A short film opens a long-buried chapter of postwar Britain, where music became argument, Nation Records became counter-infrastructure, and Aki Nawaz refused to let multiculturalism settle into décor.
Britain has begun to look and sound like its own archive. The recent ‘United the Kingdom’ march, fronted by Tommy Robinson and swelling beyond 110,000, was only the most visible flare in a season of anti-immigration unrest. Since April, protests have spread from coastal hotels housing asylum seekers to city centres, with far-right outfits like Britain First, UKIP, the Homeland Party and Patriotic Alternative circling the crowds and stirring the feed with misinformation. The country is not approaching a crossroads. It is replaying one. Into this context, ‘More Punk Than Punk‘ emerges as a film that explores sonic insurgency and political art as responses to nationalist certainty, offering a counterpoint to marches with the loudness of music.
UK-based Azeem Rajulawalla’s More Punk Than Punk opens like a drawer that was never meant to be touched. Inside lies not only the life of Aki Nawaz, born Haq Nawaz Qureshi in 1961 in Gumpti near Rawalpindi and later raised in Bradford, but a compressed sonic history of postwar Britain that has been misfiled under “multiculturalism” and left to gather dust. The film is short, twenty-five minutes, yet it wants to function as an aperture. Through Aki, it invites us to glimpse the country that produced him – the mills and terraces of Bradford, the cramped geometry of the council estate, the unruly promise of punk, the emergence of the Asian Underground, the distant yet intimate wars that redefined Muslim life in Britain.
The director speaks of being captivated by Fun-Da-Mental and energised by Aki’s activism, and of wanting to channel his punk ethos to tell the story of a British Muslim who will not compromise his art. The hope is that Aki’s story offers a compass to those who resist injustice at a time when dissent has grown dangerous.
As a sketch of character and temperament, the film largely meets that ambition. In many respects, More Punk Than Punk works best when it abandons the burden of exemplar and instead becomes what it almost accidentally is – a study of one man who insists on holding together the personal and the political, even when that insistence has cost him. The camera catches his insistence without turning it into self-myth. Yet the portrait is strongest when it lets go of the burden of exemplarity and watches a person determined to hold the personal and the political together, even when that insistence has cost him.
At its best, More Punk Than Punk opens the archive for a moment and lets some of the stored heat escape. It does not map the entire architecture of sonic insurgency in which Nawaz operates. That task belongs to a larger critical and historical project. What it does, and does well, is to return Aki Nawaz to view not as an ornament of multicultural Britain but as a difficult citizen: a man who declined partial inclusion, who treated music as a form of argument when other forms were denied to him. The question that lingers after the credits is not how to imitate him, but how to respond to what he reveals. What does it mean to make art in a country that prefers your culture to your critique? Aki Nawaz answered with sound. The film, to its credit, lets us hear that answer again with the volume properly raised.
Nation Records
The film begins in the place where so many stories of postwar Britain are obliged to start and often fail to linger: the industrial North. We see Aki Nawaz not as a legend but as a boy who loved Deep Purple, discovered punk in the mid-seventies, and felt, in its noise, something that answered to the static inside his own life. The documentary is careful not to romanticise this discovery. Punk appears here not as a youth culture trend but as a first language of refusal, a way of saying no to the hypocrisies of a country that took his parents’ labour but not their dignity. When Aki joins Southern Death Cult, the film refuses to frame this as a glamorous escape. It reads as another chapter in an ongoing search for a form capable of holding his contradictions – Pakistani and Yorkshire, Muslim and punk, subject of empire and citizen of its aftermath.
The documentary is at its most alive when it sits inside that world. Archival clips of Fun-Da-Mental show a band that refuses to behave as a world music act grateful for a slot on the festival circuit. On stage, they appear as a moving argument. Sufi chants and qawwali phrases collide with breakbeats and distortion. Lyrics name wars and occupations that British audiences were not accustomed to hearing in their own tongue. In these passages, the film allows the viewer to register what was at stake in the music. Aki does not present himself as a martyr, nor indulge nostalgia. What surfaces instead is something more challenging to place: a conviction that art which refuses to address power becomes a form of complicity.
