11.05.81 Newcastle, England, intro to ´Independence Day´

´´I grew up in this little town and we lived on this main street, next door to this gas-station ....and at 6 a.m every morning I used to watch my old man, I´d hear him out back fiddling around under the hood of a car so he could get it started so he could make it to work.... and as I got older, I watched around and I didn´t see how my life was going to be much different than his was because it seemed that if you were born in a certain place that things didn´t change much for you. I looked back at him and he went into the army when he was 19 and he came out and he got married and started to work in a plastics´ factory ....when I got older I never had a picture in my mind of him laughing, all I could remember him doing was sitting at the kitchen table at night with the lights out, smoking a cigarette, waiting....for it all to go away or something....and I tried to think what was the thing that we all had in common, why did it time after time end up that way and it was that we didn´t have enough knowledge about the forces that were controlling our lives. and I started to read this book, it was called History of the United States and it seemed how the way that things were, weren´t the way they were meant to be, like the way my old man was living and his old man and the life that was waiting for me ¬¬¬¬- that wasn´t the original idea. but even if you find those things out, it´s so hard to change things. and it wasn´t until I started listening to the radio and I heard something in the singers´ voices that said there is more to life than what my old man was doing and the life that I was living, and they held out a promise - and it was a promise that every man has a right to live his life with some decency and some dignity. and it´s a promise that gets broken every day, in the most violent way. but it´s a promise that never ever, ever fucking dies and it´s always inside of you. but I watched my old man forget that, don´t let it happen to you.....´´
(taken from the fanzine Point Blank, issue 4, 1981)

Compiled by : Johanna Pirttijärvi