by David Renton
50 S. Scott, ‘The uprising that they wish to forget’, in S. Grover and J. Patel (eds), Coming of Age: 1976 and the Road to Anti-Racism (London: The Monitoring Group, 2017), pp. 161–167; C. Gutzmore, ‘The Notting Hill Carnival’, Marxism Today, August 1982.
51 Widgery, Beating Time, pp. 30, 36.
52 Widgery recalls one meeting for Chaggar addressed by Howe, ‘[w]ho prowled the platform, snarling lucid defiance, superbly sending up the worthies on the stage and insisting, with every pore of his being, that the black communities, Asian and Afro-Caribbean, must set their own agenda, command their own organisations and to themselves be true’: Widgery, Beating Time, p. 30.
4
REGGAE, SOUL, ROCK ’N’ ROLL
The later 1970s saw a sustained attempt to use music against racism. It was not the first time that left-wing artists had considered something like this. In 1968, the Merseyside-born anti-war poet Adrian Mitchell gave a radio broadcast comparing the Beatles to the US writer Allen Ginsberg. Mitchell proposed that the Beatles’ move from likeable pop to ‘adventurous poetry’ would be completed if they could release a song taking on the ‘lunatic’ racism of Enoch Powell. ‘If the Beatles applied their considerable wits to a record called Enoch,’ Mitchell told his listeners:
they would be subject to a great deal of hatred. They have taken risks in the past but this would be higher risk . . . [on the other hand, it] might, by amplifying the same chorus of brave voices, mean that the future might be less bad.
Weeks later, Paul McCartney arrived at a Beatles recording session with the first draft of a song. The lyrics were earnest and literal and appear to have antagonised the other Beatles, including John Lennon who was filmed singing them in a series of comic accents. Uncomfortable with the lyrics or with the band’s treatment of them and finding himself incapable of writing the sharp political irony that he had intended, McCartney ended up reworking the idea into the band’s famous but very different 1969 single, ‘Get Back’ (‘Jojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona / For some California grass / Get back, get back / Get back to where you once belonged’).1 The attempt shows how difficult it is for even radical artists at the height of their powers to turn a political message into compelling art.
A decade later, the problem was not the earnestness of the left but the rhetorical violence of the right. In May 1976, the glam-rock star David Bowie was photographed returning to Victoria Station after two years in North America. Collected in an open-topped Mercedes, Bowie appeared to give his supporters some kind of open-handed, straight-armed gesture, possibly a fascist salute. Watching journalists from the New Musical Express headlined their report, ‘Heil and Farewell’.2 Later that summer, Bowie was interviewed by Playboy magazine:
I think Britain could benefit from a fascist leader. After all, fascism is really nationalism . . . I believe very strongly in fascism, people have always responded with greater efficiency under a regimental leadership . . . Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars . . . You’ve got to have an extreme right front come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up.3
In August 1976, rock guitarist Eric Clapton performed at the Birmingham Odeon. Two years before, Clapton had enjoyed a hit with a cover of Bob Marley’s reggae classic, ‘I Shot the Sheriff’. He interrupted the Birmingham concert to make a speech supporting Enoch Powell. Members of his audience heard Clapton say:
I used to be into dope, now I’m into racism. It’s much heavier, man. Fucking wogs, man. Fucking Saudis taking over London. Bastard wogs. Britain is becoming overcrowded and Enoch will stop it all send them all back . . . This is England, this is a white country and we don’t want any black wogs and coons living here. We need to make clear to them they are not welcome.4
The photographer David ‘Red’ Saunders wrote a reply to Clapton which was published in the New Musical Express, Melody Maker and Sounds:
When we read about Eric Clapton’s Birmingham concert when he urged support for Enoch Powell, we nearly puked.
What’s going on, Eric? You’ve got a touch of brain damage? So you’re going to stand for MP and you think we’re being colonised by black people. Come on you’ve been taking too much of that Daily Express stuff, you know you can’t handle it.
Own up. Half your music is black. You’re rock music’s biggest colonist. You’re a good musician but where would you be without the blues and R&B?
