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Daniel Rachel, "This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika, and the Third Reich" (Akashic Books, 2026)
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- [00:01]
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- [01:44]
Daniel Rachel
Welcome to the New Books Network
- [01:48]
Bradley Morgan
hello, welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Bradley Morgan and I am joined today by my guest, Daniel Rachel. Daniel is a musician and the author of several books, including Too Much Too, the Two Tones Record Story, Isle of Conversations with Great British Songwriters, and the Lost Album of the what if the Beatles Hadn't Split Up? Their latest book is this Ain't Rock and Roll, Pop Music, the Swastika, and the Third Reich, and is published by Akashic Books. Daniel, thanks so much for joining me today.
- [02:16]
Daniel Rachel
Pleasure.
- [02:17]
Bradley Morgan
So, to get started, can you tell us what your book is about?
- [02:20]
Daniel Rachel
This I'm Rock and Roll. It's about pop music, the Swastika, and the Third Reich. It goes through several decades, seven or eight decades worth of the history of rock and roll, and talks about Artists and groups that have used emblems from the Third Reich or the swastika and lays it all out over several hundred pages.
- [02:51]
Bradley Morgan
Well, as you mentioned, your book does explore this amazing array of artists from different genres. And within that you also go into the historical context for all of them and we won't have time to talk about everyone. But I do want to set the scene for that context because your book opens with a story about a music producer named Jack Goode who went to see a Tommy Steele concert in 1956. And. And you write that Jack might had been the first person to draw a connection between pop concerts and Nazi rallies. What did Jack witness for him to make that connection?
- [03:21]
Daniel Rachel
Yeah, well there's. There's absolutely no hint of, of accusation towards Tommy Steele, a British pop star in the 1950s. It was more to do with the observation that he made when he was talking to Maureen Cleave. Maureen Cleave, famously the person that spoke to John Lennon when he said that we mean more to kids than Jesus and caused the whole furore in the mid-60s. But that same very Maureen Cleave spoke to this producer of many, many British pop programs and the most popular of the era and just made a simple observation that the adoration of the audience bestowed on the star Tommy Steele reminded him of a Nuremberg rally and the Nazi party faithful looking to Adolf Hitler as their hero, their pinner. And as far as I could find, this was the first analogy bringing the Third Reich into rock and roll. Hereafter it's a juggernaut of comparison, but yeah, it was just the starting point and as I say in the opening words. And has he said he's witnessed a similar thing? That's a football match between Tottenham and Arsenal, so I could have been talking about footy.
- [04:41]
Bradley Morgan
So this Tommy Steele concert happened a decade after, after the Nazis were defeated. And this is just as when rock and roll was exploding into this major cultural force. But they still evoke this sense of wonder and especially in post war Britain. So I want to discuss with you about a couple of those British groups that grew up surrounded by reminders of the bombings. And you know, as an example, the Beatles were the biggest band on the planet by the time their film Hard Day's Night came out in 64. And you write about John Lennon giving a Nazi salute during the film's premiere in Liverpool. But however, this behavior from John wasn't new and he had been provoking audiences since the Beatles early days playing in Hamburg. What would John do on stage at those early shows?
- [05:22]
Daniel Rachel
Well, I mean, this is, you know, famous amongst Beatle aficionadios, aficionados. Um, you know, they would shout out abuse at the Germans in the audience and, you know, replicate Z Kyles and whatever else. And then, like you just said, Paul and John were photographed and filmed Zeke Hiling as they were in Australia. In fact, there's a great piece of footage and Ringo tells John off. It's just great. Stop it, John. That's really good that, you know, they were all born in the war and they played on bombies, as Paul McCartney called them, bummed out sites in Liverpool. And it was heavily bombed, of course. And they've got direct connections to people that fought in the war. And so going to Germany would have been a very strange thing for the Beatles. You know, they stopped off at Arnhem at one point and where the. Many of the war dead were buried. John stayed in the van, apparently. But, you know, when John bought stuff, Nancy Regalia at the port, both in Liverpool and in Hamburg, shared it out as gifts amongst the Beatles. And the fascination really was born in childhood for Lennon. John Lennon, in as much as he did ink drawings of him as Hitler. And instead of Heil Hitler, he wrote Heil John. And. And the chapter which was the extraordinary opening for me to uncover and write about was how Cynthia Lennon revealed that John's collection of Nazi memorabilia, which he also wore on his person, came into the hands of a neo Nazi. And that's quite bizarre how that happens, really. But it's very important that despite those. Despite that lampooning and mucking about on stage, John's fascination and collection was pretty much a private affair. And it didn't come into the public domain, which couldn't be the same said of many other artists in the decades to come who proudly flaunted their fascinations and used it for artistic endeavor. I don't think John Lennon was doing that.
- [07:44]
Bradley Morgan
You mentioned this auction and that was one during the early 90s that Cynthia Lennon auctioned a lot of John's early stuff. And this included this. This. Those drawings weren't part of the auction, but she had given them to a neo Nazi later. Could you tell us about that?
