Chris Gray

Anarchist, writer and maverick Situationist

Dick Pountain

Wed 8 Jul 2009 00.01 BST

In London in 1966, Chris Gray, who has died of cancer aged 66, teamed up with Charles Radcliffe, an anarchist blues aficionado, to produce Heatwave, a magazine that blended radical politics with the nascent youth culture. They soon attracted the attention of the Situationist International (SI), in Paris.

The leading lights of the SI - founded in 1957 - were the French theorist Guy Debord and the Belgian philosopher Raoul Vaneigem. A descendant of earlier 20th-century European avant gardes, the dadaists, surrealists and letterists, it added its own libertarian strain of Marxist politics. Its 15-year existence was hectic and expulsion-prone, but it achieved an influence on radical culture and politics - especially the May 1968 events in Paris - far beyond its tiny numbers. Gray was more attuned to the sensual post-surrealism of Vaneigem than Debord's cerebral Hegelian Marxism, and he translated Vaneigem's Banalités de Base (1962-63) as the pamphlet The Totality for Kids (1967), thus helping to introduce the SI's ideas to British radicals.

English members Don Nicholson-Smith, Tim (TJ) Clark, Gray and Radcliffe parted company with the SI in 1967: the first three and others then assembled King Mob, a group named from a slogan daubed during London's 1780 Gordon Riots, along with a magazine, King Mob Echo. Nicholson-Smith remembers King Mob as being composed of "ex-artists, ex-socialists and radicalised hippies" who were caught "between the dialectical certainties of Paris and the no-holds-barred, risk-everything example" of the New York group Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, a "street gang with an analysis" founded by the painter Ben Morea and the poet Dan Georgakas.

What most distinguished King Mob from late 60s student revolutionaries was its sense of humour, displayed in stunts such as entering the toy department of Selfridges, in London's Oxford Street, dressed as Santa Claus and giving away the toys to passing kids, or scrawling erudite graffiti around west London. King Mob participated in the March 1968 anti-Vietnam war protest in London - culminating outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square - under a banner drawn from William Burroughs that proclaimed: "Storm the reality studio and retake the universe".

King Mob had dispersed by 1970, and two years later Debord dissolved the SI. Gray turned away from politics, his parting act being his 1974 publication of a valedictory anthology of SI writings, Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International.

Gray was born in Crosby, Liverpool, and his parents separated after his father returned from war service in Kashmir. Chris was raised by his grandmother until the age of 10. In 1952, his parents reunited and moved to Cornwall, sending him to Repton school in Derbyshire. He evaded a university education and in the late 1950s gravitated to London's Soho, where from 1959 to 1961 he was to be found helping the poet and playwright Neil Oram run one of London's first basement jazz cafes, Sam Widges, in D'Arblay Street. Then he travelled across the US with the film-maker Conrad Rooks, returning to London in 1965.

By the late 1970s Gray was spending much time in India, as a trekking guide in the Himalayas and a not uncritical follower of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (known after 1989 as "Osho"). Under the pen-name "Sam", Chris published Life of Osho (1997) and The Acid (2009).

Charismatic, charming and perpetually amused, Gray was a romantic rebel in the Byronic mould. Clark remembers most his distinctive laugh - "a high-pitched, disbelieving, boyish cackle, full of delight in human folly. The kind of laugh one imagines Rochester or Rimbaud having. Chris was about as remote from the moralising puritanism of the British left as one could imagine."

I first met Chris on the steps of an occupied London School of Economics in 1969 and that laugh changed my life, convincing me that mischief-making would be far more fun than staring at test tubes.

Towards the end of Leaving the 20th Century, Gray wrote that "Everyone's life is a switch between changing oneself and changing the world. Surely they must somehow be the same thing and a dynamic balance is possible ... I want to find it again - that quickening in oneself and in others, that sudden happiness and beauty."

He is survived by a daughter, Maria, with former partner Brenda, and a son, Elian, with former partner Usha.

 Christopher Nelson Gray, activist and writer, born 22 May 1942; died 14 May 2009

STONE COOL KILLERS 

The recent spate of knife and gun killings, argued Tony Blair recently, cannot be solely attributed to the effects of poverty but to a dysfunctional gang culture among young black people. This provoked a predictable outcry from black community leaders, but Blair was at least  half right that the violence has roots in youth culture, but half wrong in  confining it to black youth. The problem isn’t that young people are, in  Blair’s words, being brought up with “no rules, no discipline, no proper  framework around them” but rather that the framework of rules they live  within diverges sharply from that of mainstream civil society.  

It’s this framework that we called Cool (with a capital C) in our book “Cool Rules” (Reaktion Books 2000). That capital letter signified we weren’t just talking about “cool”, the universal term of approval for the under-30s, nor about the fashion buzzword that gets attached to everything from iPods to Pot Noodles – we meant a complete ethic which encompasses all those other senses, an extreme form of individualism that can be summarised as a conviction that society’s mores apply to everyone except yourself (and possibly your  mates). 

Our book was misinterpreted by several reviewers, some of whom wanted to  see it as a moralistic attack on Cool while others wanted a manual on how to be Cool. We should have predicted this because Cool represents a moral  sea-change, and any morality is as invisible to its adherents as water is  invisible to the fish that swim in it – we tried to poke our snouts out of  the water for a better view. Cool is a shift as profound as that from  medieval Christianity to the Protestant Reformation, an adaptation to life  in affluent societies where consumption rules over production. Think of it  as the decomposition product of Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic, from which  point of view (still our official morality in the Anglo-West) it can only  appear as the trio of vices Narcissism, Hedonism and Ironic Detachment.  

