Eddy Says

Eddy Says: Go home Paki? OK, a single to Cardiff please…

By Eddy Temple-Morris | Published on Monday 21 November 2011

This week Eddy looks back at the various occasions when one time Southern Death Cult drummer Aki Nawaz has had a presence in his life, starting off as a poster on his bedroom wall, through to being a bandmate, then the man behind so many great underground electronic releases Eddy rated, and now an old friend at a surprise party. Remembering how Aki, as THE cool Asian of the early 1980s, provided such inspiration for a mixed race teen living in a very different era in British culture, Eddy also celebrates the more multicultural Britain of today, where MOMO (music of mixed origin) is all around.

It’s so easy to take the UK’s most brilliantly multi-cultural society for granted, but I’m old enough to remember the days when things were painfully different.

On my first day at secondary school, the biggest boy in my class threw a chair at me and told me to “go home you fucking Paki”. If that happened now I’d just throw it back and say “My mum’s from Iran and I was born in Cardiff, you ignorant cunt”, but in those days, you just couldn’t draw attention like that. I was too outnumbered.

My parents were married in the mid 60s, when inter-racial marriages were pretty rare, so you could say I was one of that first wave of mixed race kids that called themselves British, even though we were despised by many of our contemporaries.

You would pale at some of the names that were said to, or rather screamed at, me while I was being chased through the back streets of Hereford in the 1970s. Me and my friend Ade – his dad was Nigerian and his mum was Herefordian – were, at the time, the darkest skinned kids in our neighbourhood, and my god didn’t we know it.

But we just had to take it on the chin, and, I think, looking back on it, the seige mentality we had was partly due to the fact we had nobody to look up to, nobody we could call our own, in pop culture. I think having ‘heroes’ makes you stronger. Having cool icons on your wall, and to have characters you identify with, when you’re that age is so important, especially if you are, as we were in those days, ‘outsiders’. Teenagers feel excluded enough already.

When I started to fall in love with music, I didn’t have anyone I could REALLY identify with. Sure I had Robert Smith of The Cure, and Sid Vicious, and Paul Simonon; the uber-cool icons on my wall at the time. But they were all white, and I was brown. I felt different and I didn’t really connect with anybody on a genetic level.

That is until my last year at school, and the day I bought a twelve-inch record by a little band from Bradford with a weird name: The Southern Death Cult. I was at first drawn in by their Native American imagery (we said ‘Red Indian’ in those days, which sounds weird now but at the time was perfectly normal and not meant disrespectfully). Then I looked closer, past their beautiful 80s effeminacy, and I looked at their drummer Aki, and I smiled, deeply. He was brown. He was brown AND cool. Blisteringly cool. Here was a man at the top of the NME Independent Charts and I couldn’t believe my eyes. This man was Pakistani. I could not, for a second, imagine this beautiful man being called all the names I was called.

I was blown away by the fact that this guy, whose picture was on the back cover of my favourite record at the time, was the first person I ever pinpointed as being both Asian and cool. Up until that point, being Asian, or in my case half Asian, was pretty much the most uncool thing you could be. There were no Nihals, no Frictions, radio and TV was ‘white’, music was ‘white’ and ‘black’, there were no shades.

It’s peculiar thinking back on those days, it doesn’t seem all that long ago, but there will come a time soon when us mixed race ‘kids’ will be in the majority. We’re everywhere I look, all over the music I love and play: Example is half Indian, so is Jakwob. Ayah Marar is half Jordanian. When the MOBOs were happening I tweeted, half joking-half serious, that there should, by the same token, be a MOMOs (Music Of Mixed Origin). Why the hell not?! There’s probably more music out there now of ‘mixed origin’ than anything else!

I followed Aki’s career, as a street-level supporter, and paying customer, when Southern Death Cult split up and became Death Cult, then The Cult on one side of the family tree, and Getting The Fear on the other.

One day my flat mate, an utterly wonderful man called Nigel Templeman, alerted me to the fact that Getting The Fear, the band that featured Aki and Buzz from Southern Death Cult, wanted a new bass player, and that they were having auditions at a London rehearsal studio. I excitedly packed up my then relatively new looking Musicman Stingray bass (the one I still use as Losers’ bass player today) into the back of Nige’s car, and he drove me to the audition, like the big brother I never had.

