DAILY TERROR PART 5: PLAYING WITH FIRE

Click here for part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4

In our previous instalment, ‘Daily Terror part 4: On a forlorn mission’, I mentioned that I didn’t believe Pedder had any genuine nazi sympathies – that even in his sketchiest period he may have been a patriotic leftist at heart. Sure, he knew some unsavoury characters, and sometimes, when he’d had one too many, his right arm went up to salute the sun ‘just for fun’ – but it didn’t mean much.

Well, I’m going to have a harder time maintaining that position now. In the meantime, dear reader, I stumbled across an interview that Pedder gave in 1987, namely to White Noise, a pseudo-skinzine published by the British National Front’s musical arm, the White Noise Club. How did this come about? Pedder thanked a “German nationalist comrade who made it possible”, and while that could refer to many people, it isn’t too far-fetched to guess that the German nationalist comrade in question might be Pedder’s mate Ulrich ‘Uhl’ Grossmann. In the 80s, Grossmann edited the Clockwork Orange skinzine and was an activist in the National-Democratic Party’s youth league, which, like the British National Front at the time, boasted Strasserite and Third Positionist currents.

So, what did Pedder have to say? When asked about the political positions of the band, he replied that both Achim [Brüning] and him were “patriots”, but that Micha and H. Rald [Harald Brüning] were “not interested in politics, only in being musicians”. Were any band members politically active, the interviewer wanted to know? “We have good contacts with some people in the German national movement, particularly in the youth groups”, Pedder offered, “but none of us is a member of any party”. At the end, he signed off with: “We are all in the same boat, so I wish all the members and the [White Noise] Club itself all the best for the future. All for Europe! All for the White Power movement! Thank you everyone!”

Cough, cough… How do I explain this away? Agreeing to an interview in a drunken haze is one thing. But agreeing to give an interview, reading the questions, crafting the replies, and even mailing them off so consistently shitfaced that you never once realise what you’re doing is unlikely, even for a heavy drinker like Pedder. So, what motivated him? Was he dreaming of playing gigs alongside ‘illustrious’ RAC acts somewhere in Britain? Did his bandmates even know about the interview?

I concede I don’t have much to say in Pedder’s defence at this point – and if you were to tell me, “forget it, the guy was obviously sailing close to fascism at the time”, I wouldn’t argue with you for too long.

At most, I’d offer some context. Flipping through the pages of said NF ‘skinzine’, it seems that many European Oi bands agreed to be interviewed, including combos that later swore they’d always been apolitical and who, in a sense, probably were. I’d point my finger at two contributing factors. Firstly, opportunism: in the second half of the 80s, when skinhead bands of any stripe were pariahs as far as labels and promoters were concerned, some fairly moderate bands seemed to fall over themselves to stress their patriotic credentials. After all, the White Noise Club, Rock-O-Rama and Rebelles Europeens provided recording and gigging opportunities, plus international exposure – and an instant audience to boot.

Secondly, there was plain old group dynamics – i.e. peer pressure. Talking to people who were skinheads in the 80s, they’ll often tell you “that’s just the way it was”. And I guess it’s true: that’s just the way it was. Skins allowed themselves to be dragged along by their mates or turned a blind eye in the name of unity. Pedder’s case was nothing special. There were plenty like him – people who were friendly with punks in the daytime, but didn’t stop their mates from bashing them at night. Folks who swore they were apolitical, then indulged in drunken stiff-arm salutes when hanging out with a different crowd.

And so it happened that Pedder Teumer, ostensibly a patriotic German working-class skinhead, signed off with “all for white power”– an Anglo-American slogan based on a concept invented by slavers from the confederate US south: the so-called ‘white race’.

Either way, Daily Terror kept a fairly low profile for a while, and the first piece of vinyl they dropped after a three-year gap, the Deutsches Bier EP, was hardly worth the wait. The title track was like something you’d expect to hear at the Munich Octoberfest – musically and lyrically a low-point in the band’s career.

German beer
The pinnacle of nature
Forget about imports
We like it pure

 ‘Jubilirium’ on the flipside celebrated Daily Terror’s imminent 10-year anniversary:

Too leftwing for some
Too rightwing for others
Who hasn’t mouthed off about us yet
We only added fuel to the fire
And in the end nobody stood in our way

An entry in the self-glorification genre, which has a long tradition among German skinhead bands, ‘Jubilirium’ was a decent enough mid-tempo rock tune, and much the same can be said about the third song on the EP, ‘Hier und heute’. Notably, this was their first record since 1981 not released by Aggressive Rockproduktionen (AGR), but self-released by Pedder’s own ‘Skan Productions’ mini-label. Evidently, AGR label owner Ulrich Walterbach – who, as readers may remembers, felt “creeped out” by Pedder from 1985 onward – had finally decided to draw a line (which didn’t stop him from reiussing two Daily Terror tracks on a punk compilation titled Deutschpunk Kampflieder in 1989).

Meanwhile, the drift of the German skinhead scene to the far right, especially among teenagers and newbies, continued. Old-school bands like Daily Terror didn’t do much for this crowd. In March and April 1989, the first-generation German Oi group Vortex appeared on bills alongside nazi bands Kahlkopf and Commando Pernod. Though not noted for their Trotskyism, Vortex were physically attacked on stage when throwing in a couple of reggae covers, including ‘Skinhead Moonstomp’. As far as the meatheads kitted out in 14-eye Ranger boots and camo flight jackets were concerned, reggae was ‘n***r music’. The band split up shortly after the incident.