The camera is honest enough to show the cost of that refusal. In quiet moments, Aki recalls the vilification that followed tracks such as “Bin'” and “Cookbook DIY.” Parlour debates about artistic freedom collapse once one remembers that a Muslim artist in the early twenty-first century did not face the same risk calculus as a white provocateur two decades earlier. The film conveys this asymmetry without bald explanation. Tabloid headlines flicker, parliamentary denunciations are recalled, and behind them sits the knowledge that his citizenship had been placed, however tacitly, under review.
It is here that the director’s aspiration to offer Aki as a guiding light for contemporary protest becomes more complicated. The temptation is to read his trajectory as a usable script. The film itself suggests something less consoling. Nawaz’s path is bound to an exact alignment of global and local forces: the first Gulf War and its televised spectacle, the enduring deferral of Palestinian statehood, the slow tightening of the British security state, 9/11, 7 July, the invention of “radicalisation” as an object of policy. On screen, these appear in glimpses – war footage, protests, anxiety in the headlines – but they remain backdrop rather than structure.
Aki Nawaz enters the frame not as a survivor of a documented past but as evidence of a past that was never properly kept. His story refuses to behave like official memory. The result is that the film falters, though its real stumbling block is the absence of a national archive capable of holding the political density of his work. What looks like narrative compression is actually an archival vacuum. The documentary’s brevity exposes this vacuum rather than correcting it. In trying to introduce Nawaz, it reveals that the materials from which one might construct a definitive account either never existed or were discarded as noise. The film presumes a history; it discovers a gap. At the centre of the gap is Nation Records. The label appears in More Punk Than Punk as an anecdote of self-sufficiency, a footnote to Aki’s dissatisfaction with the music industry. The omission is telling. Nation was not a side project. Major labels did not know what to do with Aki’s work. Community representatives were unnerved by its politics. In 1988, he and Kath Canoville built their own apparatus in West London, in the same postcodes that had nourished sound system culture, which would later be mythologised by Small Axe and had already carried the weight of Mangrove and Carnival. The Nation was counter infrastructure. It was a way of refusing both industry condescension and the polite self-portrait that the South Asian diaspora was encouraged to adopt.
Nation Records gathered sounds that were politically inconvenient, aesthetically unruly, and geopolitically entangled. In its first years, the label released the experimental Fuse compilations, early blueprints of what would later be called the Asian Underground, featuring formative contributions from young artists such as Talvin Singh. It collected Algerian rai alongside Bengali devotional fragments, Balkan echoes alongside South African protest, South Asian futurism alongside British punk residue.
By August 1991, Aki Nawaz, joined by late Dave Watts and Inder Matharu, formed Fun-Da-Mental, a group that transformed the label’s political charge into a full-blown sonic insurgency. Their first recordings and white-label EPs appeared between 1992 and 1993, circulating through vinyl networks and club circuits, laying the groundwork for one of the most confrontational and necessary musical projects in modern British history.
A functioning archive absorbs such material into its memory system. Britain did not. Instead, these sounds circulated as fugitives through clubs, pirate radio, independent shops, and diasporic networks. By the time the cultural establishment attempted to narrate the Asian Underground as a chapter of heritage, the primary materials had already slipped beyond its control. Nation Records had functioned as a repository. No national institution assumed responsibility for its preservation.
Where the film acquires real texture is when it turns to Fun-Da-Mental, released by Nation Records in 1991. The documentary does well to situate Fun-Da-Mental as the most volatile expression of this project. The archival clips show a band that refused to behave as a world music act, grateful for a place on the circuit. They appear instead as a moving argument.
The Politics of Sonic Insurgency
By the late 1970s, Britain entered not a crisis but a recognition of one. The postwar industrial compact eroded under recession. Debates over immigration became a theatre in which the Nation projected its unresolved imperial afterthoughts. Multiculturalism appeared in legislation long before it appeared in everyday life. In the Midlands and West London, particularly Birmingham, Coventry, Handsworth, Ladbroke Grove, Southall, Brixton and Tottenham, the children of the Windrush generation and post-Partition migration matured into adulthood amid economic abandonment and rising police authority.