- [08:00]
Daniel Rachel
Well, yeah, I mean, I. I was trying to kind of tease with the book really, to kind of say, there's a great story to go and read if you buy the book, you know, so. But, but yeah, I mean, she tried. He. They met at the auction house, Cynthia Lennon and this guy who was a dealer and was very well and was knowledgeable and she wanted to get rid of the stuff because the dealers in central London were reluctant to sell it, as you can imagine. You know, she's the Queen's auctioneers, you know, as it was then. And, and so it. That's how I came to know about a lot of the stuff. And, and, and her conversation with him I found with this dealer I found on a neo Nazi website. And, and he seemed to know word for word what had gone down. Whether he had a great memory, always recording it, I don't know. But it's a sad place for such items to end up from. You know, know what John Lennon ended up representing, particularly once he formed a relationship with Yoko Ono.
- [09:08]
Bradley Morgan
Well, I'm glad you mentioned that because you write in the book that pop music reflected this dramatic art of the theater of the Third Reich with this sense of awe and often without accountability. And this point of lacking accountability is very important, especially when it comes to the Beatles because of the success and further of Beatlemania that had created this bubble around them. And, you know, you can look back in those old footage and see how they used humor as this form of defense. But a lot of that defensiveness often came through in cute and clever ways. But then there would be moments like the Nazi salutes. Considering that Lenin did come to be known as a peace advocate, what can you tell us about how that lack of accountability has shaped the Beatles legacy?
- [09:50]
Daniel Rachel
Well, I mean, you say using it in defense, I have to say throughout the book, I don't make any assumptions whatsoever about anybody or anything they did or said. And what I tried to do was go back to the source and see what literally those people said about what they did. You know, for all we know, Lenin's doing it as a form of attack. We don't know his defense. You know, so I found that really interesting. And also, whether or not journalists wrote about it and what their angle on it was and use that, I'm not being presumptuous in any way whatsoever. And I think that's really important because I'm not writing in the book to accuse or excuse. It's just to say, here's a history. This is what was said, this is what was done. If you're a fan of a particular artist, you probably know the history and the relationship with the Third Reich to that artist already. But when you collate it and put it all together, it certainly tells an overarching story. And one of the great things about John Lennon's love for Yoko Ono is what he received from her and, and she changed him Without a doubt, and made him see the world in a different way or one that was perhaps within him already, that needed to be freed. And he confronted the fact that he'd been abusive, he'd been violent in relationships and he also, you know, there's many things that, you know, you can read about, about their relationship, but it was obviously a relationship that's built on love and, and Yoko wanting John to face up to things he'd done in the past. I'm not, I'm not aware of the most this, the, the, the strongest connection to anything to do the Third Reich that I'm aware of, think of in the 70s is the concert they do when Yoko reads out a letter purportedly written by Adolf Hitler. But she doesn't declare that until the end of the, the reading at Madison Square Garden. I think it is. And, and it sounds like. And they're getting great, she's getting great applause for all this rhetoric about, you know, Liber liberty and freedom and you know, rights for people. And, and then she says that's written by Adolf Hitler. I did some research into that and I don't think it, it seems it wasn't Adolf Hitler's words, but the point, the point was being made that when somebody is trying to attain power and bring in a mass of people, as the Nazi party were doing in 31, 30, 32, you know, then you appeal to the masses. And that that was a very powerful move by Yoko.
- [12:33]
Bradley Morgan
I mean, ultimately it seems like when younger musicians do provocative things, it's kind of driven by this idea that new groups of new artists need to be controversial in order to boost record sales. And, and within the British Invasion scene, the Rolling Stones, they were the bad boy alternatives to the Beatles. But while the Beatles would just would flash the occasional Nazi salute at their shows, you write that the Stones had turned one of their concerts in Germany in 65 into a sort of impromptu Nazi rally. Could you tell us more about that concert?
- [13:03]
Daniel Rachel
I don't say that. I spoke to Andrew Lou Goldman, who's the manager of the Stones, and he says that's what happened because he's there and basically he's on the side of the stage with Keith Richards and dares Mick Jagger to go and do some goose stepping and perhaps a Nazi salute. And in true Andrew, Luke Oldman style, he wrote it up as causing a near riot. Whether that's true or not, who knows? But it's in Germany, which is significant because it's illegal to do that. And then as Andrew revealed to me, and as he has then already he had Jewish heritage. And I don't think he knows that at this point. And he's dressed up as Hitler himself. You know, they're messing about and they're lampooning and what they're not, they're divorcing the theatricality of Nazism from atrocity. And what they say rock and roll is doing is realigning the history of these gestures, of this uniform of these actions to what they truly belong to. I don't think that the, that Nazism can exist in a theatrical vacuum. It's the, it's, it's too horrific what happened in the 20s, the 30s and the 40s, because how the Nazi party went from a violent organization to a barbarous, murderous organization on a mass scale unknown to, to humankind.
