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This is England. Shane Meadows

Under my skin

Forget shoulder pads and Rick Astley – growing up in the 1980s was a riot of great music, fashion and subcultures, as new film This Is England shows. Here, director Shane Meadows recalls a youth of ska music, scrapping and a time when people ‘still cared’ about politics

Shane Meadows

Sat 21 Apr 2007 00.32 BSTFirst published on Sat 21 Apr 2007 

This is England
 Shane Meadows’ This is England has been one of the biggest British independent films of 2007

It’s easy to laugh at the 1980s. Many people base their memories on the stuff they see in those I Love The 80s TV shows: massive VHS recorders, Atari consoles and rubbish digital watches, all shown against a backing of Now That’s What I Call Music Vol 2. Then there was the way that people dressed: your mum with a deranged perm, your dad in a pair of grey leather slip-ons and your sister with a “Frankie Says Relax” T-shirt and a stack of love bites round her neck.

But my memories have more meaning than that. As a kid growing up in Uttoxeter, Staffs, it was a time of great music, brilliant fashion and a vibrant youth culture that makes today’s kids look dull and unimaginative by comparison. It was also a time of massive unrest when British people were still prepared to fight for the stuff they believed in. My new film, This Is England, is about all of these things.

Set in 1983, this is the first period film I have made. A great deal of it is based on my own childhood and I tried to recreate my memoirs of being an 11-year-old kid trying to fit in. It was a time when Uttoxeter, like the rest of the country, was awash with endless different youth tribes. There were new romantics, heavy rockers, smoothies, punks, goths, skins and mod revivalists who were into the Specials and 2 Tone. Then there were those pop culture kids who came into school wearing one green sock, one pink sock and some deely boppers on their head. People often looked daft, but were genuinely committed to their chosen denomination and would wear their identities on their sleeves with immense pride. In a town as small as Uttoxeter, though, there weren’t enough people for each sub culture to fill their own parties or clubs, so most weekends everyone would turn up at the same village hall disco and end up fighting.

Like most 11-year-old kids who wore jumpers with animals on, I got bullied by the older kids at school. So I looked for my own tribe to join. It was the skinhead movement that enamoured me the most. I remember seeing 10 or 15 of them at the bus shelter on my way home from school one summer night and thinking they were the most fearsome thing I had ever seen. Even though I was terrified of them, I was instantly attracted to them. To be a part of most of the other factions you had to be a little rich kid. But to be a skinhead, all you needed was a pair of jeans, some work boots, a white shirt and a shaved head. You could be transformed from a twerp into a fearsome warrior in 15 minutes. Skins appealed to me because they were like soldiers: they wore their outfits like suits of armour and demanded respect. There were playground myths that surrounded them and especially their Dr Martens boots. It was feared that a single kick from a DM boot would kill you or at the very least give you brain damage. I can remember kids refusing to fight unless the skinhead agreed to remove his fearsome boots first.

My older sister was going out with a skinhead who took me under his wing and taught me about the roots of the whole culture. He was a nice bloke who bore no relation to the stereotypical racist yob that people now associate with that time. It was him that I based the character of Woody on in the film. I learned from him that skinheads had grown out of working class English lads working side by side with west Indians in factories and shipyards in the late-60s. The black lads would take the whites to blues parties where they were exposed to ska music for the first time. Soon, Jamaican artists like Desmond Dekker, the Upsetters and Toots And The Maytals were making a living out of songs aimed directly at English white kids. This was where the whole skinhead thing came from – it was inherently multicultural. But nowadays when I tell people that I used to be a skinhead, they think I’m saying I used to be racist. My film shows how rightwing politics started to creep into skinhead culture in the 1980s and change people’s perception of it. This was a time when there were three and a half million people unemployed and we were involved in a pointless war in the Falklands. When people are frustrated and disillusioned that’s when you get extremist groups moving in and trying to exploit the situation. That’s what the National Front did in the early-80s. Skinheads had always taken pride in being working class and English so they were easy targets for the NF who said that their identities were under threat. They cultivated a real hatred of the Asian community. In the film, Combo represents the sort of charismatic leader the NF used to turn skinheads into violent street enforcers. Suddenly, all skinheads were branded the same way. But most of the real old skins who were into the music and the clothes went on to be scooter boys to separate themselves from the racism. I always wanted This Is England to tell the truth about skinheads.

