‘Don’t Tell Me Punching Nazis Ain’t the Way’
'Grime-punk' duo Bob Vylan talk to Tribune about Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Savile, and the importance of pissing people off.
Still from 'We Live Here' (Bob Vylan / YouTube)
- Interview by
- Ben Thompson
Released in 2020, just before the first Covid-19 lockdown, Bob Vylan’s ‘We Live Here’ was—and is—one of the most forthright statements of British mixed-race identity ever committed to wax (or streamed through the ether). The video found Crass T shirt-wearing frontman Bobby Vylan rampaging through the over-mediated byways of Shoreditch, dispensing street justice with an élan conjured from the Daily Mail’s worst nightmares. The music was a stadium-ready racket, widely described as ‘grime-punk’ though actually skilfully welding together all sorts of useful components, from rap and metal to the Prodigy’s M11 extension turbo-rave. The lyrics were fearless, funny, and brutally frank: ‘The first time I was called ‘n*****’ I was about seven or eight years old—I was playing across the street and one of the older kids called me it. I went home for bath time a little later and asked my mum what it meant—my white mum—she told me it was a bad word…’
Two years later, the London-based duo are on the brink of releasing a new album—Bob Vylan Presents The Price of Life—which addresses the current cost of living crisis with the same combination of sharp wit and righteous anger that its predecessor (also titled We Live Here), brought to bear on the history of racial injustice. Bobby and his less front-and-centre musical helpmeet Bobbie Vylan (possibly not his real name) talk to me over a Zoom link about the importance of maintaining a historical perspective while being on the front cover of Kerrang! It’s Bobby who answers most of the questions but Bobbie is happy to chip in on the rare occasions when his more loquacious bandmate takes a breath.
Bob Vylan lyrics often reach back to cultural touchstones from before you were born. On the new album you mention Johnny Rotten trying to blow the whistle on Jimmy Savile in 1979 but being shut down by the BBC, and there’s also a critical reference to Margaret Thatcher’s early seventies tenure as education secretary (couched in the gleefully provocative terms which are Bob Vylan’s stock in trade)—’Let’s go dig up Maggie’s grave and ask her where that milk went’. Is it a deliberate strategy to promote historical awareness?
We’re not fortunate enough to be unaffected by yesterday’s atrocities—as black and brown people we still suffer from things that happened hundreds of years ago and we need to be aware of what’s coming for us.
In terms of more recent history, it felt like the band was ready to break through just as the first lockdown kicked in. Was it frustrating for you not to be able to ride that wave?
I think it helped us. Lockdown gave people the opportunity to slow down and see what’s important and in our case that meant appreciating the relevance We Live Here had to a year of protests against racism. People weren’t just shuffling onto the tube with their free newspaper, they had time to think about the things we’d been talking about. We’d been shopping this around for a long time and all sorts of people had been telling us ‘Who the fuck is gonna buy punk music about racism made by two black guys?’ But now everyone gets that.
It’s the same with the new album which is all about the pursuit of and the attempt to retain a pound note—the things people have to do to get one as the disparity between rich and poor gets starker…
So Britain’s spiral into a dystopian racist nightmare has played right into Bob Vylan’s hands?
It’s upsetting that the way this country is going keeps our music relevant!
Would it be fair to say that you take a certain amount of satisfaction from pushing people’s buttons?
Sometimes we are trying to wind people up because to be honest that is one of the ways we can derive enjoyment from living in this country. For all the ills black and brown and working-class people have endured at Britain’s hands, if I can just say a thing and you’ll get upset then that feels like a small victory and I’ll print it on a t-shirt and wear that t-shirt every day. Also it’s about making ideas digestible—that line you quoted about Margaret Thatcher is funny because it’s so in people’s faces, but it also has some validity. You can get angry about it if you want to, but that doesn’t make the underlying point any less true.
There’s an explicit rejection of non-violence as an anti-racist strategy in the 2021 single ‘Pretty Songs’ which backs up a very direct statement—’No liberal lefty cunt is going to tell me punching Nazis ain’t the way’—with some characteristically astute historical analysis (‘White folks love to quote Martin Luther ‘cos he held hands and prayed when they bombed his building/ Well good for him but times have changed… and don’t forget white folks still killed him’). Given the calls to direct action in your music, is your reluctance to divulge personal details in interviews—what we might call the cloak of two Bob invisibility—largely a matter of self-preservation?
There’s a little bit of that—we wouldn’t want everyone to know where we live. We enjoy our lives away from the band and we want that to carry on, but also we don’t want details of our individual circumstances or characters to get in the way of the message.
In contrast to this unusual autobiographical reticence, your music is full of explicit references to the people who have inspired it, with the new album containing allusions to the work of everyone from Dead Prez and Jehst to Ice Cube and Peter Tosh. It feels like Dizzee Rascal and Public Enemy are the guiding stars, though…
Grime has a huge influence on the music we make because it’s the community we grew up around—Dizzee Rascal was the king of East London—but Public Enemy were very important too, because of the Bomb Squad’s production and the way Def Jam came out of Rick Rubin’s punk background. I love Chuck D’s writing—he’s fucking fantastic, but I also love the way Ice Cube will mix social commentary with some gangsta shit as well. Those two things are not mutually exclusive—that’s why the gangsta shit exists!
When you take that set of influences into an arena full of fans of The Offspring, do you feel like you’re colonising a very white space?
The rock music that we also really liked growing up was often very much not the thing that was listened to by people around us, and in a sometimes hostile environment to admit to liking it could be perceived as weak. That’s how you end up in two separate worlds. So when we go onto rock stages and talk about things in the way grime or rap artists would, we’re very conscious of trying to bring the whole thing together in one place. Whether or not audiences want to embrace that is up to them, but it’s something we would’ve loved to see when we were their age.