Oi Polloi I love Oi Polloi, for years and my old band toured with them in Ireland and played some gigs in England with them too. Deek and any line of Oi Polloi have always been very friendly and up for a laugh. The orginal Oi Polloi interview was done when they stayed in my house in Cork on their first tour of Ireland. A friend of mine offered to print it up and lost it! So here is an article their drummer Dan did for issue 1 of the zine (1989). Dan drummed on the Oi Polloi album "Indefence of our earth" and sent stuff into the zine, and also taped and sent me videos of great Scottish punk, like A.O.A, lost World and loads more. Cheers Dan. Macho Arseholes, fuck off This is just a short article on macho attitudes within punk. We liek to think that we're creating an alternative to the shittiness of mainstream society, but how far does this go in reality. For a start, there is still homophobia within the punk movement, then amongst so-called caring, "right on" people. BAsically, to anyone who thinks theres something wrong with being gay? Everyone has the right to determine their own sexuality without having to worry about what other people say. Being gay doesn't mean that your some kind of freak. It does'nt determine your personality and it is stupid to judge a person on colour, sex, age, disability or whatever. All forms of discrimination must end now. Another thing which saddens me is the idtic, macho posing of a lot of people at gigs. How many people have been to these gigs where the dancefloor resembles a wrestling ring more than anything else! I like dancing to bands, not watching out for flying fists and idiots stage diving on to my head. I go to gigs to have a good time, not to get batttered and bruised! If your going to stagedive thats fine, but to use teh old sayying, look before you leap. Believe it or not there are people dancing down there who don't want their necks broken by some huge bloke. Has anyone noticed who exactly the aggressive dancers are? You guessed it 99.9% of the time its men (usually on th elarge side as well). The only conclusion I can draw from this is that they're a bunch of macho wankers playing out the menality of people who join teh army, folk whose idea of fun is going around in big gangs and beating the fuck out of people. As far as I'm concerned, two of the best things punk represents is respect and freedom. What respect is there in dancing like some kind of macho idiot regardless of who gets hurt? Your also imposing on other peoples freedom, to dance to a band and enjoy themselves. I'm sure I'm not the only person who sometimes doesn't want to dance in case they get battered. How can we sort the world out if we can't sort ourselves out? If anyone wants to discuss any points raised here get in touch me no its not a picture of macho arseholes, didn't have a photo of Dan, so heres a photos of Deek from Oi Polloi at Crammond Island punks picinc in Edinburgh 1992, and doing the washing up in Cork, how rock'n'roll! Oi Polloi site