I was a teenage, middle-class Rage Against the Machine fan
It was November 6th, 1992. I was one of those snotty, 14-year-old kids from the backstreets of Tonbridge in Kent, a town where anyone caught on the wrong side of a Pizza Express after 19:00 could find themselves in serious trouble; the local constabulary all too ready to ask “Does your mum know where you are?” and take away your Tango.
John Major was prime minister, McFlurrys wouldn’t be invented for another three years. Times were hard, and the soundtrack to my existence had just dropped in the form of the debut album from Rage Against the Machine.
The parallels were frightening in all honesty. Frontman Zack de la Rocha was a 22-year-old political activist and a descendant of Mexican revolutionaries, and I sat next to a boy called Zachary in French, and I’d had fajitas once on holiday. They recorded their debut album in Los Angeles, a city still smoking from the fires of that summer’s riots. Meanwhile, in my town, Millets had just closed down, and there was talk Wimpy could go with it.
I marched back that afternoon from Our Price with the album in my clammy hands, rocking a curtain haircut, a long-sleeved Levellers T-shirt and a pair of yellow-laced Dr Martens boots. I stood out from the crowd along with several hundred thousand of my peers, and whether I was late for tea (Findus Crispy Pancakes) or not, I wasn’t going to take shit from anyone.
Running straight past the outstretched arms of my Mum, I shot upstairs and pre-emptively slammed the bedroom door, opening up the CD tray of my stereo like Pete Townshend smashing up an amplifier, only more gently because it was a Christmas present.
Turning the volume knob up like Marty McFly, I was greeted by that first incendiary guitar chord, the opening notes of ‘Bombtrack’ finally making sense of my life, telling me why I felt out of place having to play cricket on a Sunday morning rather than getting to watch Buffy in bed.
“We gotta take the power back!” screamed de la Rocha and I felt every spat lyric with every sinew, THIS was why my teachers were fine with giving us double maths on a Tuesday afternoon, THIS was why the tuck shop ran out of cola bottle chews, THIS was why when I told Rebecca Gately that I liked how she walked she told everyone that I messed myself watching Poltergeist.
I threw the plastic album case across the room, where it clattered against the soft duvet cover on my bed. I’d been lied to. Repeatedly. I’d been told the only way to fight your way out of a middle class enclave was to get three A levels, do law at a red brick university, take on an apprenticeship at a firm that makes you sleep in the office, get a coke addiction, marry too young, have kids in Putney, have an affair and split up with your wife, have a break down, go on a yoga retreat to Thailand, then to rehab for more coke and then head off skiing every summer while shouting at the children and getting gout. Now I learned from my new Stateside rap/rock heroes that none of that was how to do life.
Instead, I simply had to utterly refuse to back down in the face of authority. My Dad couldn’t have timed it better, “Tim, it’s time for…” was all he managed to say before I screamed “FUCK YOU I won’t do what you tell me”, right in his face from across the room, behind the closed door, under my breath, his immediate and inaudible footsteps going down back to the kitchen, vindication enough to know that I was a changed boy or soon to be man forever. ‘Killing in the Name’ was now my favourite ever song, and the best song ever written even by all The Beatles.
The next day at school, the kids could tell something had gone on. Who was this whipsmart anti-establishment hero with a Sony Discman and between one to three albums on which was a parental advisory sticker for bad swear words? Did he listen in English when Mr Baker asked him to read out the first lines of scene four of The Merchant of Venice? Did he comply? Yes, but only after getting up really slowly. Did he eat the shepherd’s pie at lunch? Again yes, but leaving out all the carrots in empathy with the political prisoner Leonard Peltier, who probably didn’t like them either.
In the playground that day, I refused to answer questions on what I was listening to, so anti-authoritarian was I that I didn’t need to bow down to that kind of pressure. ‘Rage’, as I now called them, were the pioneers, the light I relentlessly followed until Scouts that night.
In many ways, I’ve followed the guiding hand of the band throughout the next 30 years. Like guitarist Tom Morello, I’ve shaved my head, albeit not voluntarily. Like bassist Timothy Commerford, I am also called Timothy if my parents are angry about something. And like the drummer Brad Wilk, half my second name is also Brad. It was obviously meant to be.
Straight from the gunshots and garages and Bloods and Crips of Los Angeles to the historic castle market town by the side of the River Medway on which Tandy’s and Mothercare lay, we were united in one cause. To stick it to the Man, and boy, did we ever, stick it to him, I mean.