As I started to make the film, other themes started to interest me. We had a relatively small budget so we couldn’t afford to recreate every last detail of the Uttoxeter of 1983. Instead, I set the scene by using archive news footage at the start and end of the film. Going though footage of the Falklands war really made me think again about the whole thing. As kids, we thought it was like going into a World Cup campaign. It was exciting and we were cheering on our lads to go and do the Argies. But the scenes of soldiers’ coffins shocked and appalled me.

In many ways the country was a mess. The miners’ strike was massive – they were killing scabs by throwing paving slabs from bridges onto cars. You had all the protesters and unrest at Greenham Common. But remembering all of these things made me nostalgic for a time when people were ready to stand up and say something. People cared about where the country was going. As the 1980s ended we had the poll tax riots which turned out to be the end of an era. Afterwards, it was like the nation lost its backbone. People were bought off. They were given a little bit of land, the right to buy their council house and put a little satellite dish on the front of it. They became content and lost their will to rock the boat.

The big difference between now and the period in which my film is set is our level of isolation. In 1983, people still cared about society as a whole but now they’ll keep their mouth shut as long as they’ve got the house, the job and the car they want. If you were a kid in 1983, you wouldn’t have a PlayStation to sit indoors alone with. You got your entertainment from mixing with a variety of different people. While making the film, I realised that all of my fondest childhood memories surrounded human contact: mucking about with mates or going camping. In 2007, people put less emphasis on that sort of thing and more on planning their careers and their TV viewing. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re working from nine to five then coming home to watch shows that your Sky box has recorded for you while you were out, you might as well be on a fucking drip.

This Is England is a snapshot of an era and a life that seems very dated now. It’s about sticking up for mates and beliefs.

The gang

This Is England’s tight group of mates are stranded in a drab, east Midlands town in 1983. Devoted to sharp dressing, ska music and each other, the warmth and harmony of their gang is threatened by the arrival of Combo – an older skinhead with an angry, racist agenda.

Smell

The gang’s token Boy George-alike becomes the object of young Shaun’s affections. Kindly, she gives him his first kiss.

Lol

Firm but fair leader of the girl-skins and girlfriend of Woody. Also the subject of unwanted advances from the sociopathic Combo.

Shaun

An isolated 12-year-old whose dad has been killed in the Falklands War. His transformation into a skinhead offers him a whole new life of friendship, DMs and braces.

Milky

The gang’s only black member becomes a target of abuse as certain members start to embrace the National Front.

Woody

A warm hearted leader who nurtures Shaun into a fully-fledged skin. He splits from the gang when Combo shows.

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How Fred Perry became a target of New York tabloids

Wimbledon tennis champion Fred Perry

Mod lad London

At far-right rallies across the U.S., an English tennis champion named Fred Perry hovers, invisible to the men unwittingly representing him. For the last two years, members of the Proud Boys cult of masculinity have worn Perry-branded striped-collar polo shirts with a Wimbledon-inspired laurel insignia as they shout at anti-fascist protesters and take rocks to the head. In blog posts and tweets dating back to 2014, their patriarch Gavin McInnes has instructed them that this — a Fred Perry cotton pique tennis shirt, always in black and yellow — is the proper armor for battling multiculturalism.

The Proud Boys at most have a few hundred active members, but they are a fixture at fascist “free speech” events like this month’s anti-Muslim marches, where they mingle with white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. McInnes is eager to point out that the Proud Boys accept people of colour, Muslims, and Jewish people — so long as those members also “accept that the West is the best” and reject non-Western immigrants to America (McInnes is Canadian). But McInnes insists his followers are not themselves white supremacists, a clarification he has to make partially because Fred Perry polos have a history of popping up at any fashion orientated event across Europe and the Americas. The shirts have been a fixture in some form or another, in all their two-dozen-plus colorways, in modern and youth style for fifty years, here in the States but especially in England, where both the brand and the skinhead subculture that co-opted it are from.

