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Anti-Social Workers: The Fall at North London Poly

Barney Hoskyns, New Musical Express, 31 October 1981

UNLIKE MOST other Angry Young Singers, usually by proxy, Mark E. Smith is not a rhetorician. He does not reduce the obscenities of the English class system to the slogans that idiots perpetrate in the name of awareness. He simply kicks us head first into the shit of proletarianism – booze, barbiturates, bingo parlours, slates, slags, etc. – and rubs us in it. In re-inventing the north of England, he has only shown us that it has been a grotesque fantasy all along.

Total word count of piece: 783

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