- [14:40]
Bradley Morgan
Absolutely. And there's a lot of fantastic historical context that you have in there that I, I felt was interesting like this. You know, so the Beatles, they disbanded by 70, but by, you know, the early 70s, the stones were as popular as ever. And. But in 73, they were depicted in a coffee table art book called Rock Dreams. And you write in the book that this spoke to a lib in Britain. And just for our audience, what was Rock Dreams and, and how did it reflect Britain's liberalism at that time?
- [15:07]
Daniel Rachel
Well, Rock Dreams sold over a million copies. It was absolutely huge. It was, it was pretty much. It was designed by Guy Pilar of Belgium, who would go on to design covers for the Stones and for David Bowie. And he depicted rock stars in fan. In fantasy settings. And so the Stones picture shows them with pre pubescent girls and swastikas and SS uniforms around them on them. It's a scene of debauchery. But I think what was more interesting is that because of that he was then invited to join the Stones and then to design for them. So far from them being offended by being associated with pre pubescent girls and images of Nazism, they were embracing it. And that, you know, becomes part of a pattern of behavior within the Stones. You know, by the end of, on the 78 tour, by the end of the 70s, Mick Jag is performing with a Destroy swastika T shirt designed by Vivian Westbourne and Malcolm McLaren across America. And a decade earlier, Brian Jones is dressed up in an SS uniform which was pictured and shared across national newspapers and magazine front covers across the world. And again, we're without filling in the absence of explanation because there is little explanation. There's nothing to tell you that Brian Jones is trying to make a statement or is trying to stick two fingers up at the establishment or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He's doing it with a very stern face and it's a very disturbing image. And when you couple that with the fact that Dwyan Jones, according, was kicked out the Stones, according to Keith Richards memoir, because of his violence towards Anita Pallenberg, you know, he would beat Pallenberg. That was, you know, and he was falling in love with Anita Pallenberg and couldn't bear what Brian Jones was doing to her, so he was kicked out. You know, that casts a very different light that rock and roll doesn't like to look at, which is the star of the 60s Stones musical oeuvre. Brian Jones was violent towards women. That's hideous. And then he would freely wear an SS uniform. This doesn't match my love of the Stones and all the innovation he bought musically. But it's, it's an important part of the narrative and we shouldn't shy away from it. We should remember it's part of the history. And as you say, there has to be a sense of accountability in rock and roll, which for first, for so long, almost for its entire history, has a license to operate as wantonly without regard to anybody or anything, if it so chooses. That I think that's slightly shifted. Perhaps in the modern era of the MeToo movement and the death of George Floyd, perhaps this has made rock and roll consider racism according to the color of one's skin, or sexism or misogyny in a different way. But we haven't got. And that's brilliant. But we haven't got there in terms of the Third Reich.
- [18:34]
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- [19:45]
Bradley Morgan
No, I absolutely agree. And culture and environment plays a major role in that. And one thing I really liked about your book is not only just the array of artists, but these are artists who come from different areas. Because it wasn't just the British musicians that developed a fascination with the Nazis. There were also American musicians who had embraced them in their own way, way. And as an example, Ron Ashton, the guitarist for the Stooges, he owned a large collection of Nazi paraphernalia and he would even flaunt it on stage. So my question is, you know, Britain had reminders of the bombings all around them, but what can you tell us about how America's post war experience contributed to that moral culpability?
- [20:21]
Daniel Rachel
Well, I think the larger question, the larger question concerning the US is to do with the Allies propaganda as to why this war was being fought. Why did the Second World War happen? The Axis powers with the nucleus Germany, are explicit from day one. Well, pre the ascension of Adolf Hitler to power, there was going to be a race war. This is repeated by Hitler, by Goebbels, by Goering, from the beginnings of the party all the way through during the war. This is a racial war. And the Jewish people are responsible for that. And as a result they will be annihilated. And that annihilation, what seemed like rhetoric or a threat became a reality in the 40s when factories of death were created. Now we know factories as a place where you produce a product. A pair of trainers, a can of coke, a pair of shoes, you know, some clothing. The, the end product of a death factory in Nazi Germany was a dead, was a, a dead body. The majority of them were European Jews, but there were also Roma and Sinti, known as Gypsy, or there were gay people, or there were those people that were regarded as mentally or physically deficient according to the Aryan race ideals. There were Russians, there were Slavs. The end product was that their dead body, be that women, children or men. And I think this is really the illustration of this comes from Eisenhower. Is it Eisenhower, Buchenwald, where was it? Yeah, when he, he faces the camera and he says, you know, people say to me, why is this war being fought? And that's stunning in itself because this is April 1945. They don't know since Pearl harbor why they're in this war. And he says with the backdrop behind him of all the emancipated and beaten and tortured and dead bodies behind him, he says two camera. They'll sure as hell as know now. And that's the difference. So, so where we're talking about American culpability, it's, you know, what does, why does any soldier fight a war? It armies are built on hierarchies and it's, you have to go to the top to decide why a war is being fought and then for the reasons why. Well, that doesn't concern necessarily a soldier.