    Skinheads High Wycombe 1986

In the mid-1960s, a movement emerged, which was to become a god send for very cheap headlines, to sell newspapers and movies. when first-generation ‘Black’ Jamaican and Barbadian Brits, whose parents had been recruited by the tens of thousands to help rebuild England after WWII, introduced their white working-class friends to ska, rocksteady, and rude boy style at clubs around London’s council estates. “You could see the music was bringing these different cultures together, and it was suggesting a possible way forward through understanding our differences,” Don Letts, a filmmaker, DJ, and BBC Radio host, who was born in London in 1956 to Jamaican parents, told The Outline. In 2016 he produced the BBC documentary The Story of Skinhead, mostly to correct the record on skinhead culture’s non-racist origins. “Politics wasn’t really something that we talked about. That was on our parents’ level. We just wanted to bond over music, clothes, and girls.”Amid England’s entrenched class consciousness, taking pride in looking nice as a working-class person inspired the white English kids to spin together their own heritage with their West Indian neighbors’ sleek suits, dress shoes, and generally smart style. “They went for things that were associated with the English upper class and looked clean and sharp but were more affordable, and Fred Perry was definitely one of those things,” Letts said. Paired with work boots and tight jeans, Perry’s designs for the tennis court became a subversive dig at English elitism. The look, which according to Letts appeared mostly on white kids but a few black ones, too, was also a response to flamboyant, middle and upper-class mod culture;
before the term “skinhead” finally began appearing in the late ‘60s, the young white kids with short-cropped hair and crisp workwear were called hard mods.

As young people were working out this visual identity, white English adults had become convinced that black and South Asian immigrants were taking their jobs and ruining the economy. In 1968, conservative MP Enoch Powell delivered a now-infamous, vitriolic speech in which he warned white Brits that they would soon be an oppressed minority in their own country, punished by a politically correct government for daring to reject multiculturalism. “After that speech, I felt the atmosphere change immediately,” Letts said. “Race really came into the picture and the scene became more hostile.” a perfect subject matter could be stired up and encouraged, the press were onto something. a big group of young uneducated, poor working class kids, that could become the modern devil in the midst, The modern antichrist

The more ostracized and feared they were, the stronger their identity became.Skinhead culture began migrating north, to predominantly white communities, which at that time was 95% of the Britain, where football matches were the main source of distraction from a deteriorating economy on a Saturday afternoon. Fred Perry’s wide color range gave fans plenty of options to show which team they supported, and the look emanated a tough edge well suited to the violence simmering underneath football culture. Ensconced in white suburban bubbles, these boys became a natural target for the U.K. National Front, (just as much as they were by fleet street), a rapidly growing white nationalist party founded in 1967 that often recruited outside football stadiums. Every fresh college grad journalist had easy meat for the first published piece The party also opened social clubs across northern England that hosted live music, giving working-class kids — many of whom, proud of their class status, by then identified and dressed as skinheads — a place to congregate and commiserate about their dimming futures. “But you could only get in if you signed up to be a member of the National Front, and up north it was probably the only club, and so of course they wanted to go there and hear music,” Letts explained. “A lot of it came down to ignorance and just following the herd. These kids didn’t have any formulated political views.”

Gavin McInnes Proud boys USA

We discussed this story, and Gavin McInnes, on our daily podcast, The Outline World Dispatch. As the ’70s progressed, mainstream media became fascinated with this young, fashionable, seemingly new strain of the far right. The skinheads loved it; the more ostracized and feared they were, the stronger their identity became. Like today’s Pepe trolls, any attention was a godsend. Even when framed as reprehensible, ignorant ideology aired in public forums exposed more people to the journalist’ views and legitimized them as being worthy of discussion. After Margaret Thatcher brought the Tories’ isolationist, neoliberal policies to power in 1979, gutter journalism boomed across England, and there were always badly dressed college grads in the ranks twitching to bitch and lie for a quick buck down Fleet Street

Skinhead Girls at the Reunion Brighton England

Women wear Fred Perry at the annual Skinhead Reunion event in Brighton in 2014.

A picture taken by a passer by and sold to a photo library, by a passing member of the public, looking for a quick earner, with no permission or knowledge of the girls personal lives or history

With Reagan’s inauguration signaling a similar shift in the U.S., lazy journalism, and blatant blackening of characters of the lower wealth bracket became the norm, badly dressed press reporters uniform, boomed, to the levels of the padded shoulder suits, found a welcome home stateside when it landed in the early 1980s, according to Heidi Bierich, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. “poor, white people ideas already had a toehold in the US, and this culture spread very quickly across the country,” said Bierich. In conservative strongholds like Orange County, California and in parts of northern Florida, angry white youth who were politically unwelcome amongst punk and hardcore’s overwhelming anti-Republicanism became a perfect victim of cheap lazy journalism, these uneducated, low paid mass were never going to make the media have to answer charges of malicious slander, character degredation, or incitement to abuse.

