Ian Stuart Donaldson: 1957-1993. 30 years since the death of a legend

Ian Stuart Donaldson was the lead singer of the most famous White nationalist band of all time – Skrewdriver – a gifted musician, and dedicated movement activist.

In the NF he was known as Ian Stuart, a large Lancashire lad from Blackpool. He had that ‘something’ charisma about him that made him stand out from the crowd. It is very hard to believe that it is now thirty years since he died in that fateful car-crash in Derbyshire on 24th September, 1993.

Ian was born on 11th August, 1957 in the seaside town of Blackpool. His father was an engineer who ran his own toolmaker’s business and his mother was an old-fashioned northern house-wife. He went to Baines Grammar school in Poulton-le-Fylde – which is less than twenty miles from H&D’s Preston office – and was pretty wild as a teenager by all accounts!

On leaving school with a couple of O-Levels Ian did various jobs including apprenticeships, but his heart was really set on a career in music. The first band he joined was Tumbling Dice in 1976, but that soon broke up and Ian formed another and started sending out tapes to record companies. Their luck was in and Chiswick Records asked them to come to London and record a session in their studio. The band not even having a name chose Skrewdriver from a list supplied by Chiswick!

Ian and his band packed their bags, moved to London and around this time adopted the full Skinhead image. They played concerts supporting Motorhead and The Police among many others and began to build a name and a following. At that time Graham McPherson (Suggs), later the lead singer with Madness, was one of their roadies.

After the release of the band’s first album All Skrewed Up there was a showdown with both their management and record company who wanted Skrewdriver to denounce their nationalist, mainly skinhead following and change their image following pressure from the left-wing music press in general and New Musical Express in particular.

They refused to do this, so Chiswick cancelled their contract. Now, for the first time Ian began really to think politically and joined the National Front. Soon after the idea for Rock Against Communism began to take shape and the White Power EP was released. An ‘underground hit’ from the beginning, this poor sound quality first effort was to lead to a White youth revolution in the late 1970s that continues to this day.

Ian Stuart’s music is of a ‘love it or hate it’ variety and like all artistic performances is a matter of subjective individual taste. Ian understood this and combined his political beliefs with a great depth of musical knowledge and variety. So not only did he record as lead singer of Skrewdriver, and in doing so almost single-handedly create a new brand of music which we now know as White Power Rock, he recorded as The Klansmen, which was a combination of Bluegrass Country and Rockabilly; as White Diamond, for heavy metal fans; and with Stigger (Steve Calladine) singing a combination of traditional ballads such as the Green Fields of France and his own compositions such as Suddenly. This is of course, just the merest sketch of Ian Stuart’s life and activities.

Politically Ian was first active in the NF’s Blackpool branch in the late 1970s, before moving to London, where he joined Central London branch. He soon became the branch organiser, winning the NF’s branch recruitment cup two years in a row. In 1987 he resigned from the NF for political and financial reasons and formed a new nationalist organisation called Blood and Honour (commonly known as B&H or “28”).

After almost ten years of living in the last White-run hotel in King’s Cross, London, and after serving a prison sentence for defending himself, Ian gave up on our capital city and moved to Derbyshire at the end of the 1980s. From there he organised concerts, ran B&H and published his magazine of the same name.

The day after that fatal car-crash, in which his good friend Stephen Flint (Boo) was killed, Ian too died of his wounds in hospital. He was only 36 years old and yet left a lifetime of great recordings behind him. Ian Stuart is a movement legend, he will go down in nationalist folklore. Even though he is no longer with us, his music will live on forever.