A country that demanded its parents rebuild it after the war now feared their presence when the labour was no longer needed. The contradiction produced not silence but culture. Sonic expression became the most durable form of civic speech available to communities denied full citizenship. It is helpful to understand sound here as a historical container. Bass, percussion, call and refrain are not supplementary to politics. They operate as a political methodology. The zeitgeist, therefore, is not celebration. It is a negotiation. It is a youth culture raised within a contradiction.
Ska was born in 1950s Jamaica, shaped by R&B, swing, mento, and that offbeat skank that still snaps like sun on metal. It was independent music, city-bright and forward-leaning. When migrants brought those records to Britain, they arrived as memory and blueprint, soon rewired by cold streets, factory shifts and the echo of not quite belonging. Reggae dropped the weight, dub broke the frame, sound systems turned neighbourhoods into bass-territory. Britain did not inherit ska. It digested it.
Then came Two Tone. Late 70s Coventry, The Specials, The Selecter, The Beat. Black and white chequered board. Punk bite threaded through Jamaican rhythm. Neither English nor Jamaican, but the third thing made where histories meet. It made race visible rather than polite. It said: mixed Britain is not a theory, it is here already. For a moment, it sounded like equality might scale.
But the stage was always ahead of the street. The groove was utopian, the politics less so. Two Tone showed what coexistence could feel like, and the riots that followed showed what it was not. Between the two sits the truth: representation opens the door, but does not build the house.
Aki Nawaz enters the frame not as a survivor of a documented past but as evidence of a past that was never properly kept. His story refuses to behave like official memory. The result is that the film appears to falter, though its real stumbling block is the absence of a national archive capable of holding the political density of his work. The documentary’s brevity exposes this vacuum rather than correcting it. In trying to introduce Nawaz, it reveals that the materials from which one might construct a definitive account either never existed or were discarded as noise. The film presumes a history; it discovers a gap.
Sonic Citizenship
There is a particular figure who stands, not comfortably, but steadily at the point where British multiculturalism reveals its deepest anxieties. Nawaz is not a representative artist in the sense that the cultural sector often prefers. He does not illustrate diaspora life. He interrogates it. He does not flatter the liberal fantasy of a harmonious multiethnic Britain. He tests it, stresses it, bends it until it exposes the premises upon which tolerance is granted. To place Nawaz in the same frame as Handsworth Songs and Small Axe is to recognise that political art in post-imperial Britain has traversed three primary registers: memory, narrative, and confrontation. Rushdie, for his part, attempted a fourth: literary critique of representation itself. This is not the place to exhume the full Hall–Sivanandan quarrel over what racism discourse and its politics, though its shadow still crosses every discussion like a bill we have never quite paid. The tension among these registers reveals far more about the Nation than any one work could alone.
Beyond the individual life, there is a larger history into which Aki’s story must be read. Ska, Two Tone, the Asian Underground, Nation Records, Notting Hill Carnival, Handsworth Songs and Small Axe together suggest that music and film in post-imperial Britain have not simply mirrored social change. They have functioned as parallel institutions of citizenship. When the state refused to recognise the political presence of its black and South Asian populations, cultural production assumed the civic work of representation, memory and future imagination.
Sound became a medium through which belonging was practised rather than bestowed. Two Tone staged the idea of a multiracial Britain as an audible fact, even as law and the street resisted its recognition. The Asian Underground turned hybridity into an epistemological stance, showing that British identity could be composite without dissolving. Fun-Da-Mental treated music as ideological resistance rather than multicultural décor. Carnival in Notting Hill provided spatial proof that citizenship can be enacted through the occupation of public ground, and Handsworth Songs showed how memory can operate as a historical agent when the written archive is partial.
Taken together, these movements sketch a theory of sonic citizenship: a form of political membership constituted through rhythm, circulation and collective presence rather than through paperwork, official recognition or absorption into whiteness. Sonic citizenship is produced in the vibration between bodies in shared space, in bass moving through brick, in a sense of history felt in the diaphragm before it is fixed on the page. It is a citizenship that does not wait for the state. It sounds like it is happening.