You’ve got to fight the racist poison, otherwise you degenerate into the sewer with the rats and all the money men who ripped off rock culture with their cheque books and plastic crap.
Rock was and still can be a progressive culture not a package mail order stick-on nightmare of mediocre garbage.
Keep the faith, black and white unite and fight.
We want to organise a rank and file movement against the racist poison in rock music – we urge support – all those interested please write to Rock Against Racism, Box M, 6 Cotton Gardens, London E2 8DN.
P. S. Who shot the Sheriff Eric? It sure as hell wasn’t you!5
Red Saunders was a great bear of a man who had been given his nickname in honour of his red rockabilly quiff. A photographer and a former mod, Saunders was also a Clapton fan who had bought the guitarist’s albums and watched him play live. Saunders had previously acted in Claire and Roland Muldoon’s agit-prop theatre group Cartoon Archetype Slogan Theatre, ‘famous’, as one admirer recalled, ‘for its acrobatic style, fast pace and roll-neck black sweaters’.6 Saunders later left CAST for another radical theatre group, the Kartoon Klowns. In summer 1976, the Klowns were rehearsing a play, Yes, but: Socialism or Barbarism and it was among this group that Saunders found his first allies.7 According to Saunders:
I was just a working photographer and then the art got to me, typography, Rodchenko’s posters, Mayakovsky’s poetry. I was educated by the theatre group CAST, it was the rock on which everything was based . . . So that we would be reading Preobrazhensky this week, right, then we’re off to see the Prague Theatre of the Black and then it’s The Crime of M. Lange at the Kilburn Grange. It trained you for cultural fanaticism. We’d go back to the flat, eat sardines on toast, get herbed up and analyse it all night.8
Several hundred people responded to RAR’s letter,9 as Saunders recalls:
After the letter appeared, people came back and contacted us . . . Our attitude was always, if you’d like to get involved do it. One guy called up from Aberystwyth. I said, ‘Right, you’re the RAR Aberystwyth committee.’ He said, ‘Can’t you help?’ I said, ‘No, I’ve only got two rolls of Sellotape and that’s it.’
RAR Central meetings began at the studio which Red Saunders shared at 41 Great Windmill Street in Soho with another photographer, Gered Mankowitz. The meetings were open to all, sometimes with thirty people or more in attendance, including musicians, fans, writers and artists. Within a year, the meetings became so packed, and letters and RAR gigs so numerous, that an elected committee was required in order to organise effectively.10 According to Gregory:
Red had this big studio, this big enormous space. We didn’t have to hire anywhere. On the walls, there were his and Gered’s photos. Meetings were long, sometimes two, three hours. They weren’t structured, they were just people sitting around a long table and putting in ideas. We were interested in doing. It was about music, it was about activity. There was a lot of laughter, sometimes shouting. We had this burning desire for change.
When the campaign started Saunders was at its heart, as Syd Shelton recalls:
Red would turn up at three in the morning and he always had this big Bellingham camera bag. He’d pull it out and there’d be a couple of bottles of beer and a sandwich and he’d go ‘This is wonderful’ . . . He could motivate people to do things who maybe wouldn’t have done it without him.11
Chris Bolton and Clarence Baker from reggae band Misty in Roots attended the London RAR meetings. Other reggae groups pledging their support to the emergent campaign included the Cimarons, Steel Pulse, Aswad and Black Slate. Saun
ders’ studio, with its red plywood sofa and a coffee table made from a Kodak rotary print dryer was soon too small to seat all those who wanted to take part.
Kate Webb was just 17 years old and a Tom Robinson fan. She was working in the hat and glove department at Debenhams when she attended her first RAR meeting. Fired up by the way the older campaigners dropped in to the conversation names such as Toussaint L’Ouverture, Alexandra Kollontai and Kurt Weill, Webb quit her job at Debenhams and became RAR’s first full-time worker, based in an office at Clerkenwell near the Marx Memorial Library.
The musician Tom Robinson also took part:
All these international rock superstars, Eric Clapton, David Bowie giving the fascist salute, even Rod Stewart declared ‘Enoch’s our man’, all these people had made their living out of black music. I made up my mind to do everything I could to help.