Cool has had its historical precursors, from the Romantics to the Parisian flaneurs, but its modern form was constructed from the wreckage of old certainties wrought by two world wars, Auschwitz and the Atom Bomb, in the context of a booming consumer society in thrall to youth and (thanks to cinema and TV) with appearance. Its most significant aesthetic input came from US black culture, from the earliest jazz age right up to hip-hop. In “Cool Rules” we argued that though superficially rebellious, Cool is wholly dependent upon consumer capitalism: product vendors constantly monitor youth creativity to discover new product categories, and the kids enthusiastically consume the results to construct/reinforce their own Cool persona. 

We also described the way young people wield Cool as protection against the depression that failure in a highly competitive and celebrity-obsessed culture may induce. If you can't win, then refuse to play the game by dissing it as uncool. What we couldn't have predicted was to what terrible lengths this mechanism might be stretched. Merely refusing to play a particular game (like succeeding at school or joining some desirable social set) is no longer sufficient – now you need to stop others playing too, perhaps by knifing them in a street fight, or by taking a 9mm Glock automatic onto the university campus.

“What a waste!” was a refrain heard a lot during last year’s hot summer in North London. Kentish Town High Road was dubbed “Murder Mile” by the press, and even young men from “good homes” started carrying knives “for protection”. Amid a nationwide epidemic of so-called “black-on-black” crime – Yardie-inspired tit-for-tats, drive-bys, drug-trade assassinations – Kentish Town saw a series of assaults on, and occasionally executions of, complete strangers. A typical scenario involves a flurry of street challenges and ritual insults, followed by assault/death. A young man stabbed to death in an argument on top of a double-decker bus after he asked a young drifter to extinguish a cigarette. Typical excuses proffered in court include “He looked at me wrong” or he “Didn’t show nuff respect”. Osman, a Somali student from respectable family was savagely stabbed to death in a busy Camden market while waiting at a bus stop, by an enraged mob of knife-wielding young Somalis out to settle some obscure vendetta. And then there were the “fratricides”: after he stabbed his best mate in the chest with a serrated army knife during a Saturday night row over a crack-laced spiff, Jerry asked the barman of the Tally Ho to order him a mini cab to take Jamal to the local A&E. Jamal lost so much blood that he died shortly after arrival and Jerry turned himself in. While on remand he tried to end his own life (and he’s still trying).

Another topic we touched on in “Cool Rules” but couldn't treat in sufficient depth was the way that class interacts with Cool. Beneath the global media spectacle of Cool, the detailed boundaries between the cool and the uncool are always set locally by each gang, subculture or even just group of friends. It's therefore perfectly possible for both a gang of relatively deprived teenagers from a sink estate and a jeunesse dorée of  DJs, musicians, rich kids and movie makers all to call themselves cool, to share aesthetic values and social milieus. But of course only the latter group can afford the pricey material goods – cars, iPods, clothes – needed for a cool life, and they also tend to monopolise the media channels and become cultural arbiters. And so Cool amplifies the tensions caused by growing economic inequality.   

Glenroy is a young Kentish Town robber who wears a permanent look of self-satisfaction and moves among his mates enclosed in a fog of self-regard, interrogating them about their trainers and jewelry. At school an unmanageable childishness was his sole strategy against authority. His pursuit of status always requires doing others down, sex is always about manipulation and entrapment rather than seduction. From 10pm through 4am every night in summer Kentish Town’s streets become a youth party, serviced by numerous nightclubs, dance halls and a reliable night bus service. Young people from all backgrounds participate, mostly in safety until the Glenroy’s become involved. Glenroy’s neighbour Joseph is the same age and background, but is studying for A-levels and hoping for a university place. One night at the local Sixth Form Centre Joseph and a group of students, teachers, parents and friends gathered for an A-level drama accreditation evening with an examiner present. To everyone’s horror they were invaded by Glenroy and friends armed with baseball bats, looking for someone who’d dissed his girl friend. Joseph faced down Glenroy and called him a disgrace to the community, which took real courage. 

Joseph was fortunate to be a well-built lad who could handle himself, and survived. Unlike Kayam from a neighbouring borough, stabbed to death outside his school gates – handsome, popular, on trials for QPR, and from a supportive and industrious family, his striving attracted deadly resentment. Or Prince, aged 15, from East London, also from a successful and supportive Caribbean family numbering Olympic athletes and professional footballers among them – terminated on his way home one evening by unknown assailants. The jealousy and contempt of the Glenroys extends not just to fellow students but to any organization that serves the community by offering anything more than merely a pretext for keeping kids off the street…

So Blair was half right in identifying resentment and jealousy in black gang culture as a prime motivation for violence, but he missed out the rich (largely white) Cool culture that provokes this jealousy. He also missed that both sides share far more values with each other than they do with him – what he’d regard as anti-social values concerning both drugs and violence. This being the case there's no easy prescription for what to do next. The Home Office has announced that it's looking at the possibility of banning gang membership, enforcing the supposedly mandatory five-year sentence for illegal firearm possession and lowering the age from 21 to 18. None of that will make violence or guns uncool, and in fact banning gangs can only make them cooler. 

To halt an ongoing change of value systems is a very tall order indeed. The education system has proven largely ineffective, given that Cool is widely deployed to resist learning. Religious conversion is another possible exit, but nowadays this would almost certainly be into some fundamentalist sect (the 7/7 bombers could be seen as a horrible mirror image of the knife killers). This lack of any plausible solution reflects our current social quandary, namely that when Reagan and Thatcher set out to demolish Social Democracy in the 1980s, in the process they fatally weakened the ideology of "decency" that went with along it. No-one has so far come up with any secular substitute that's more attractive than Cool, and one trembles to imagine what some of the antidotes might be. 

[Dick Pountain is a technical author and contributor to Political Quarterly. David Robins is the author of several books including “Tarnished Vision: Crime and Conflict in the Inner City”]