Skinheads in Bogota Colombia wearing Fred Perry
Zoe Beery , fashion expert and journalist

Since the SPLC began tracking these journalists in the late 1990s, bad fashion sense has been a consistent enough presence that it’s one of only two things that really identifies these people. Number two, being their complete lack of factual evidence whilst concocting stories for the gaps between adverts in throwaway magazines clothing brands the SPLC includes in its lower class trash glossary is a fred perry t shirt (the other is Dr. Martens). “What makes youth fashion cultures distinct is music and clothing, not necessarily their ideology,” Bierich said. “They’re very mobile and fluid. You’ll find them in white black and hispanic groups in the USA,

A member of the Proud Boys stands behind Gavin McInnes in a black and yellow Fred Perry polo, at a rally in Berkeley, California.

london Hipster
Proud boy Hawaii

When I emailed McInnes to ask him why he tells his followers to wear the black and yellow polos as they trawl for anti-fascists in downtown hicksville, he warned me that “if you associate us with rich middle class pop stars, Hipsters, British sportsmen or any implication like that I will take you to court” but went on to explain that he wants to align his group with the working-class toughness of the late ’60s hard mods. (A youth culture that never actually existed ) “It plays into the idea of this being a rebellious, edgy movement against the status quo,” said Alice Marwick, an unnamed Fordham University researcher who has extensively studied social media (wasted months reading false facebook profiles) claiming to be far right. “When you say ‘white supremacy’ you think of something with a long history, like the KKK. When you say ‘alt-right’ it sounds like something new and alternative, very similar to alt delete, when you write something completely senseless. In that newness, people feel that they’re part of sticking it to the man, nothing like ending a debate, by pressing the block button, to silence any questions someone may want to ask the journalist.”

Amy Winehouse expression when asked if she was a Proud Boy

A few days later, he released a ten-minute video excoriating media that criticizes the Proud Boys for their uncanny similarities to Amy Winehouse dress sense. I asked him why, if he doesn’t want to be associated with Jewish singers and Hipsters, he tells the Proud Boys to dress like them. He replied, “I’m not going to let the media’s obsession with pop stars dictate what shirt we wear.” The more hated they are, the stronger their identity becomes.

This article has been written with slightly more knowledge than the original printed on new york toilet roll

if you want a laugh read here

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Ivy League Japan 1964

The Miyuki-zoku: Japan’s First Ivy Rebels

The first Japanese to adopt elements of the Ivy League Look were a youth tribe called the Miyuki-zoku, who suddenly appeared in the summer of 1964. The group’s name came from their storefront loitering on Miyuki Street in the upscale Ginza shopping neighborhood (the suffix “zoku” means subculture or social group). The Miyuki-zoku were mostly in their late teens, a mix of guys and girls, likely numbering around 700 at the trend’s peak. Since they were students, they would arrive in Ginza wearing school uniforms and have to change in to their trendy duds in cramped café bathrooms.

And what duds they were. The Miyuki-zoku were devotees of classic American collegiate style. The uniform was button-down oxford cloth shirts, madras plaid, high-water trousers in khaki and white, penny loafers, and three-button suit jackets. Everything was extremely slim. The guys wore their hair in an exact seven-three part, which was new for Japan. They were also famous for carrying around their school uniforms inside of rolled-up brown paper grocery bags.

What lead to the sudden arrival of the Miyuki-zoku? Although Japanese teens had been looking to America since 1945 for style inspiration, these particular youth were not copying Princeton or Columbia students directly. In fact, Japanese kids at this time rarely got a chance to see Americans other than the ever-present US soldiers.

The Miyuki-zoku had found the Ivy look through a new magazine called Heibon Punch. The periodical was targeted to Japan’s growing number of wealthy urban youth, and part of its editorial mission was to tell kids how to dress. The editors advocated the Ivy League Look, which at the time was basically only available in the form of domestic brand VAN. Kensuke Ishizu of VAN had discovered the look in the 1950s and pushed it as an alternative to the slightly thuggish big-shouldered, high-waisted, mismatched jacket-and-pants look that dominated Japanese men’s style throughout the 1950s. As an imported look, Ivy League fashion felt cutting-edge and sophisticated to Tokyo teens, and this fit perfectly with Heibon Punch‘s mission of giving Baby Boomers a style of their own.