Once there, it was nerve wracking. A handful of hopeful Goths were in front of me in the queue, skin pale as alabaster, and hair dyed jet black. I was so nervous when it was my turn. Jesus Christ, I was about to meet, and even jam with, two guys who were on a poster on my wall when I was at school! I walked in, smiled, said hello and was surprised to see my two icons, not dressed in obligatory post-punk-goth regalia, but running shorts, vests and trainers. At least Aki had a black jogging top on (the term ‘hoodie’ was not on the horizon then).

That was the moment I chose to play my trump card. I thought, before the audition, how can I set myself apart from everyone else? How can I show them I’m the sort of guy who should be in their band? How can a young kid like me be taken seriously by two older and wiser musicians? Surely, I thought, as a naive nineteen year old, drugs are the answer! I’d pre-rolled a fat, hash spliff, and whipped out this marvellous cone before I’d even plugged my bass in.

“Fancy an ice-breaker?” I said, with a smile as big and fat as the Camberwell Carrot between my thumb and index finger. I looked at Buzz, who looked at me as if I’d just stuck my finger up my own arse then asked him to smell it.

“No thanks, I don’t smoke draw”, he said, quite seriously, in his lovely Bradford accent.

I was crushed. My last hope of salvation was Aki. I held the joint aloft, like the torch on the Statue Of Liberty and swivelled to face the drums.

“You’re alright mate”, said the coolest Asian ever. “I’m a strict Muslim, I’ve never had a drink or taken drugs in my life!”

At that point the blood drained from my body. I hoped that a fissure might appear in the earth that I could dive into and escape from this nightmare of awkwardness. Thank god they saw the funny side of it, Buzz just took the piss: “What were you thinking?! Look at me, I’m in fookin running gear, I’m a fitness fanatic!”

Aki laughed along with him and pointed out that this was work for them, and we should get on with it. Which we duly did, with ice well broken, but not in the way I’d planned.

I plugged in and started playing, we gelled almost straight away, and when I left I felt that I’d at the very least retrieved my dignity after that disastrous opening gambit. Aki and Buzz were all smiles when I said goodbye and said they thought I was a really good player, the best they’d seen, but there were plenty more to come, so not to get my hopes up too much.

But my career in this crazy business started at the point they called to tell me I had the job, and that I’d have to move up to Bradford, on and off, for a year or so.

You may know Aki from the name he adopted many years later: Prince Haq Propaghandi, frontman of Fun Da Mental, and head honcho of Nation Records. He signed and supported some fantastic underground electronica in the 90s, Transglobal Underground, Prophets Of Da City and many others. The last compilation I got from Nation was called ‘And Still No Hits…’

Aki was always politically provocative. Fun Da Mental and Nation were part of the global backlash against US foreign policy. Nation is still going, and Aki is still kicking against the pricks, producing TV documentaries on subjects close to his heart. For example, Aki was on the very boat that broke the Israeli Navy blockade of Gaza, as part of a documentary on the treatment of Palestinians by the rest of the world.

The rest of this story could easily provide another Eddy Says, but the reason it’s all come flooding back now is that last Saturday was Aki’s (surprise) 50th birthday party, where I saw him for the first time in years. There’s nothing like an email from the son of a good friend, who’s now grown up and got his own Facebook page, telling you it’s his dad’s surprise birthday party and asking “can you come dressed as a punk?” to make you feel your age. People often, sweetly, tell me that I don’t look my age, but my god, Aki does not have one single grey hair, not one! And he’s years older than me!

The party was emotional, for Aki, of course, but when I saw his picture on this massive birthday cake, it really got me to thinking, that my old friend may actually be a proper trail-blazer, the first ever young Asian man that crossed over into pop culture. He was from my point of view, anyway. I cannot think of anyone else both Asian and cool until way after The Southern Death Cult. And he’s still there, on the edge, still refusing to cross into the mainstream, and still challenging it, while still inspiring people like me.

Funny that now feels, politically, just like the 1980s, but for one thing: those brown kids who had bricks thrown at us in the street decades ago are now almost in the majority.The MOMOs may not be that far away…

X eddy