- by Nick Soulsby
- Description
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'Born of Struggle, Living in Hope:
The Anarcho-Punk Lives of the Centro Iberico 1971-1983 - by Nick Soulsby |
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story of the Centro Iberico, a legendary music venue of the UK's postpunk
era, has been fragmentary and disjointed, its tangled twelve-year history
never properly documented before now. Its tale spans the Spanish Civil War
as we follow an anarchist hero who spilt blood for his beliefs, fought the
Nazis, fought Franco's fascists as part of the resistance, endured a death
sentence commuted to twenty years' imprisonment, before devoting his twilight
years to evangelizing his cause from exile in London. His survival and the
inauguration of the Centro Iberico were thanks to London's anarchist underground,
which maintained a foothold and kept the torches burning despite harassment
and disinterest, before finding new life amid punk's co-opting of 'anarchy'
as a youth culture phenomenon. Punks and political anarchists rallied together
to support the victims of an egregious and shambolic antiterror trial. The
Centro Iberico's peripatetic journey ended as it came into contact with
the squatters occupying an abandoned school, morphing from its activist
roots to become a creative hub which gave refuge to the residents of the
anarchy center before the first murmurs of the '80s construction boom finally
ended its existence. The Centro Iberico was the only consistently established
anarchist center that survived throughout the decade, forming a key connection
between the international political prisoner support offered by the Anarchist
Black Cross, the anarchist groups abroad that fueled the Black Flag newspaper,
while sustaining its own activities in support of the cause. - Description |
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'Born
of Struggle, Living in Hope: The Anarcho-Punk Lives of the Centro Iberico'
1971-1983 Publisher: P M Press
(January 8th, 2026)
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