- [23:05]
Bradley Morgan
No, it certainly doesn't. But it does cascade into the culture and has its effects, you know, because connecting back to Ron Ashen, he never really clarified his fascination with the Nazis or why he shared his collection so openly. And I think that's, you know, he's a great example for the influence of this on the culture because you write that the music press matched his indifference with silence and they never really questioned him and they ignored any political outrage. And I would like to hear your opinion on what effect did that silence in the music press have in how the public viewed these musicians and what they were doing when it came to.
- [23:43]
Daniel Rachel
Well, exactly. I mean this is why I made that point. Just because by not understanding that the second World War is a racial war, it diminishes the importance of the swastika. Now we know the swastika belongs to, to thousands of year old cultures on various different continents and it invariably means goodwill, a spirit of goodness. But it was designed by Hitler in 1919 with the Red and the white around it to represent the social idea, the national idea. And as Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, the swastika itself explicitly represented antisemitism. But if you go fully realize that the anti Semitism of the Third Reich is the extermination of 11 million European Jews, that was the list that the Nazis drew up at oncee they listed it including Britain's 11 million Jews. I mean they made a good job. They got six of them, didn't they? You know, as Lemmy points out in his memoir. But so, you know, if you look at somebody like Ron Ashton wearing that symbol, he may well not be thinking of antisemitism. It's a connection to his, to his father, to his parent, to his family in the war. He's seeing it as trophies of victory, he's seeing it as something he likes. He's got fascination with it. These are things we do know about Ron Ashton, but their surface interest, but where you might hope somebody would challenge that to a degree, as you rightly say, that does not exist. And that, that, that takes us away from my finger in the book, pointing just that, musicians, which I'm trying not to do anyway. But I am saying that culpability, accountability belongs to more than just the single artist or a band. It's about the. The music press, it's about record labels, it's about promotions in the industry at large. Because for him to get on a stage and wear stuff or to be photographed takes a photographer, takes a newspaper, takes the picture, editor takes the editor, takes the people that own, takes the concert, promoter, takes the audience. There's lots and lots of elements and ripples of this where decisions are either accepted or not or ignored. And that wider view perspective of why this is happening becomes even more pertinent when we look to today, because somebody like Kanye west compared to Ron Ashton, you can imagine the tightness and control of an artist like Kanye west, which simply wouldn't have existed really, beyond a couple of layers. But they're significant layers to the Stooges. But again, it's about patterns of behavior. It's not single incidents. And when you look at Ron Ashton and then you look at what the Stooges did, or you look at the band that Ron Ashton formed called the New Order, and you look at, you know, guests that came to Iggy's wedding, despite the fact that Iggy Pop was managed Jewish Girl, you know, there's patterns. And you look to see what. Where Is there something more to this than an isolated incident? And that's what I find most intriguing about what I'm laying out in this set. Rock and roll.
- [27:08]
Bradley Morgan
And those patterns are really. I'm glad you brought those patterns because it's really fascinating because I wanted to ask that last question because one thing I really like about your book is how you examine the ways the culture influences musicians and how those musicians further influence the culture in turn. And, you know, going back to Britain by the 70s, that was a time when the country was really fixated on its own past. And mimicking Nazis became more ingrained in the culture in television and film. How did this coincide with the nationalism that was rising throughout Europe? And did these musicians directly influence that, or were they just a product of that rising nationalism?
- [27:45]
Daniel Rachel
The rising nationalism is to do with social and economic political decisions made by the British government when at the end of the war, they needed help to rebuild the country. And so they looked out to the motherland and to the empire and invited British citizens to come back and help. And so there was massive influxes of immigration of black people, particularly, and then in the 70s, of Southeast Asians. And they Built the rebuilt Help Bill, rebuild the country and integrated into society and made us a richer place for it. But, but that also bred resentment. And so by the time that you've got those people laying down their roots and having children or bringing their children to join them from the families they've had to leave, that resentment grew into nationalist groups and pro Nazi neo Nazi groups. Particularly in the 1970s, very, very few musicians aligned with that. They actively fought against them. And so you get the formation of Rock Against Racism and then on a. More and more. So the Anti Nazi League in 1977 and Music directly aligns itself with those two organizations, which becomes hugely powerful in British culture. But the significant part of that, again which I point out in the book, is that Nazi becomes synonymous with black, not with Jewish at this point. And black and the Third Reich is a very, very minor topic story. Even if, if you go through Mein Kampf, Hitler's rhetoric about black people, although it's odious, is very minimal, whereas his anti Semitism is practically on every page. But the, the Jewish rhetoric of, of 70s Britain, punk, post punk almost disappears. And that, that is really fascinating. So again, we take away from the, from the atrocities of the war. We try and forget about the death camps and we talk about the experience in the 70s. And you know, for people listening to understand that greater then I, I met people from reading Rock Against Racism and they're in the book talking about why that absence or apologizing for that absence. In fact, it was a. They overlooked it.
- [30:19]
Bradley Morgan
Ultimately, on this topic of how artists reflect the culture, I really think it's worth reiterating that the people we've discussed so far were either born after the war or were either very small children by the time it ended. But in the case of Serge Gainsburg, he was born to Russian Jewish immigrants and was only 12 years old when his family fled Paris after the Nazis invaded France. But in the mid-70s, he drew upon these personal experiences when making the album Rock around the Bunker, which became a commercial and critical failure. Could you tell us more about that album's concept?