When the magazine arrived in the spring 1964, readers all went out and became Ivy adherents. Parents and authorities, however, were hardly thrilled with a youth tribe of American style enthusiasts. The first strike against the Miyuki-zoku is that the guys — gasp! — would blow dry their hair. This was seen as a patently feminine thing to do.

More critically, the Miyuki-zoku picked the wrong summer to hang out in Ginza. Japan was preparing for the 1964 Olympics, which would commence in October. Tokyo was in the process of removing every last eyesore — wooden garbage cans, street trolleys, the homeless — anything that would possibly be offending to foreign visitors. The Olympics was not just a sports event, but would be Japan’s return into the global community after its ignoble defeat of World War II, and nothing could go wrong.

So authorities lay awake at night with the fear that foreigners would come to Japan and see kids in tight high-water pants hanging out in front of prestigious Ginza stores. Neighborhood leaders desperately wanted to eradicate the Miyuki-zoku before October, so they went to Ishizu of VAN and asked him to intervene. VAN organized a “Big Ivy Style Meet-up” at Yamaha Hall, and cops helped put 200 posters across Ginza to make sure the Miyuki-zoku showed up. Anyone who came to the event got a free VAN bag — which was the bag for storing your normal clothing during loitering hours. They expected 300 kids, but 2,000 showed up. Ishizu gave the keynote address, where he told everyone to knock it off with the lounging in Ginza. Most acquiesced, but not all.

So on September 19, 1964, a huge police force stormed Ginza and hauled off 200 kids in madras plaid and penny loafers. Eighty-five were processed at nearby Tsukiji jail. The kids got the message and never came back, and that was the end of the Miyuki-zoku.

Starting in 1945, Japanese authorities generally viewed all Western youth fashion as a delinquent subculture. Despite looking relatively conservative in style compared to the other biker gangs and greasy-haired rebels, the Miyuki-zoku were still caught up in this delinquent narrative. In fact, they were actually the first middle-class youth consumers buying things under the direction of the mainstream media. It was Japanese society that was simply not ready for the idea that youth fashion could be part of the marketplace.

After the Miyuki-zoku, however, Ivy became the de facto look for fashionable Japanese men, and the “Ivy Tribe” that followed faced little of the harassment seen by its predecessor. The Miyuki-zoku may have lost the battle of Ginza, but they won the war for Ivy League style. — W. DAVID MARX

As the Ivy League style swept across the globe. The British Modernist ‘Mods’ subculture adopted the clothing, modifying it into a very British subculture, with a new more aggressive edge. The Skinheads

Bracknell Skinheads 1970

W. David Marx is a writer living in Tokyo whose work has appeared in GQ, Brutus, Nylon, and Best Music Writing 2009, among other publications. He is currently Tokyo City Editor of CNNGo and Chief Editor of web journal Néojaponisme.

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Scam Music Agents Exposed by BBC

Musicians hit by ‘management scam’

By Guy Lynn and George GreenwoodBBC News

  • 29 March 2018
    • More information added by subcultz
Media captionArtists say management company BMU has disappeared with their money.

A music company “scam” has left artists thousands of pounds out of pocket, with one singer saying she now faces being made homeless because of her losses.

In an apparent fraud, management firm Band Management Universal (BMU) charged up to £4,000 for services and continued to sign clients despite having numerous complaints about not meeting promises.

Head of the Musicians’ Union Horace Trubridge called it the worst scam he had seen in the past 20 years.

BMU could not be reached for comment.

The company, registered in Farringdon, London, has shut its website and email accounts and cancelled its phones.

‘Hate campaign’

Singer Sarah Kaloczi said she paid £2,000 to BMU for a contract that was supposed to include music production, marketing, gigs and tours, as well as help to secure a recording contract.

The company failed to deliver these services or refund her money and she now faces being evicted from her flat.

“They took everything I had put my heart and soul into and just shattered it into pieces,” she said.

Sarah
Image captionMs Kaloczi said she was harassed by BMU for speaking out

She claims she suffered a “hate campaign” after she spoke out.

She received abusive messages attacking her looks and mental health, and received a number of targeted negative reviews after complaining about the company online.

