselves rather than to surrender these responsibilities to the state. That's always been our message.


- What about people who promote LENIN, STALIN or MAO, instead of HITLER?

- Anyone who's interested in Communism should read about what the bastards got up to in the Spanish Civil War and how they put down the Kronstadt uprising in the Russian Civil War - quite a sickening tale. FUCK THOSE BASTARDS! Just listen to our song 'COMMIES AND NAZIS' off 'UNITE + WIN' to see where we stand on that one.

As to promoting violence, we're quite happy to promote it's use in the specific and very limited circumstances in which we advocate it. Indeed when a bunch of tooled-up nazi skinheads attack your concert, info-shop, demo or whatever you would have to be pretty stupid to think that you can stop them with pacifism, so I think we've a duty to promote physical self-defence in these contexts so that some naive people don't get beaten up because they've been taken in by some ill-thought out pacifist ideas. As of questions of who is more 'evil' I think that's immaterial. The important thing is to look towards our long term goals and realise what is TACTICALLY the best thing to do to achive those goals. Thus, while someone who knows all the facts about the meat industry and yet still eats meat is obviously a fucking arsehole who I'd be quite happy to see getting a kicking, I don't see how TACTICALLY that would advance the cause of veganism and animal liberation at all. It's the same with the idea of shooting vivisectors - while some of them might well deserve it - it would be a fucking stupid thing to do and is totally unnecessary too. Economical damage to animal abusers - going hand in hand with Information and education campaigns - is the way forward. We've have no problem with people exposing vivisectors, etc, for what they are to their neighbours, etc, but physically attacking people isn't IN THIS CASE necessary. Like I said, we only advocate that as a last resort.


- A punk rock tour is usually nothing more than driving thousands of miles around europe, spending every bit of cash you make on gasoline, selling pieces of plastic. Isn't preaching 'go green' and 'stop pollution' a bit much then?

- We don't lose any sleep over this. If everyone used motor vehicles as rarely as us the world would be a much better, cleaner place. A few punk bands going on tour a few times a year is not the problem. It's the dumb commuters driving to work every day, one person in each car, etc, that are the real problem - and none of us do that. In our daily life most of us walk or cycle most places - we're not into private transport. That's not to say, though, that we don't try to minimise the environmental impact of our touring. Our first trip to europe for example was made on cheap train tickets and our first tour of Poland was on forged rail tickets so it was even cheaper! We used public transport again for the first part of our europe tour last autumm and after that we travelled in a partially solar-powered vehicle. Then when we toured last easter we planted young trees everywhere we went as partial compensation for some of the pollution we were creating - some of the people we met thought we were just crazy hippies for doing that but I thought it was a cool idea and it will be good to see how the trees have grown each time we play these places again. Yeah! Trees are punk!


Whatever you think about OI POLLOI's music and/or politics you got to respect them for practising what the preach. Stop to plant trees? Fuck, when we're on tour we only stop to dump garbage.

Contact OI POLLOI at: c/o AFA, PO BOX 421, Dun Eideann, EH 11 1QD, SCOTLAND.

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