Punks Without Borders: a conversation between the artistic masterminds behind Chinese and British punk
They are no longer part of the punk music scene: Jamie Reid has left London to worship seasons through an anarchy sign sowed to a Cornish field and Bo Lu has left Beijing, finishing a comic reinventing the Book of Genesis into an alien conquest anthology. My respective conversations with them overlapped in the punkest way possible.
Cover art illustrated and designed by me. Sampled from a Chinese Cultural Revolution era propaganda poster with added elements of the Sex Pistols. The original poster reads“Chairman Mao Leads Us Forward”which is adapted into “The Sex Pistols Leads Us Forward”.
(The interview with Bo Lu has been translated from Mandarin Chinese to English)
A decade after zealous youths were violently quelled yelling “give me democracy or give me death” in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, disaffected youths gulped down 15p Yangging Beer while screaming “anarchy in the P.R.C.” in a ramshackle cul-de-sac. The slam-dancing, angsty waifs in the crowd grew up studying Confucian virtues and had never experienced such ferocious sounds. The contagious, nerve-racking chords liberated their innate primitive energy that fueled the moshpit rife with alcohol, sweat and piss. The malcontents on the stage knew little about what they were doing — slamming out-of-tune Strats and bursting out raging moans. Barely permeating through the haze of tobacco smoke, the dull lights revealed colourful mohawks, tattered tartan bondage trousers on beat-down Doctor Martens, and a yellowing leather jacket hand-painted with the line “punk enlightens China.” An illustrated, crucified Jesus was stepping on a funky serpent on a photocopied poster nailed to the grimy metallic doors, declaring Christmas Eve in 1998 at Scream Club to be a night-long marathon of rebellious noises presented by the Boredom Contingent.
To Brits who were out pogoing to no-future anthems in the late 70s, spending a night at Scream Club in 1998 means walking down memory lane, only the safety-pinned Queen’s portrait replaced by a Stratocaster-crossed hammer-and-sickle. The Boredom Contingent is a collective of bands who, surprisingly, survived bombarding the Beijing underground. It was after all an era when desecration of any national symbol, like Jamie Reid’s distressed Union Jack for the Pistols, meant a twenty-year sentence.
The resemblance is more than apparent, but the Boredom Contingent isn’t another rip-off of Sex Pistols trying to relive their notoriety. Entrenched monetarism, political disarray, and the dismissed future of the youth brought the Pistols to subvert state and media indoctrination. These Chinese youths who were part of a helplessly populous 1.3 billion-people nation could not reform the gloomy economy nor could they incite a protest under authoritarian surveillance. They instead inherited the same rage the Pistols petrified Britain with two decades ago and brought the revolution to the underground. They were the future of the nation making changes in the most enjoyable way possible.
The ephemerality of Scream Club resembled that of the Pistols, lasting only two years. Bo Lu sat outside of the empty club as he stared into the murals he painted on the wall in the cramped space he both opened and closed down. Lu continued this lucid dream and founded Scream Records, under which he managed the bands born out of the Boredom Contingent. The Sex Pistols had Jamie Reid for visuals and Malcolm McLaren as manager, and Scream had Lu taking care of both. After a decade, some bands became too rebellious to exist, some turned to the commercial mainstream, and some became too old to rock. Scream Records still exists today, but Lu is long gone in Sweden, reclusive like Jamie Reid in Liverpool before Reid passed away in August 2023.
Reid refused to be interviewed. “Jamie never talks about his past and his teeth are falling out so you can’t really understand what he’s saying,” said John Marchant, the gallery owner representing Reid who has also been struggling to get him to talk about his past. Marchant’s brain is likely the most comprehensive biography of Jamie Reid one could find, and I was fortunate enough to have him tell the stories on behalf of Reid.
After a series of internet manhunts and referrals, Lu agreed to tell his stories too. The two punk artistic masterminds have proved to resemble each other beyond their professional involvement with punk (and also that they both refrained from talking about punk). Even though Reid no longer creates ransom-note style décollages for the Pistols and Lu no longer creates funky illustrations for the Boredom Contingent, they started talking about their connection with nature. Respective conversations with them somehow, without being referenced to one another, synced.
Nature and Spirituality
When asked about their recent work, Jamie has been creating contemplative landscape paintings in the fields of Heligan, Cornwall. “He has a whole cycle of festivals to deal with at eight points of the year, the winter solstice is the next one.” And Lu “has been painting with both oil pastel and pastel, documenting the scenic and cultural encounters in Scandinavia.”
Reid’s Druidry inspired his belief in the “wheel of time,” which tries to encourage people to think about the turning of the year. Met with my confused face, Marchant gave an example: instead of realising the change in seasons only when the temperature drops, be mindful of the universe’s patterns. “We’re very detached from the seasons and the turning of the year, but when you’re mindful, every six weeks there’s a new thing worth celebrating,” says Marchant. “The winter solstice might be the darkest time of the year, but every day after, the days just get brighter.”
“I find myself resonating with Edvard Munch a lot after moving to Sweden and seeing what he depicted in his painting of nature,” said Lu, talking about internalising the landscape into personal emotions, such as fear and optimism, as the Norwegian painter did.
Lu and Reid are all about bonding with Earth. “‘There seems to be ancient knowledge that we don’t have anymore!’ I can hear Jamie saying that,” laughed Marchant. “We completely lost touch with so many of these importances — in some ways, it’s kind of like dropping our conceptions.”
Spirituality and Scepticism
“Jesus was a black, Arab, Gypsy, bisexual socialist shaman educated by Druids and Brahmins!”
Lu talked about his latest comic book Evolution, which “no publishers have shown interest in publishing for being too unorthodox.” In the 130-page fantasy, Lu, a devout Christian, responds to Paul Gaughin’s three questions — ‘Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?’ — by reinventing the biblical genesis and the evolution theory into a narrative about aliens colonising Earth, breeding Adam and Eve with their DNA, and galactic warfare that led to the evolution of humans and the birth of civilisations (the story ended with the birth of Jesus).
“Throughout my life, my affinity for Christian ideologies grew but at the same time the ‘religion of modern science’ made me consider the possibility of an alien-created world,” explained Lu. “After all, God created the universe and the universe is so vast, nothing is impossible.”
“Indeed, we've been honouring the nurturing qualities of the planet for thousands of years and it’s only when Abrahamic religions came in that it reverted to worshipping other people,” said Marchant playfully, as it reminded him of Reid’s illustration titled “Jesus was a Black, Arab, Gypsy, bisexual socialist shaman educated by Druids and Brahmins!” Jokes aside, Marchant reminded that “there is more in the world that we don’t understand than what we do, keep your mind open and free.”
Scepticism and Punk
“Youths today have no idea who their enemy is and what they’re fighting against, fetters in the past take physical forms, shackles today are invisible.”
Although they’ve detached themselves from punk, they still manifested punk ideals in nature. And through the connection with nature, punk becomes an energy still deeply connected in their lives. “We live in a kind of hyper-exploitative culture and the main raw material of this hyper-exploitative culture is us,” explained Marchant. “Really, fuck that, excuse my language, but truly, it’s just a charade.”
Lu doesn’t call himself a punk, as he thinks his generation, born in the 70s, was plagued too deeply by Confucian ideologies propagandised by state education. He is, however, “a great admirer of punks,” because they criticise everything including themselves. “Youths today have no idea who their enemy is and what they’re fighting against,” lamented Lu, who thinks punk will die with his generation. ''Fetters in the past took physical forms, shackles today are invisible.”
Reid’s great uncle George was the chief Druid and a Clapham South MP who organised rallies for workers’ rights. “We tend to dissociate them, but about 120 years ago it was fairly common that civil and spiritual rights were linked,” explained Marchant. “Jamie’s work still associates these two things because punk is about fulfilling your potential and not being put down by people who want to keep you in a box.” Activism for social and political justice has always been a big part of Reid’s practice, from fighting against the poll tax to his campaigns for Pussy Riot.
Lu has also been involved in a “movement” since 2017 (referring to the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong and the more recent anti-China protest in 2019). “I am still fighting with fellow ‘warriors’ around the world,” said Lu. “In fact, I don’t spend the majority of my time drawing for fun, I’m participating in a ‘digital web revolution’ that resists using the power of the internet.” Over the years, Lu has been illustrating posters advocating for freedom of speech, the right to protest, and democracy to combat propaganda online.
This connection between nature, spirituality, and subversion has transcended time and location and is embedded into the minds of punks around the world. In essence, activism is the child of questioning that results from open-mindedness that feeds back into spirituality and nature. Both Reid and Lu are reluctant to speak about their involvement with punk, but perhaps what they’re doing right now is punker than any punk ever has been.
Edits have been made on this piece regarding the passing of the late Jamie Reid in August 2023.