Ms Kaloczi has been signed off work for 18 months with anxiety, depression and panic attacks, lost her job and could not bring herself to perform for a year afterwards.

“At 27, I don’t want to have to keep falling on my dad. I just want to make him proud, look after him for a change,” she said.

Jasper
Image captionJapser Roelofsen and Counting Wolves lost £3,840

The BBC spoke to more than 20 artists telling a similar story, but the true number affected could be much higher.

Some said they got limited services from BMU, such as photography or studio sessions, while others received nothing.

Over time the company became harder and harder for artists to reach. BMU also failed to pay some contractors.

Artists said the apparent head of BMU, known to them as Matthias, would spend hours on the phone talking to them about his plans for their careers, but they never met him in person and suspected he used a false name.

They said they did meet some BMU representatives, but claimed the people seemed to have been hired in for the meetings.

‘Burned’ money

Dutch singer Jasper Roelofsen said Matthias pressured him to pay, bombarding him and his band at the time, Counting Wolves, with messages promising them the chance to work with well-known artists.

Mr Roelofsen said Matthias told him “the quicker you get the money to me, the quicker we can get started”.

The band never received the promised services and lost £3,840.

“We could have used that money to do something useful for our careers, but instead we burned it.”

Horace
Image captionHorace Trubridge described BMU as a scam

Mr Trubridge described BMU as the worst example of music fraud he had seen in the past 20 years.

“Oh, it is a scam, definitely. There’s no doubt about it,” he said.

“As soon as we hear that an artist has been asked to put their hand in their own pocket by a management company, big alarm bells start to ring.”

He said paying management companies for services was widely seen as unethical in the industry, though was not uncommon.

Bought to our attention in around 2015 is Inspired Artists Agency Touring

Another ‘Agent’ very active in the Brighton area is run by a guy called Ben Hylands, called Inspired artists, using exactly the same tactics as BMU. Often preying on BIMM student bands, and foreign acts wishing to tour the UK. A representative will show up at a gig and tell the young band how they have potential, and arrange a meeting in a cafe with the ‘Agent’. And for a staggered fee in excess of £2000 he will launch a PR campaign, which turns out to consist of a few blog websites and internet radio stations. The website will be shown to the new act, showing a few established artists, which are funded by the scam money, to unaware artists. A tour of UK venues, which if the band does get a booking, it will be a non paying show, or door split, sometimes at the other end of the country, with bands paying the same scam agent, to an empty room. For this you will pay Ben Hylands another £25 plus your own travel and all other out of pocket expenses. The more the band pays, the higher their headline status. None of the young bands will appear on the website, until their ‘profiles’ are built, so these bands have no reference to the other bands , to ask about experiences

The sales pitch used, is that after the £2000+ is paid the band will get to play The Great Escape Festival in Brighton, which in fact is the ‘Alternative Escape‘ a local bar hired from the Great Escape Festival designed for independant promoters and companies to showcase their acts, which is sold to anyone with £500 spare. These scam agents, will do just about very minimum to uphold the contract, staying just within the law, consisting of a mail out to venues, magazines and blogs. The non paid tour, The festival. showcasing 16 bands in a day. £32000!!! Not a bad days work

when one young band was cancelled on route to a venue in Tunbridge Wells we looked into it. The band were told they were off the bill because their music did not fit with the Inspired Artists headline act, which was a boy band paying several £1000’s by a wealthy banker father. The following night was to be the Nottingham Rock City, the young band noticing they weren’t on any posters or event information from the venue, when we called them, no such booking had taken place. We contacted Tunbridge Wells venue The Forum, who told us Inspired artists had bombarded them with offers of free, non paid bands to be added to any event as opening acts, after our discussion they told us they would no longer be dealing with this agent.

When we approached Ben Hylands on he phone he became aggressive and using the words ‘You dont know who i am’,then blaming his work placement unpaid student staff, refused to meet or refund the young band. We then contacted the MU who told us that unless the young acts are members of the union, there was nothing they would do, other than take note of this agent.

Its about time the law is extended for the minimum wage to apply to musicians and the entertainment industry overall. Lottery and Government arts funding into grass roots music, protection and licencing on live venues, which over the years attrtacts £billions into the UK economy.

If you have more information about this or other stories you would like BBC London to investigate, you can email in confidence: investigationsbbclondon@bbc.co.uk