Nazi rock star: Ian Stuart - Skrewdriver Biography

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I’m off to the Rebellion Festival to catch old Oi bands such as Cock Sparrer, Cockney Rejects and Last Resort. Just as Adolf Hitler's regime had thrown gays and lesbians into death camps, the neo-Nazi movement remained staunchly homophobic.

The city of Sunderland in the North-East of England was the focus for the 2023 Ian Stuart Donaldson memorial concert. Its politics were fairly broad - while there were right-wingers within its ranks, some of its most prominent acts, including the Angelic Upstarts, were avowed socialists. Leading on from that reputation, I received a letter from Nick Griffin, the serial destroyer of Nationalist political parties.Skrewdriver became known for attracting violence at their shows and none of their Chiswick releases did very well in the UK charts. Each featured the letters L and G on either side of a Celtic cross, the British Movement's answer to the swastika. According to Bushell, who had only recently left the Socialist Workers Party and still regarded himself at the time as a left-winger, the story was a "tissue of lies". That particularly was also the day that racist author Colin Flaherty lost his battle with cancer at the age of 66 at his home in Wilmington, Delaware.

A music festival has been held to remember him by Blood and Honour including one set up in 2016 near Ely. Some members of the original Skrewdriver line-up objected strongly to the new direction in which Donaldson took the band. He was in Wormwood Scrubs prison when Skrewdriver’s third album, named Blood And Honour, was released. He escaped the furious crowd by using a female left-wing activist as a human shield, according to witnesses.While Légitime Violence is not an openly nazi band, its lead singer Raphael Lévesque is active in the nazi Atalante Québec gang and the band boasts of its anti-left wing, anti-antifa, and Rock Against Communism credentials. Continuing with this request will add an alert to the cemetery page and any new volunteers will have the opportunity to fulfill your request. In the aftermath of his death the anti-fascist bulletin Fighting Talk made a number of mocking references to their “Mechanic” as a number of far-right bands had suffered car crashes around that time. While Donaldson had drawn the most violent elements of the skinhead scene into Blood and Honour, on the streets around King’s Cross he often faced peril in the early 90s at the hands of militant anti-fascists. Thirty years may have passed since Ian Stuart Donaldson left this earth, but his legacy remains and he is most certainly not forgotten.

The re-formed Skrewdriver eventually became openly supportive of white nationalist groups, after a lengthy period of publicly denying such support. A lot of people that I did used to hang around with, they did sort of like hate us," he said in 1992 - "us" meaning gay men. In a 2011 interview he notes he left the band after they were chased out of London, with lead singer Ian Stuart Donaldson relocating the band to Derbyshire, UK which cost not only the band it’s following but members who could not find the time to make it to gigs. Gigs started being staged in Derbyshire, Nottingham shire etc…And as most of us were working and gigs up north tended to be mid-week it took a toll on taking a Wednesday off plus a Thursday to recover. Donaldson also became leader of two other bands—The Klansmen (a rockabilly band) and White Diamond (a hard rock/ heavy metal band)—and released several solo albums.The new version of Skrewdriver openly promoted far-right groups such as the National Front and raised funds for them (and affiliated organisations) through the White Noise Records label. The gay skinhead night may simply have been an attempt to carve out a space for himself where he would not be challenged either for his sexuality or his politics. Archive footage of their concerts shows Donaldson barking neo-Nazi lyrics as he loomed above Crane who stood, arms folded, at the front of the stage.