Another member of the RAR London committee was Dave Widgery, a GP in Limehouse, a former editor of the magazine Oz and a member of the IS/SWP’s informal dissident wing. Born in 1947, Widgery had been a victim of the 1956 polio epidemic and suffered five years of reconstructive operations, graduating as he put it, ‘from wheelchair and callipers to my first pair of shop-bought shoes’. He was trapped with other children on a hospital ward, ‘crying, as I so clearly remember, ourselves to sleep at night with our nurses in tears at their inability to comfort us’.12
At age 15, Widgery read Jack Kerouac’s great novel On the Road and discovered in it ‘a coded message of discontent’. Later, he would write that Neal Cassady, the hero of the novel, was the ‘Leon Trotsky of his time’. Widgery bunked off from school to listen to jazz bands at the Rikki-Tik club in Windsor. He was expelled from his grammar school for publishing an unauthorised magazine, Rupture. At 18, he interviewed the American radical poet Allen Ginsberg.13 He arrived in the States just as Watts, the black district of Los Angeles, exploded in riots. Widgery journeyed to Cuba and later to the West Coast, taking part in anti-Vietnam protests called by members of Students for a Democratic Society.14
Widgery describes how jazz and reggae shaped his and his friends’ lives:
Black music was our catechism, not just something we listened to in our spare time. It was the culture which woke us up, had shaped us and kept us up all night, blocked in the Wardour Street mod clubs, fanatical on the Thames Valley R&B circuit, queuing all down Gerrard Street to see Roland Kirk in Ronnie Scott’s old basement. It was how we worked out our geography, learnt our sexuality and taught ourselves history.
There was no question of slumming or inverted snobbery, we went for black music because it was so strong rhythmically, there was a passion in it, it was about life and had some point to it. And if white musicians were as good and as exciting (as George Fame, Alexis Kormer and the early Stones certainly were) we worshipped them too.15
‘It took to the end of 1976’, as Widgery recalls:
For the little RAR group to hammer out its ideas and consolidate a core of visual artists, musicians and writers who could drive the project ahead. But for that group the feeling of fear and passivity against the Front’s advance was over, at least in our heads; we were going to strike back kung-fu, rub-a-dub, surrealist style.16
The first RAR gig took place at the Princess Alice pub in Forest Gate in November 1976, with blues singer Carol Grimes and the London Boogie Band playing. According to Grimes, ‘One day, Red came knocking on my door. He was quite a big man and my house was like a doll’s house.’17 To advertise the concert, RAR spray-painted an image onto a massive plain white sheet, photographed it and then reduced the image to a flier – only forgetting to include the time of the gig.
Security was put on by the Royal Group of Docks Shop Stewards Committee, Micky Fenn, Bob Light and their friends. Widgery describes the dockers arriving with a bulky Adidas bag and the words, ‘Not to worry, the tools are here.’18
A second gig saw Grimes’ London Boogie Band perform alongside reggae act Matumbi and the saxophonist Mike Hobart’s soul band Limousine. Fred Rath reviewed the gig for Black Echoes, praising ‘Dave Brooks, playing sax like a reincarnated King Curtis’, and concluded:
I’m not sure of the role that politics takes but I’m sure that the Socialist Workers who got this thing on, will realise that racial harmony is far more important than any political party. The venture deserves support from anybody who cares.19
The graphic designer Dave King came up with a RAR logo, a five-cornered star in the style of the old Communist red star for the five continents but with curved lines to make the image softer, smoother and cast within a circle representing unity.
RAR held its first conference at North London Polytechnic in January 1977, recalled by Widgery as ‘a caboodle of oddballs who were going to work together . . . more explosively than the worthies of the conventional anti-racist platforms’.20
The next RAR benefit was held at the Roundhouse on 1 May 1977, with Carol Grimes inviting her friends Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding from the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Paul Jones from Manfred Mann to perform and Red Saunders booking reggae band Aswad. The foyer was filled with union banners, while Saunders’ colleague Gered Mankowitz, the photographer for the Rolling Stones’ album Between the Buttons, bathed the stage in Jamaican green, black and yellow light.
