Blessed & Blasted: Roots of the Anarchy Shirt part 2

Two “manifesto” designs which emanated from 430 King’s Road – the You’re Gonna Wake Up t-shirt and the Anarchy Shirt – share a reference to “The Black Hand Gang”.

I had long assumed that both referred to Spanish anarchists La Mano Negra, since the group’s name was listed with that of their fellow countryman and revolutionary Buenaventura Durruti.

But on the t-shirt, the absence of an “and” or connecting device had me pondering the possibility this was another Black Hand Gang; maybe the secret society dedicated to Serbian unity (linked to one of the events which triggered the First World War, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914)?

Then Derek Harris pointed out that 60s radicals David and Stuart Wise and their King Mob confrere Christopher Gray also dubbed themselves “The Black Hand Gang”.

As in the San Francisco situationists Point-Blank!, McLaren and Bernie Rhodes – who conceived the t-shirt – were familiar with the Wises.

“The All Saints Road pro-Situ Black Hand Gang would fit nicely alongside Point-Blank!,” says Harris, who adds that the Wises’ activities included The End Of Music pamphlet and, much earlier, the commuter-baiting graffiti on the sidings of the approach to Royal Oak tube in west London:

SAME THING DAY AFTER DAY – TUBE – WORK – DINER [sic] – WORK – TUBE – ARMCHAIR – TV – SLEEP – TUBE – WORK – HOW MUCH MORE CAN YOU TAKE – ONE IN TEN GO MAD – ONE IN FIVE CRACKS UP.

“Futura 2000 had a hand in destroying that with his first London piece, which was filmed by Don Letts in 1981,” says Harris.

There is no doubting McLaren’s intention when he daubed The Black Hand Gang moniker onto a patch for some of the first Anarchy Shirts he designed with Vivienne Westwood in 1976.

McLaren told me in 2008: “I simply dyed – not fast-dyed – pieces of material and, with a wooden twig dipped in Domestos bleach, wrote anarchic slogans that had appeared on the walls of Paris, such as ‘A Bas de Coca Cola’, an ode to anti-Americans, and to those great heroes of the anarchist movement like Buenaventura Durruti and the Black Hand Gang, famous in the Spanish Civil War.”

Later Anarchy Shirts, made under McLaren & Westwood’s direction, also featured the gang’s name. An example is the one acquired by Jay Strongman in early summer 1977 (as featured in The Look).

While a black hand was literally stamped onto one of the last designs to come out of 430 King’s Road in its incarnation as Seditionaries – the “Friends Of Vicious” t-shirt produced in support of the troubled Sex Pistols bassist – Durutti made it to a third McLaren & Westwood design: his name appeared (with the quote “We are not in the least afraid of the ruins”) on their 1977 remix of the Vive Le Rock tee.

Next:  Harris talks through other radical political sources for the Anarchy Shirt.

Roots of the Anarchy Shirt part 3.

The IT page comes from the publication’s exhaustive online resource.

Thanks to Hiroshi Fujiwara and Jay Strongman for use of images.