English Ultraviolence: Why Extreme ‘No Rules’ Fight Clubs are On the Rise in the UK
· Vice
While you were busy QTing some podcaster’s terrible opinion, two lads were plastering each other’s blood across the concrete floor of a warehouse and hugging afterwards. While you were fretting about the points on your license, a girl was hanging out the window of a drift car doing donuts around suburban Belgium in a hail of fireworks. The moral of the story is you never know what people get up to in their spare time, but a lot of them are probably having more fun than you.
Heavy Weekend is an Away Days limited series made in collaboration with VICE about those people. Created by Jake Hanrahan and Jonny Pickup, Heavy Weekend brings you drive-by dispatches from the outskirts of society. You’ll see underground fight clubs, illegal street racing, mysterious armed organizations, and other local countercultures that exist in total ignorance of over-managed, mass-surveilled modern life—or as a direct result of it. You can decide for yourself when you watch it.
Visit h-doctor.club for more information.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93J3VzbViuEThe first episode, English Ultraviolence, looks into the rise of “no rules”: an extreme form of fighting that permits head stamping, choking, and eye-gouging. Getting to the heart of its growing popularity, the documentary spends some time with Urban Gladiators, one of the first “no rules” fight clubs in the UK, where fights are arranged in hidden locations and aired on private PPV. Explaining more about the phenomenon, Hanrahan stresses that this isn’t a combat sport. It’s “organized ultraviolence.”
VICE: Underground “no rules” fight clubs are spreading rapidly across Europe. Why do you think that is?
Jake Hanrahan: It’s only in the last five years that it’s been spreading. Before that, it was really just King of the Streets (KOTS). But it’s become popular now because people have seen it online, and there are a lot of young men that like the idea of fighting without restrictions, without regulations, without jumping through hoops—and they also want to do real, proper fighting. For example, they could go into the Amateur Boxing Association, or get an MMA belt, or train Thai boxing for years, but the kind of fighting they want to do isn’t open to them on any of those levels. “No rules” is as brutal as it gets. You can literally bite someone’s ear off and it’s fine. A lot of people don’t like the idea of that, but a lot of people do, and I think that’s why it’s spreading.
Is there anything that distinguishes the scene in England versus elsewhere?
The “no rules” scene in England is very small. In general, we’re a pretty docile nation. We don’t really have any balls left, in a countercultural context. There’s not even a hooligan scene anymore. It’s all dead. People think bare-knuckle boxing is the gnarliest thing you can do, and that’s not even close to “no rules”. So the scene isn’t big, but it’s definitely growing. I would say we’re probably ten years behind France, where it’s absolutely massive. That is, if we can rekindle the English nerve and fire, and take that nonsense, angry-at-the-world politics and focus it into something really countercultural and underground like “no rules”… but I think that’s highly unlikely. Again, the country is on its arse.
Do you think the growing popularity, and subsequent commercialization, of combat sports is driving people to seek out avenues for fighting that are maybe less glamorous, more raw?
Yeah, in a way. Combat sports have never been as socially acceptable as they are now, which is both good and bad. It’s good in the sense that it should be for everybody, and anybody with the right mindset should get into combat sports and they will become a better version of themselves. But on the other hand, it perhaps waters down some of the more violent elements to a lot of combat sports. When MMA first became popular, it was almost KOTS style, but in a ring. The more commercialized combat sports gets, there will always be this subset of people that want to see the underground version.
But overall, “no rules” is for people who want to see something really hardcore and without limits—with bare hands, not with weapons. Anybody can win something with a weapon, but when you watch something like “no rules” it takes real skill and heart, and I think there’s something in it that you can’t see anywhere else.
What is the biggest misconception about people who are into organized violence?
There are many misconceptions, but I think the most common is that somebody who’s interested in it is some kind of political extremist. You hear that quite a lot. The other one would be that they’re a nasty, violent, angry person. But generally I’ve found the opposite is true. The people who are most interested in organized violence or combat sports tend to be people who know themselves a little more than others. They tend to be more grounded. I don’t see them doing a lot of bitching or two-faced stuff, which in itself is a form of violence—a violence of the spirit, maybe, but it is a form of violence and it’s one of the most detestable, for me. I’d much prefer to hang out with somebody that’s more willing to fight it out than bitch and moan and deceive. People that are into combat sports and organized violence are no different from anybody else, they just understand the “human condition” a little better.
Anything unexpected or funny that didn’t make it into the film?
There’s this guy who keeps fighting in “no rules” fights but he doesn’t train, he can’t fight, and he’s very clearly quite scared. But for some reason, he keeps entering these fights. He doesn’t even throw a punch in most of them, he just gets battered and covers his head. It was bizarre. So yeah, we didn’t include him.
Forthcoming Heavy Weekend episodes get into illegal street drifting, armed organizations in France… What’s the connection between all these groups for you?
There’s this concept called black banner romanticism and I think that’s kind of the link, for me. It’s not something that’s explicitly mentioned [in the series], but it’s essentially the celebration of people that live outside of society, that embrace countercultures, that don’t care about illegal hobbies or “uncivilized” activities; people who revel in all that and don’t try to ascribe it their interest in to “Oh, it’s because I had a bad childhood” or whatever. It’s black banner romanticism, and I think that banner is the one that all these people live under, whether they realize it or not.
I’m so tired of journalists trying to moralize or justify why people end up in the places they do, when often the answer is that they just fucking like it. The tendency to “explain away” only arises when it’s to do with people on the edges of society, but the people involved in the stuff you’ll see on Away Days aren’t out there like, “We don’t know why we’re like this, we’re sorry.” They’re like, “We are like this, we’re not sorry, and fuck you if you’ve got a problem.” I think that’s so much more interesting, especially in the times we’re living in. It’s the end of the world, right? We’re living through the apocalypse, in a way. The idea of freedom is almost gone, it’s crumbling in front of our eyes day by day, and these people aren’t fighting a political fight or anything like that. But they’re fighting, in my opinion, a much more just fight, in that they’re living with full adrenaline and liberty. They’re doing that unapologetically, and I love it.
Heavy Weekend launches today, with episode 1 available to watch at VICE: Members Only and the VICE YouTube channel now.
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