It was at around this time that Rock Against Racism approached the poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, inviting him to take part in the campaign. He in turn asked his comrades on the Race Today Collective. Leila Hassan recalls that Darcus Howe, Race Today’s editor and Dave Widgery of RAR had been friends for several years:
They disagreed a lot but they would have discussions. Darcus liked Widgery. Race Today had regular big heavy parties. You’d meet people in social gatherings and because of the moment you’d always be discussing politics. I remember Darcus and Dave talking about CLR James and the vanguard party.
The message came back to Johnson, yes, this was an initiative which he should support.
Johnson recalls the suspicion which some of his friends felt towards Rock Against Racism: ‘We didn’t subscribe to their position on blacks and Asians who they saw as victims. Victims are people who don’t fight back . . . That was soon dispelled when we saw the effectiveness of what they were doing.’21
The first issue of a RAR fanzine, Temporary Hoarding, appeared in November 1976. Lucy Whitman explains the name: ‘Everywhere you went there were lots of bill posters all over these boarded-up buildings. There was the idea that everything was very immediate and wouldn’t last long.’22 The first issue contained an A3 poster of the Clash with the lyrics of White Riot: ‘All the power is in the hands of the people rich enough to buy it.’ A second poster showed a family watching a Front march on television: ‘Don’t sit back and watch it . . . smash racism!’ The editorial demanded: ‘Rebel music, street music. Music that breaks down people’s fear of one another. Crisis music. Now music. Music that knows who the real enemy is.’
Three designers on Temporary Hoarding worked in the SWP printshop and others contributed from outside the SWP, including Andy Dark, Jo Wreford, Darla-Jane Gilroy and Rick Fawcett. Ruth Gregory had worked on the left press in Sydney:
In Australia, everything was hot metal. By the time I came here, the technology had moved on. It was all artwork straight to camera. The new machines gave us more freedom, suddenly design was accessible to more people. It was part of punk, you could tear things up, you could print from anything.
Gregory describes the part played by Saunders:
Red was taller than anyone else. He used to come in and talk to his friends about music, Red was totally inclusive. I don’t remember him as a leader. He was encouraging; he was interested in meeting new people. He’d talk to people about what they were doing, he’d do that to everyone and make them feel like they were part of something. If someone was involved in Temporary Hoarding, he’d insist that they got a credit. He’d insist on writing in everyone’s names at the final edit.
There was every contrast between the art
istic license Gregory had in designing Temporary Hoarding and the limits of her day job. Gregory recalls working at the printshop on a poster and being instructed by Jim Nichol, the SWP’s national secretary and the manager of the SWP printshop, to tone down the design. ‘A poster’, he told her, ‘has to be able to be read from the top of a bus.’ Socialist Worker was a conventional-looking tabloid, similar in design if not politics to the Daily Mirror or the Daily Express. When it came to Temporary Hoarding, Gregory had a free licence to express her imagination. ‘It’s like cooking,’ she says, ‘either you follow a recipe exactly or you take the ingredients and make something new.’
Shelton, Gregory and other Rock Against Racism designers employed a typographic style which may have seemed reminiscent of the punk fanzines, but looked deeper into the history of design, experimenting with layout, colour and showing the influences of Dada, the constructivists and Weimar artist John Heartfield.
The writing was also bolder and more chaotic than standard left journalism. Scathing, ironic and deadly serious beneath a humorous facade and relying on a free associational style, Dave Widgery’s essay for the first issue of Temporary Hoarding, ‘What is Racism’, linked the rise of the NF to the racism of the state:
Racism is as British as Biggles and baked beans. You grow up anti-black, with the golliwogs in the jam, The Black and White Minstrel Show on TV and CSE dumbo history at school. Racism is about Jubilee mugs and Rule Britannia and how we won the War. Gravestones, bayonets, forced destruction of the culture of India and Africa was regrettable of course. But without our Empire, the world’s inhabitants would still be rolling in the mud, wouldn’t they? . . . [Racism] would be pathetic if it hadn’t killed and injured and brutalised so many lives and if it wasn’t starting all over again . . .