Seen from this angle, More Punk Than Punk is more than a portrait of an idiosyncratic artist. It is a small opening onto this larger political formation. The film restores part of Nawaz’s complexity, but much of the surrounding argument still lies just outside the frame. If it wishes his story to guide those who resist injustice, it must also accept the difficulty he poses. He is not an easy ancestor. His career demonstrates that representation can coexist with ongoing violence, that multicultural celebration can mask geopolitical complicity, and that dissent which refuses gratitude will always test the limits of tolerance.
The film’s formal modesty is both a limitation and a virtue. It does not attempt to mimic the aesthetic risk of Fun-Da-Mental’s tracks. Interviews and archival footage are intercut in a familiar documentary cadence. One might wish for bolder use of sound and montage. Yet the restraint has its own logic. The film does not compete with its subject’s noise. It listens to it. It refuses to tidy the contradictions, refuses to redeem Aki as a misunderstood hero or condemn him as a cautionary tale. It leaves space for disagreement, and in that space the viewer can begin to register why this figure remains unsettling.
The consequence is that Aki’s activism can appear purely personal, an expression of temperament rather than a response to specific historical pressure. It is not a failure of sincerity so much as a consequence of compression. In twenty-odd minutes, the film cannot unpack the architecture of the world it confronts. “Politics is war, culture is war, religion is war,… There is something wrong there”, you hear Aki saying. Without that frame, his defiance risks being misread as timeless rebellion rather than as a considered response to a very particular configuration of empire, migration and surveillance. A viewer unfamiliar with the political landscape of the nineties and early two thousand will come away with a sense of character, but not necessarily with a sense of why this character triggered such disproportionate alarm.
Triptych of remembering
Aki Nawaz belongs neither to the polite multicultural trajectory applauded by the state nor to the curatorial framework of diversity management. Handsworth Songs (1986) is not about Handsworth. It is about Britain refusing to see Handsworth as Britain. Small Axe later restores what Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC) mourned, and Aki Nawaz barges in to shatter the frame altogether.
If Handsworth Songs mourns, and Small Axe restores, Nawaz disrupts. His work does not ask Britain to recognise Black and Asian subjects. It demands that Britain recognise the violence inherent in the terms on which recognition is offered. Salman Rushdie, when he criticised Handsworth Songs in 1986, argued that the film lacked testimonial immediacy, that it lost contact with lived experience by dissolving narrative into montage. This critique reveals the fault line: Rushdie believed representation requires a coherent narrative, while John Akomfrah believed that trauma produces fractured memory, which only montage can honour. Nawaz, by contrast, treats coherence itself as ideological. His music is not fragmented like Handsworth Songs nor empathetically embodied like Small Axe. It is incendiary. It works like a detonator, exposing the circuitry of British power.
To understand this fully, one must first examine how art became the site of postcolonial politics in Britain, even as formal political channels remained narrow. After the riots of Brixton and Handsworth in 1981, the national imagination discovered that racialised communities do not remain silent under structural violence. The uprisings signalled that tolerance had not matured into equality. While Rushdie explored allegiance, migration, and belonging through literature, Handsworth Songs turned the camera not towards individual drama but towards historical sediment. The archival footage, voiceover, and slowed pacing created a visual memory palace in which meaning accumulated rather than declared itself. There are no protagonists in Handsworth Songs, only people who appear and reappear like evidence. It insists that migration is not anecdote but atmosphere.
