Dump It On Parliament Revisited


Watch Dumping It On Parliament documentary  by Andy Wilshire

I promised someone at the recent Luton Centre of the Punk Universe thing that I would post up a link to the recent documentary.
Last year I worked on with a couple of artists that were commissioned to take a look at the local alternative culture during the mid eighties.

Step back in time to the post-punk scene of the mid 1980’s. Think Siouxsie Sioux, a DIY ethic, scratch video, protest, Thatcher.

This is the backdrop to Dump It On Parliament Revisited, a new living history artwork exploring counter-culture local history, created by artists Dash MacDonald and Demitrios Kargotis (DASHNDEM) and artist/musician Roshi Nasehi as part of the 2015 Library as Laboratory commission.

DASHNDEM had discovered the story of the Dump It On Parliament post-punk compilation tape whilst researching Bedfordshire’s alternative local history. In 1986 a group of local post-punk bands, including Luton’s  Steve Spon from UK Decay, had joined together to create a musical protest tape, to campaign against a proposed nuclear waste site at Elstow near Bedford. In the end the government withdrew its plans but the tape was released and proved popular. The artists wanted to understand the socio-economic and political climate at that time and contrast it with what people are people angry about now.

This was a really eye opening and exciting project to work on Dash, Dem, Roshi and company were really inspired by the local scene’s coalescing protest during the mid eighties against nuclear dumping in nearby Elstow. There was a huge focus on the pre internet, Social Media age when protest and the D.I.Y culture carved precursory inroads that laid the foundations to the contemporary. Here students backpedaled and used cut and paste with scissors ,glue and Letraset  instead of Photoshop. Today’s bands from the area each provide a cover of the original compilation protest Cassette and go on to write an original song with today’s issues that  one might want to dump on parliament

The Original 1986 compilation

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