Far-right music promoter put on racist gigs where his children performed

Times

5 hours ago

A far-right music promoter has been found guilty of encouraging terrorism by distributing extremist rock music and putting on racist gigs in which his children performed, in a unique case that put the far-right music scene on trial.
Robert Talland, 56, and his children Stephen, 36, and Rosie, 34, were found guilty of stirring up racial hatred through the lyrics in their songs. Talland was also found guilty of encouraging terrorism.
The children's involvement in the scene went back to their twenties, when Rosie would regularly pose alongside Nazi-inspired emblems at alcohol-fuelled gigs in which her brother sang and played guitar.
Talland, known as 'Ginger Rob', ran a record label called Rampage Productions from his home in Waltham Abbey, Essex, distributing music by mail order to customers across the UK and Europe. His children played in a band called Embers of an Empire and were accused of stirring up racial hatred through their performances at concerts and an album called Phoenix Rising.
The band attempted to encourage a new generation to join the far-right music scene amid concerns that their audience was ageing in the UK, it was revealed in court.
CCTV footage of one gig at the Corpus Christi Catholic Club in Halton Moor, Leeds, on September 21, 2019, showed children in the crowd and on their parents' shoulders as the audience performed Nazi salutes in front of a line-up of bands singing racist lyrics.
Talland was a proud skinhead who had run security at 'white power' concerts in the 1980s before taking over the running of Blood and Honour, a group previously linked to the banned far-right terrorist group Combat 18. Talland organised the largest event in the Blood and Honour calendar, an annual concert in memory of Ian Stuart Donaldson, the lead singer of Skrewdriver, which was attended by up to 800 people.
Talland, who appeared in court with a hearing aid, had complained to a Special Branch police officer there were no young members in the 'movement' and said most of the group were aged between 45 and 55. He said members at the next gig would be staying in a local bed and breakfast and the Premier Inn opposite the site, as 'the members are getting older and camping out is not as comfortable as it used to be.'
Roise Talland was said to act as a personal assistant to her father, managing stock, replying to emails, organising gigs abroad and managing their website. In one message exchange she discussed whether she hated Muslims or Jews more, saying London was 'disgusting' and 'like Africa'.
She messaged a contact on September 29 2016 saying her father was keen to start a 'youth division' and she had been 'nominated to organise' it, suggesting the name Young Blood.
On October 18, 2017, Alex, a member of the band, messaged the others saying: 'I think there's a lot of people placing a lot of hope in to us to keep the scene alive.'
WhatsApp messages showed them searching for a name. Options included Hateful Youth, White Society and Auschwitz Holiday Camp. They eventually settled on Embers of an Empire.
The band's lyrics included: 'I hate you and I hate your face, I hate your kind you're a damn disgrace, I hate you cos I love my own. Forced to hate yeah forced to be violent, gotta be heard, won't sit and be silent.'
Lucy Organ KC, for the prosecution, said the Blood and Honour movement was 'explicitly organised around music' aimed at inciting racial hatred and encouraging a race war. Its gigs acted as 'ideological spaces' for recruitment and radicalisation for the neo-Nazi cause, she told Woolwich crown court.
Lyrics were often sung and memorised by activists and the Blood and Honour network acted as a 'key propaganda mechanism for indoctrinating other young people to its beliefs', Organ said. They promoted 'violence and hatred' against Jewish people, Muslims, black people, homosexuals, immigrants and communists, along with anyone they accused of 'racial mixing'.
'They are racists. They are neo-Nazis who believe in violence in support of their grotesque cause,' Organ added. Stephen and Rosie Talland were said to have played a 'significant role' in the organisation and were 'imbued by their father with all his hatred, all his attitude to violence and all of his beliefs'.
When police raided Talland's home, they found a room used as an office that had shelves stacked with boxes of hundreds of CDs, lyric inserts and album sleeves. On his phone was a video promoting the Ku Klux Klan and another celebrating Adolf Hitler, called 'The Impartial Truth'.
Rosie Talland had items of Nazi memorabilia in her bedroom and her phone had a picture of a cake with a swastika on it and 'Blood and Honour' iced on the side, which she had sent to her father. Stephen Talland's phone had a copy of the livestream video taken by Brenton Tarrant when he killed 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019.
Detective Chief Superintendent James Dunkerley, the head of Counter-Terrorism Policing North East, said: 'Robert, Stephen and Rosie Talland were part of a network of hatred which had encouraged violence and extreme right-wing terrorism across Europe for decades.
'Robert Talland dismissed the group as an 'old man's drinking club' but through the gigs and events they organised, they promoted music [that] glorified acts of murder to audiences [that] included young children. In doing so, they encouraged attitudes of hatred, intolerance and violence which have no place in our society.'