Steve McQueen’s Small Axe arrived decades later, offering the representational clarity Rushdie believed Handsworth Songs lacked. Where Akomfrah rendered history as atmosphere, Small Axe returned names to lost voices, kitchens to anonymous riots, lovers to headlines. BAFC built a theory of memory. McQueen built a theory of interiority, allowing the camera to inhabit the domestic grain of experience rather than the historical echo. Yet, for all its intimacy, Small Axe also reveals the shifting cartography of Blackness in Britain. In the late twentieth century, “Black” was not merely a racial identity but a political coalition that encompassed Caribbean, African, and South Asian subjects under a shared structure of exclusion and struggle. By the time Small Axe entered institutional consciousness, however, this coalition had thinned. The rise of American-mediated export Black Lives Matter discourse, its rapid adoption across British campuses and arts infrastructures, redefined Blackness along US genealogies and aesthetic codes. The brown and Asian dimensions of British Black politics, once central to anti-racist organising, recede in McQueen’s frame. Small Axe restores a crucial lineage of Caribbean resistance, yet in doing so it participates in a narrowing of “Black” that forgets its own historical capaciousness. It completes the circle of Handsworth Songs, but also marks the point where the circle contracts. Together, the two works express what diaspora theorists call postmemory, yet they also expose how memory can be inherited selectively. History here does not settle. It reorganises itself. It continues into the present tense not as accumulation, but as subtraction.
Nawaz enters from a different door. He does not attempt to restore or mourn. He tries to rupture. His work answers a question that the other two only imply. If Handsworth was the symptom and Small Axe the elegy, Nawaz is the refusal to accept elegy as an endpoint. His stage persona, his interviews, and his lyrics coalesce into a thesis: until the British state confronts the asymmetry of its violence, no amount of representation will suffice. He is not satisfied with visibility. Visibility without power is spectacle. Visibility under surveillance is not progress. Nawaz articulates a radical grammar: dissent is not a failure of citizenship; dissent is citizenship denied legal vocabulary.
It is within this frame that Bin’ and Cookbook DIY must be read, not as provocations detached from politics, but as intentional destabilisations meant to test the elasticity of British civil discourse. The track interrogates the conditions under which violence is romanticised or condemned. It is not asking listeners to revere bin Laden. It is asking who grants permission to revere Guevara, and whether anti-imperial violence is legitimate only when white radicals commit it—Bin’ forces Britain to confront the racialisation of rebellion. Cookbook DIY is sharper still. The song describes in cold detail how to construct an explosive device, and this textual literalness is what made the British press hysterical. Yet the piece functions not as a manual but as a mirror, reflecting the anxiety of a society that fears violence only when it comes from below. The lyric structure lacks metaphor precisely to refuse interpretation. It dares the listener to confront the unmediated reality of insurgency as a concept. The point is the sonic act of placing knowledge usually reserved for state security discourse into a public hearing. Cookbook DIY reveals the asymmetry of information: governments maintain nuclear arsenals and call them security, while criminalising knowledge when accessed by racialised youth. The song is not advocacy. It is an indictment of double standards.
To situate these tracks alongside Handsworth Songs and Small Axe requires one additional leap. Both films treat violence as an event to be understood, historicised, and grieved. Nawaz treats violence as logic to be exposed. Where McQueen cuts from street to courtroom to living room to dance floor, Nawaz cuts through the veneer itself. His sound does not contextualise. It confronts. In Handsworth Songs, the police helicopter is a metaphor for surveillance. In Nawaz’s work, the helicopter crashes into the track itself.
More Punk Than Punk is not remembrance but refusal. It refuses the reconciliation that mainstream multiculturalism expects. It follows Aki Nawaz not as an exemplar but as a dissident. The film positions music as a medium that exposes the fault line between state expectations and diasporic self-articulation. Nawaz does not contribute to British culture. He contests it. He confronts racism as systemic and Islamophobia as a structural response to dissent. His life demonstrates that to be “more punk than punk” is to resist incorporation even when incorporation offers legitimacy.
Together, these three works chart the evolution of British racial consciousness across form and generation. BAFC constructs a critique. McQueen constructs empathy. Nawaz constructs an insurgency. The history of post-imperial Britain requires all three.
Rajulawalla is looking back to understand how dissent emerged when the country last convulsed like this: how musicians answered racism with an insurgent sound, how Nation Records built a space for refusal, how Nawaz turned music into confrontation rather than consolation. The impetus is clear. If nationalism has returned wearing its old coat, the counter-history must be recovered too. The film is less about remembering Aki than about remembering how resistance once spoke, loudly enough that Britain could not pretend not to hear.
Narendra Pachkhédé is a critic, essayist and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva.