So I want to talk about a band that most of you have probably never heard of. And I want to talk about a song that was made by people who were willing to get their hands dirty for what they believed. And I want to talk about a moment in British history that feels uncomfortably close to right now.
The band is Blaggers ITA. And the song is “The Way We Operate.”
Let me give you the context, because you need it. Blaggers ITA, the ITA stands for “In The Area”,were a punk band from London. And they weren’t just a band that had politics. They were a band that was politics. They were explicitly, militantly anti-fascist. They had close links with Anti-Fascist Action(AFA) and Red Action. They donated money to those organizations. They used their gigs as recruiting grounds for the movement.
And here’s the thing that makes them different from every other “political band” you’ve ever heard: they weren’t just singing about the struggle. They were in the struggle. They were showing up. They were getting into fights. They were part of the physical resistance against the neo-Nazi groups that were active in Britain in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Blood & Honour. Combat 18. These weren’t abstract threats. They were real people who wanted to hurt real people, and Blaggers ITA were among the people who said: not on our watch.
The singer was a guy named Matty Blagg. And Matty had a story. A complicated one. He’d been involved with the British Movement, a fascist organization, as a teenager. And then he went to prison. And in prison, another prisoner introduced him to Marxism. And he came out a different person. He came out dedicated to fighting the very thing he’d once been part of .
That’s the context. That’s the soil this song grew out of.
Now. “The Way We Operate.” It came out in 1992. It was a 7-inch single on Fluffy Bunny Records, which is a great label name, by the way, just objectively. And it was a direct response to the Rodney King beating. The video. The acquittal. The uprising in Los Angeles.
You remember that? March 1991. Rodney King, a Black man, beaten by four LAPD officers. Videotaped. Fifty-six baton blows. And then, April 1992, an all-white jury acquits them. And Los Angeles burns.
And Blaggers ITA, a bunch of punk kids from London, hear that and they don’t just feel bad about it. They connect it. They connect it to everything else. And that’s what the song does. It’s not just about Rodney King. It’s about the system that produces Rodney King.
The song has these lyrics that just… they land like punches. “Self respect and self defence / from his very own lips—Malcolm X / our freedom can’t wait, so dig this / it’s the bullet for them, not the ballot box”.
That’s the thesis. That’s the whole thing. “The bullet for them, not the ballot box.” That’s not a metaphor. That’s not a poetic flourish. That’s a declaration of intent. It’s saying: we’ve tried the system. We’ve tried the voting. We’ve tried the petitions. And the system keeps producing the same results. So what’s left?
And then there’s the internationalism. The song connects the dots. “West Belfast, Brixton, Broadwater Farm, Soweto, East LA, it’s all the same thing” . That’s the line that matters. Because that’s what the establishment wants you to forget. It wants you to think that what happens in Los Angeles is separate from what happens in Belfast, which is separate from what happens in South Africa, which is separate from what happens in Tottenham. It wants you to think these are local problems with local solutions. But they’re not. They’re the same problem. The same system. The same machine. And the same people are getting crushed by it everywhere.
And the music itself. This is the part that still gets me. It’s not a dirge. It’s not a wall of noise. It’s got this groove. This bounce. There’s a trumpet. There’s a rap section. There’s sampling. It sounds like the news. It sounds like a helicopter circling overhead. It sounds like the dancefloor of a club where the revolution is being planned.
And that’s the genius of it. Because if the song was just angry, you could dismiss it. If it was just noise, you could turn it off. But you can’t turn off something that makes you move. You can’t ignore something that gets into your body. The rhythm is the recruitment tool. The groove is the Trojan horse. You come for the beat, and you leave with a fist in the air.
The record itself has this inscription in the runout groove: “Rodney King, are you still proud to be an American” . That’s not subtle. That’s not metaphorical. That’s a direct question, pressed into the vinyl, asking a man who was nearly beaten to death by the state whether he still believes in the country that did it to him.
And the inner sleeve of the record has this note. It’s about a graffiti slogan in Los Angeles. “L.A.P.D. 187.” And it explains: “187 is the Police radio code for a killing. Bluntly the slogan means ‘KILL COPS’”. They put that on the record. They wanted you to know what the people on the ground were saying. They weren’t sanitizing it. They weren’t softening it. They were amplifying it.
Now. Here’s where it gets complicated. Because Blaggers ITA signed to EMI in 1993. A major label. Parlophone. And people accused them of selling out. And their argument was: we can reach more people this way. We can spread the message further . And they did. They used the money for promo on full-page anti-fascist ads. They used tour support to fund political groups. They got on TV. They got in the papers. They reached people who would never have heard of AFA otherwise .
But then Matty Blagg allegedly punched a journalist. A Melody Maker writer named Dave Simpson, who had written that Matty could never reform his fascist past. And Matty punched him. And the whole thing collapsed. Festivals cancelled. Press boycott. Dropped from EMI. Band fell apart. That’s as much as anyone can tell from the outside of the situation.
Matty died in 2000. Drug overdose. RIP Matty.
And I think about that a lot. I think about what it means to be a person who was on the wrong side, who saw the light, who spent the rest of his life trying to make up for it, and who couldn’t escape the shadow of what he’d been. I think about how sometimes the world doesn’t let you change. How it keeps holding up the worst thing you ever were and saying: this is who you are. And how sometimes, the pressure of that makes you do something that proves them right.
“The Way We Operate” is a song about a way of being in the world. It’s a song that says: if the system won’t listen, you make it listen. If the ballot box doesn’t work, you find something that does. It’s a song that came out of a specific moment, Rodney King, the LA uprising, the fight against fascism in Britain, but it’s a song that could have been written yesterday. Because the system is still operating the same way. And the people are still getting crushed the same way. And somewhere, right now, someone is hearing this song for the first time and feeling something click into place.
The dinosaurs. The fascists. The cops. The system. They’re all still here. But so is the song.
Alright. I think that’s it. I’ve said what I needed to say. Listen to the song. It’s worth the five minutes. And then go do something. Anything. Just don’t just sit there.
Let’s get out of here.