1989 also saw the release of Der Tollschock Sampler, a rare attempt in those dark days in Germany to do an Oi compilation of sorts (in the original Bushell sense of ‘working class lads playing a variety of music styles’), not to mention one that contained absolutely no chants of “Dooooooitshland”. Tollschock came about on Pedder’s initiative. It contained new songs by Herbärds, an early skinhead band from Stuttgart, and Beck’s Pistols, an early 80s Oi group from Duisburg reformed at Pedder’s insistence. Daily Terror contributed ‘Hey Braunschweig’, a great football hooligan anthem, once more dedicated to Pedder’s local firm: “We’re running through the streets, fun’s the name of the game… we are the elite, nonsense is ignored, and whoever interferes is knocked of his feet”. Secondly, ‘Ein Freund’: this one was a cover version of a popular German song from the Weimar Republic, originally written for the movie Die Drei von der Tankstelle, where it was performed by Berlin’s acapella sextet Comedian Harmonists. The lyrics went:

A friend, a good friend
that is the best thing on earth
A friend always remains a friend
even when the whole world is falling apart
So do not ever feel sad
even if your sweetheart has stopped loving you
A friend, a good friend
that is the greatest treasure there is

In my opinion, the cover version is fantastic and remains one of my favourite Daily Terror recordings. The original Comedian Harmonists’ records are worth checking out too if you’re interested in the pop music of the Weimar era. Sadly, their career was stopped short when the nazi regime passed new ‘race laws’ in 1935, which forced some members of the group into exile.

In 1990, Daily Terror finally released their new album Abrechnung. The cover artwork was kept in the colours of the German flag, and the picture on the back cover allowed a glimpse into the band’s rehearsal room, adorned by a black-red-golden flag with the coat of arms of West Germany (the ‘federal eagle’) in the middle.

Allow me a little digression: In the 80s, the black-red-gold colours of the German flag were often worn as patches on the sleeve of skinheads’ flight jackets. Although they were often perceived as ‘far right’, and sometimes worn by those of a far-right mindset, black-red-gold are actually the colours of the German republic, dating back to the liberation wars of 1813. They were used as the official German colours by the revolutionary parliament of 1848 and the 1918-1933 Weimar Republic, hated and reviled by the nazi regime, and resurrected by both parts of divided post-war Germany. German leftists might refer to black-red-gold as the bourgeois flag of Germany, and not without historical justification. But then, East Germany used the same colours – and East Germany was many things, but not bourgeois. The far right, in contrast, tends to use the Wilhelmian colours black-white-red.

Anyway, back to Daily Terror. Personally, I love every note on the album, but that probably has to do with memories more than anything. Objectively speaking, it wasn’t their strongest effort so far. Songs like ‘Glücksrad’ or ‘Liebeskasper’ were fairly average, not to mention the inclusion of the abysmal ‘Deutsches Bier’. The instrumental title track was filler.

But the album really delivered the goods with ‘Gib niemals auf’, a brilliant reworking of the Bowie-penned Mott the Hoople tune ‘All the Young Dudes’, containing personal lyrics about fighting on against all odds and so on (which was pretty much the central theme of the album).

So you’re standing there wondering
Are you in the right or not
With all that hate around you

You look back on all those years
many a friend has proved to be false
But you stand tall
You have never cowered

You’re banned from bars, banned from stadiums
Banned from city centres, banned from speaking…
Well, so what?

Never give up
They can’t wait till you do

Secondly, there was the aforementioned football hooligan ditty ‘Hey Braunschweig’, every bit as fun as its predecessor ‘Schluckspechte’ of 1984. And finally, ‘Dornenweg’ – another song about personal struggle, containing a Slavic-sounding melody line played on a mandolin in the chorus. One of Daily Terror’s greatest, the tune once more shows the musical influence of Ton Steine Scherben, the legendary anarchist band from 1970s West Berlin.

It has to be said that the new, additional guitarist Helge was a weak link. His predecessor H Rald from Gefühl & Härte and Durchbruch, though an experienced rock musician, had a sparse and tasteful style, nicely accentuating the songs without using too much overdrive. Helge, on the other hand, was a shredder stupidly running up and down pentatonic scales on his distorted guitar. Even so, Abrechnung earned itself an abysmal review in Metal Hammer – a German metal mag that was lionising the rueful ex-skinhead band Böhse Onkelz at the time – which gave it the worst possible rating and dubbed the album “pseudo-punk” (blissfully unaware of the band’s long-standing history on the German underground punk scene).

Either way, for me Abrechnung concludes the ‘classic’ period of Daily Terror, i.e. the five albums starting with Schmutzige Zeiten in 1982. The band also played some impressive gigs in that year – and rather more disciplined ones than e.g. the infamous one in Schöppenstedt ’87. There was, for instance, a glorious performance in Stuttgart on 20^th December 1990, where Daily Terror were billed alongside a number of other bands at a ‘punk Christmas party’. The anti-fascist punk combo Hass cancelled last minute – according to rumours, they didn’t wish to share stages with the ill-reputed Daily Terror. Not an unusual occurence at the time, but something that Daily Terror would later vehemently deny had ever happened.

The Christmas gig in Stuttgart was also their first with new guitarist Lutz. Helge, the shredder from Abrechnung, had gone too far: “When we played in Moers – our first gig with Helge on guitar – we noticed that the gentleman didn’t really feel part of the band”, Pedder explained in a 1990 interview with the south German skinzine S.O.S.-Bote. “Instead, he wanted to stand out with solo guitar interludes, all of which failed miserably because he hadn’t practised them… After that we decided to go our separate ways”.

This was the year of German reunification – or annexation of East Germany by West Germany, depending on your perspective. Around that time, certain things began kicking off across the country that would make Pedder’s play with fire very hard to justify to himself or others any longer. Something had to give.

Click here for PART 6: A TURNING POINT.