- [30:50]
Daniel Rachel
Yeah, I mean, Serge Gainsbur, always a. A commercial failure. I think he's such a. He's such an out there artist. He's. He's like one of France's great. But he's not always a success. So we don't need to hold too much by that because that's part of his thing to push, push the boundaries. And yeah, I mean he was when he had to flee Paris as a young boy and his Family. They changed their name on several occasions and fled to Vichy France. And then they had to wear a yellow star to depict themselves as Jewish. And he decided that the yellow star should be a badge of honor. It should be something that a sheriff would wear. And so he wrote a song about it. And the whole album is to denigrate Nazism for him to vent his feelings as. I think there's 12 songs and every single one of them is a. Is. Is another way to. To look at how the SS fled to South America, to how here that Ava Brown's. One of her favorite songs was. It was a smoke gets in your eyes. And he. He very playfully uses the idea of smoke gas chambers. And that's very clever. And he wanted to dress in an SS uniform for the front cover with SS guards on a photograph behind him in the image. That image. That image was banned by the record company, surprisingly enough. But it's one of the first examples in the modern age of an artist favorably dissecting the Third Reich from a positive view. Very clear point of view. I mean, we can go back to Woody Guthrie, we can go back to Pete Seeger, you know, and you can go into film with the Three Stooges and Charlie Chaplin to see anti Nazi rhetoric songs, films in popular culture. But in. In particularly in the Western world, you know, Leonard Cohen in Canada. But France, Serge Gainsbourg was on his own to many respects. And it's a. It's. It's a fun album, but it makes a huge political point and it's very powerful record.
- [33:04]
Bradley Morgan
Yeah. What. I think that sets the record of what the record apart. And what sets Gainsborough apart from groups like the Beatles and the Stones. We were discussing earlier because Rock around the Bunker challenged a country that was still coming to terms with its involvement in World War II. And, and you write that it may be considered the first album to resist the Third Reich. And, you know, what made that distinction so important in Europe during the mid-70s,
- [33:26]
Daniel Rachel
well after the end of the Second World War, very few Nazis were tried at the Nuremberg and various trials thereafter because modern Germany was needed to make Europe economically viable. And so rather than at the end of the First World War, we imposed massive reparations. Second World War, you integrate. And so that people were let free in France, that would have extended to their culpability in collaboration in, you know, capitulating after six weeks when they were invaded by kind of allowing that to happen by, you know, the puppet government. And. And. But mostly they rounded up Jewish people on behalf of the Nazi Party. And for some, for French citizens, many of them can never forgive their country for doing that. And so the importance of Serge Gainsbourg in, in the mid-70s singing about this and writing about it and making it public and a public issue was, was incredibly daring of him and, and necessary. And you know, you could, you could level the same accusations that the British, you know, the knowledge of Churchill, of the, of concentration camps, do they know there's death camps? Possibly, probably there is evidence to suggest that. And you know, Jewish communities across Europe desperately wanting them to act and didn't, you know, so I don't, I'm not, I don't for what, I'm not just singing out France. I mean, all the countries gave up their Jewish people, the Brits gave up Jewish people on, on from Guernsey, you know, but all across, whether you're talking about Greece or, you know, up in Finland or wherever, you know, you can go to all countries all across Europe. And they were this collaboration, you know, in the same way as the Nazi party looked at Germany and you know, saw the eugenics program and back and wanted to replicate it. And you know, and your own Ken Burns, the magnificent filmmaker, you know, lays this all out brilliantly in the US on the Holocaust. That, that 10 part documentary, if you've seen it, is magnificent.
- [35:55]
Bradley Morgan
Yeah. And Showa, I would throw that in there as well as an example of that, you know, and a French film as well. So they have a, a good history of trying to contextualize that. So during the latter half of the 70s, punk music would emerge as this new phenomenon in rock music and would arguably have a more troubling history evoking the Nazis than earlier rock music. And you write that the story of punk in the swastika begins with Malcolm McLaren, who was Jewish. Could you share with us a bit about his background?
- [36:25]
Daniel Rachel
It's a troubling background because he was bar mitzvah and grew up in a north London enclave of a Jewish community where people spoke Yiddish like his grandmother did. And sadly, why that person would want to introduce the swastika to punk as he did. He freely handed out armbands at the first punk festival at the Hundred Club in central London. You would hope journalists at the time and since would have questioned McLaren to find out what that was. Well, I can't find it. I've gone. There's little bits here and there. I mean, one thing that they would say, the sex shop on the King's Row with him and Vivienne Westward and the punk acolyte Jordan would be. They're demystifying the swastika. And I thought about that and I thought, what does demystify mean? It means it implies there's a mystery. So I said to myself, well, what is the mystery of the Nazi swastika? I don't think. I don't think there is a mystery. It's such a shallow.
- [37:31]
Bradley Morgan
Yeah, the demystification is just an excuse to profit, maybe.
- [37:34]
Daniel Rachel
So I don't even know. I don't think. Is it for profit? I don't think it is for profit because he's giving it away. Although they're selling it on 40 pound T shirts in 1976. I don't know. But it's deeply disturbing. And I spoke to Bernie Rhodes, who was the manager of the Clash and had a partnership with Malcolm McLaren when they were getting the Pistols idea together. And they split up over this issue because Bernie Rhodes had Jewish heritage and a connection to the Holocaust and thought it was insidious that they should be using the swastika. And they broke up over it. And the Clash would not perform if a band was. Had swastikas on stage with them. That was, that was the stance they took. And good for Bernie Rhodes. But yeah, it's disturbing. But it's also disturbing to learn that Malcolm McLaren wanted to introduce pornography into the record industry. He was fairly successful with Bow Wow Wow with the young Annabella Louis, but he set out to do that and that, you know, can find out. You, you can get explicit quotes from him. But Caroline Coon, who also managed the Clash for a while, she described McLaren as a monster in the book.
- [38:57]
Bradley Morgan
Yeah, and I'm really glad you. You mentioned her because she criticized Malcolm for perverting the course of rock music and argued that fascism is really about sexuality, power and male strength.
- [39:08]
Daniel Rachel
And, you know, he.
- [39:10]
Bradley Morgan
Malcolm defended himself against that by saying that he was beautifying the swastika by, you know, demystifying it, taking out his negative. But I still can't take him seriously because he managed the Sex Pistols, who were all about shocking people with their male power and sexuality. And he did profit from that. Did that success with the Sex Pistols belie his ideas about the swastika? I know this, that we kind of touched upon that earlier, but I'm kind of honing it in there in terms of marrying the connections of like, Sex Pistols, male sexuality, power, the Nazis, male sexuality and power.
- [39:44]
Daniel Rachel
Yeah, I mean, the power, sexuality fetishism is massive. That became a huge industry in the 1970s with Nazi exploitation films, you know, which is just hardcore pornography. Which I've seen a hardcore pornography set against women dressed in SS uniforms and the Nazi films going on behind it. There were books before that and they were popular in Israel too. And you look at the great rock and roll swindle and that song's got. Belson was a gas on some by the Pistols. It's also got a new version and videos to go with it for the film with people dressed as Martin Bormann, Hitler's secretary. And that's all with Malcolm McLaren overlooking it all. And images of Sid Vicious in cartoon form wearing a swastika. Wearing a swastika T shirt. Yeah, you're right. He's profiting from it because he's directly profiting from all of that side of it. Once John Lyden's left the band, it's. Why. Well, I can't. I. Yeah, it's. I can lay it out in the book, but unless something. Malcolm McLaren is dead, you know, it's very difficult to understand it why. And those reasons that you just gave, they're shallow. Not you. That McLaren offered.
- [40:57]
Bradley Morgan
You also write in the book that the swastika's presence in punk is seldom addressed by the media, which suggests this widespread cultural acceptance and. And in that absence of criticism, musicians are presumed innocent of right wing views. Why was there this void of criticism within punk? And how does this compare with other genres? I mean, certainly there's a lot of deep rooted conservatism in country and western music that might, you know, there might be some overlap of clan ideology there, but it seems more prevalent in punk. And I want to get your sense of why that's the case and why there was this lack of criticism.
- [41:31]
Daniel Rachel
Yeah, I mean, it is punk that predates British punk. I mean, this is. McLaren got it from Johnny Thunders, from New York Dolls. And it's. And it becomes pervasive in. In a. In with the Ramones, Dead Boys. You know, various US punks are following a similar pattern as the British punks. But in Britain, you know, as with Leicester Bangs, in the us there are some Germans that are calling this out. Not many, but it is. There is a certain kickback. Vivian Goldman, Julie Burl, you know, various people like that deserve credit for what they attempted to do. And if you disregard or put to one side anti Semitism, so, you know, the Jewish heritage of the clashes. Guitar player Mick Jones, for example, or Tom Robinson Band Danny Kirsto, for example, racism was being called out. They were calling out the artists that were racist and. Or had heritages that if the National Front or the neo Nazi party in Britain got to power. These artists would be deported Irish artists. You know, Joe Strummer because he was born in Ankara in Turkey. You know, that kind of thing. It's not, it's not. It's like mud bloods in Harry Potter. These aren't pure bloods, they're not pure Brits. And that. So in that sense that you're kind of going down a bloodline of some sort. But, but. So yes, certain others were being called out. But to reiterate, anti Semitism is not being talked about in this era.
- [43:06]
Bradley Morgan
All of the artists we've discussed so far and many of the artists profiled in your book largely reference Nazis or the Third Reich, either on stage or within their music. But a few bands went so far as to make that connection in their name, such as Joy Division, who were originally called Warsaw before changing it to Joy Division. Why did they change their name and where does that name come from?
- [43:27]
Daniel Rachel
Well, Ian Curtis and Bernard Sumner shared a book between them called House of Dolls. And House of Dolls was written by an Auschwitz Holocaust survivor. And it's a story of the. Of a young, a Czech girl ending up in sexual slavery and all the experimentation that happens to her and the rape. And that's based on fact because the Joy Division as it's labeled in that book was the brothel in a. And there were brothels across the whole of occupied Europe both for. As a work incentive for those inside the camps and for those their outside, I. E. Ss. Because Himmler, head of the ss, feared homosexuality as he called it, and wanted to provide women as an incentive to. Yeah, and it's state sanctioned rape. And they took Joy Division, took that name knowingly. And then after that they became New Order, which New Order is going back to the racial war, which is to occupy Europe, to provide Lebensraum living space for the Aryan race. And to provide that space you have to get rid of all the minorities. At first it was to pack them off to somewhere like Madagascar and starve them. But eventually it was just simply shoot them, gas them, do anything to just fulfill the promise of an Aryan future.
- [44:59]
Bradley Morgan
You write that the history of Joy Division is marked by contradiction, but especially so when it comes to their ambiguous relationship with Nazism. And you closed the book saying how outraged you were when you discovered these connections and that this cultural paradox awakened within you your passion for music and history. And could you just tell us more about that?
- [45:18]
Daniel Rachel
Yeah, I mean, contradiction is an element of everyday life. It's an element of rock and roll by default and massively so you can have like Joy Division and New Order had massive interest in the second World War. And they're using names, terminology, they're using clothing, they're shouting out things on stage. There's, there's, you know, infiltrated their professional life, infiltrated their personal life. You know, Ian Curtis wife Deborah was wrote about how she was just appalled that her husband had chosen the name after a brothel in a, in a concentration camp, death camp. And that is appalling. You know, I didn't know that as a kid. You know, I knew, I was told that the name of the Joy Division was an orchestra in Auschwitz, which is mad enough as it was. There were orchestras or there were nine in Auschwitz, but there were orchestras across all the camps, whether that's in Theresienstadt or Belgia or Majdonic or Treblinka or Sobibor or Helmno, you know, wherever there were, always there was music being made. But tonight, but that. I was told that. I don't know if I was told that because of my. It was misinformation or, or it was to protect me. I don't know. But education becomes so important in the book because, you know, it wasn't until 1991 in Britain that the Holocaust was taught. And that was only in England, not in Wales, Ireland or Scotland. Scotland. This was 40 odd years after the war. You know, in America to this day, only 22 states teach the Holocaust. How can that be? You know, so you're talking about. The majority of Americans don't learn about the Holocaust by a teacher and in a school, a trusted person, a respected environment. You know, if you only have to consider the marches that have been going on since say, Charlottesville, Jews will replace us. You know, these are perhaps people that don't know really what the Holocaust is to any great extent or of any extent at all. Education is so important to this and, and you know, Holocaust Memorial Day was only introduced to the States at the beginning of the 2000s, you know, almost 50 years after the event. It's incredible.
- [47:41]
Bradley Morgan
Yeah, I was just at the Woody Guthrie center this weekend. I went out, I went out for a trip there. It was no King's Day here in the States this weekend to protest Trump. And so I was there for that. And I saw the handwritten lyrics of this land is your land. But I was talking to one of the curation staff and he was telling me, here in Tulsa, Oklahoma, we can't even teach that. Black people experience racism during the civil rights movement. You can't even say that or you can't make any clear connection that white people were racist against them. And it's absolutely.
- [48:14]
Daniel Rachel
It's becoming interesting when you talk about a lynching, for example, in the South. What do you call that then now?
- [48:20]
Bradley Morgan
Oh, well, they just don't teach it. They just don't show that it's completely whitewashed. It's completely. Just brushed over, literally. Absolutely.
- [48:29]
Daniel Rachel
Oh, my God. You can't eradicate history. It's like the book burnings that happened in the 30s or the book burnings have been seen across America when they're ripping out things like To Kill a Mockingbird out of libraries and burning them. You can't pretend something doesn't happen. Talk about it. At least, at least the Nazis had the good. The good grace to say, you know, they put on an exhibition, didn't they? Degenerate art. And they put all the art of everybody that they said was degenerate. And it's. To this day, it is the most successful contemporary art exhibition ever. Mao, because of the. The millions that went to see what they were not allowed to see because it would defile them as Aryans. So at least they were honest about it. That's very different from say no, no. You can't even.
- [49:16]
Bradley Morgan
Like you're saying, wow, I know we've just been talking about artists from the 60s and 70s, but you profile a lot of artists spanning more than six decades, and they kind of close up. I want to kind of bridge why things matter now and the relevancy of all this now. But before we wrap up, and you mentioned him earlier, but in recent years, Kanye west has expressed anti Semitic views and even going as far as selling shirts featuring swastikas and recording a song called Heil Hitler. And he's very active on social media where he shares these things. And my question is, what role has social media played when it comes to the music industry's history with Nazi imagery and the proliferation of that?
- [49:55]
Daniel Rachel
Well, social media is huge because it's uncontrollable. You know, one post, suddenly a million people have seen it and it gets shared and you can't control it. So once it's out there, it's out there and people want to delete it or pretend it hasn't happened. You can't. It's there. And so many incidents have been shared across the world, from Kanye west to, you know, you. You more recently Nicki Minaj and then K Pop. And it's all. It's huge. And, you know, Kanye West One minute is, I love Hitler, I'm a Nazi. Then he's not, Then he's apologetic, Then he's not anti Semitic, then he is again. But all I know is his records continue to sell in the millions. And so despite all of that rhetoric, and as you rightly say, selling T shirts during the super bowl with a swastika on it, it doesn't deter people from buying the records. And that's scary. Wouldn't you see?
- [50:59]
Bradley Morgan
It's scary because while Kanye's behavior is especially troubling precisely because he is a black man, it is really worth noting that all of the other artists that we discuss today are white men. And when Kanye shares his anti Semitism online, it largely emboldens white men. And the power of social media can make those kinds of white men very dangerous. And I am pointing this out because you wrote you tried to strike a delicate balance between explanation and not attributing blame, and that you also do not advocate for censorship. Kanye, I know he's in a very extreme example, but he's a current one. But when you were writing the book, were there moments you found yourself second guessing that balance?
- [51:37]
Daniel Rachel
Well, yes. I mean, in many ways, I don't need to be explicit in the book because the artists do it for. For me. All you have to do is say, and they, they did this, this, this, this, this. Even Bernard Sumner says, we're of New Order. Says, when you put it all together, it looks bad, doesn't it? I think it's him. It's either him or Peter Hawk. Maybe it's Peter Hook, the bass player. And Bernard Sumner says, I would not make the decisions that I made then. Now I wouldn't do it. It was a different time, you know, so, yeah, let the. Let, let the musicians hang themselves. I don't want to be the one. You know, I keep on reiterating. I'm just laying out history saying, we've all known this. It's been in plain sight. It's there for us to acknowledge, accept. Let's not. Let's not try and wipe it away and say it's not there. Let's just say, how do we now move forward with this knowledge? In the same way as Mick Jagger withdrew Brown Sugar from the Rolling Stone set and said, you know, that's a song about slavery. I'm not comfortable with it. The Stones represented something to me in the late 60s and early 70s that I'm not comfortable with now. I've moved on from myself and I'm taking that song out of Our set, despite it being one of Keith Richards greatest ever riffs and just one of the great Stone songs of all time. I was huge admirable of Mick Jagger for doing that.
- [53:02]
Bradley Morgan
And when you were writing the book, you did reach out to some musicians to better understand that behavior, but the only response is you received came from those who were campaigning against modern fascism. So why do you think these musicians are so unwilling to honestly address that part of their history?
- [53:18]
Daniel Rachel
It's a very good question. I can't answer for them, can I? I mean, I've spoken to some of these musicians before for other previous books, and they participated, and I've had dialogue with them or helped to write sleeve notes or programs for them, and then suddenly they don't want to involve themselves on one. You know, on one hand, it served the book really well because it would have been boring if just every single time I mentioned an artist, there was a kind of a mea culpa or an apology or an explanation. It'd be like, oh, God, you know, But. And what instead I decided to do was just center it in the moment of these actions. So if John Lennon, Paul McCartney is E. Kiling, I'll center it in 1964. If it's. If it's Roger Waters, then you can kind of center it 78 or last week. You know, this. That's. And. And I want to know what the press are saying, what the media are saying, and now what social media are saying, which is more important than the single voice of trying to deny or, you know, because it happened. So because it's happened, we need to know. And where. If there's explanation or absence, both of those avenues tell a really important story and enable the narrative. And so I didn't mind, ultimately, but it was great to have the people that did contribute. And that was, you know, as well as, you know, a really wonderful introduction by Billy Bragg.
- [54:47]
Bradley Morgan
So, Daniel, to close things out, there is a really compelling point you make in the book. And I want to read the quote directly. And it's. Rock groups do not name themselves after monuments to slavery, but they do choose to name themselves after memorials and locations associated with the Third Reich. So with. So with that, my question is, why is the line drawn there?
- [55:07]
Daniel Rachel
Well, I mean, that's the. You're getting to what the essence of the book is now. And we've talked about those elements and what the swastika meant to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. You know, I don't know if I need to spell that out as. As explicitly as you're asking me? I think that's for the perhaps, hopefully for the reader to reach their own conclusion. Because in many ways, education is powerful when people are guided to an answer. Perhaps.
- [55:39]
Bradley Morgan
Daniel, thanks so much for speaking with me today. You did an incredible job with your book and discussing a topic that has been long overdue. But because of just how relevant it continues to be, it's quite an accomplishment and you should be very proud.
- [55:50]
Daniel Rachel
Oh, thanks for having me. It was a really interesting conversation. You kind of pushed me and it's. Yeah, really good. Thank you.
- [55:58]
Bradley Morgan
My name is Bradley Morgan and you've been listening to the New Books Network with my guest Daniel Rachel. Their latest book is this Ain't Rock and Roll, Pop Music, the Swastika and the Third Reich and is published by Akashic.
- [56:08]
Daniel Rachel
Book.
- [56:22]
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