by David Renton
The problem is not just the new fascists from the old slime, a master race whose idea of heroism is ambushing single blacks in darkened streets. These private attacks whose intention, to cow and brutalise, won’t work if the community they seek to terrorise instead organises itself. But when the state backs up racialism, it’s different. Outwardly respectable but inside fired with the same mentality and the same fears, the bigger danger is the racist magistrates with their cold sneering authority, the immigration men who mock an Asian mother as she gives birth to a dead child on their office floor, policemen for whom answering back is a crime.23
Soon, Temporary Hoarding was selling 12,000 copies per issue; making it the best-selling of the remaining punk fanzines.24
At the heart of Rock Against Racism was an alliance between political activists and a small number of reggae and punk musicians. There was nothing automatic about the connection between politics and music. Reggae was widely derided on the left as a macho, even misogynist artform. As for punk, the term was barely older than RAR itself, with the first punk singles, The Damned’s ‘New Rose’ and the Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy in the UK’, having just been released in October and November 1976.
Few people on the British left had a sense of how political (in the broadest sense)25 this new scene was. Before punk, the dominant approach on the left had been to look for socialist politics in the folk songs of the distant past.26 In Britain and the US, left-wing artists modelled themselves on the nineteenth-century singing tramps. In Ewan MacColl’s words, ‘I became convinced . . . we should be pursuing some kind of national identity, not just becoming an arm of American cultural imperialism.’27 The avowed socialist politics of artists like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Ewan MacColl was used to justify the claim that the only left-wing music was folk music. The notion that folk music was more inherently radical than more recent forms underpinned the controversy at Bob Dylan’s May 1966 gig at the Manchester Free Trade Hall when Dylan went electric and members of the audience shouted ‘Judas’ at him.
These older arguments were brought into the debate around punk. Maoist composer Cornelius Cardew maintained that punk was ‘fascist . . . The monopoly capitalist class consciously selects for promotion the most reactionary element of culture’, an argument Cardew proved to his own satisfaction by showing the Clash’s use of Union Jacks and photographs of police charging black rioters.28
Lucy Whitman, writing as Lucy Toothpaste in her fanzine JOLT found herself at an event on Marxism and music put on by the IMG. The speaker, Leon Rosselson, was the writer of such radical folk classics as ‘Don’t Get Married Girls’. To Whitman’s disappointment, Rosselson dismissed all amplified music:
He argued that rock music is incapable of being a revolutionary force because 1) you can never hear the lyrics if the music is loud, so radical messages are wasted 2) the industry is entirely controlled by money . . . Folk music was the only revolutionaries could make use of because according to him folk clubs bypass the worst of the music industry.29
While the left was deprecating punk, others on the right were taking an interest. The North American conservative magazine National Review sent its reviewer Edward Meadows to the UK to study the punk phenomenon. With the one limited exception Meadows argued of the Jam (who he decided, were Conservatives) ‘The groups lean toward the National Front’. ‘New Wave’ (i.e. punk), he told his readers was ‘at base, right-wing political protest . . . born and bred of rage against the Labour Party, the Board of Trade, the unions and long-haired hippy-dippy rich-kid poseurs who don’t have to worry because they’ve got it made’.30
The examples chosen by the likes of Cardew or Meadows were more complex than they realised. The Jam had indeed told one interviewer they would vote Conservative; the following year, Paul Weller withdrew the comment.31 Not long afterwards, the Jam released ‘Down in the Tube Station at Midnight’, a blistering account of an attack by a National Front supporter as experienced by its victim. The reason the Clash used photographs of police clashing with black youth was because members of the band had grown up in west London, had watched the police attack the Notting Hill Carnival and identified with the black rioters.
Punk is best understood as a disobedient music form, capable of nourishing either left- or right-wing politics. Indeed, you could see this ambiguity32 even in the history of individual bands. The Sex Pistols were capable of releasing ‘God Save the Queen’. The same band also released ‘Belsen Was a Gas’, with its description of the open graves ‘where all the Jews lay’ and its intended comic chorus ‘Oh dear / oh dear’. If the first song would fit into any list of the top ten protest records in British history, the second had nothing to say about the Holocaust. The band’s sympathetic historian Greil Marcus calls the song ‘crude, cheesy, stupid . . . a piece of shit’.33
Another punk act, Adam and the Ants, released a single, ‘Puerto Rican’, which offered to ‘light up a beacon on a Puerto Rican’. In an interview with Temporary Hoarding’s Lucy Toothpaste (Lucy Whitman), formerly of JOLT,34 Adam defended their song:
The story is about a white woman who has actually got a pet Puerto Rican. I saw [Alex Haley’s] Roots and what shocked me in that wasn’t the slavery, wasn’t the conditions, it was when that guy went into the black slave community and they said to him, ‘Look, we’re animals’ – they’d accepted being fucking animals . . . My song is about a white woman who has reduced a human being to dog status – because I thought that was a damn sight more powerful in a lyric than saying look at those poor Puerto Ricans.
Toothpaste took Adam and the Ants to task for their naivety and challenged the way some of their songs drew on the ‘decadent’ imagery associated with Nazi Germany. Adam was indignant at the very suggestion that he could possibly support Nazism or the National Front (‘I hate Nazis. My parents are Romany Gypsies you know’), but did not accept that there was anything problematic about writing songs which appeared to get an erotic thrill out of imagery associated with the Nazis.35
The interview appeared in Temporary Hoarding surrounded by a margin of sexist and anti-sexist images. In the top left-hand corner, the photographs included images for Neil Diamond and Sweet albums with women bending over and showing their underwear. In the bottom right-hand corner was the resistance, a Reclaim the Night protest, campaigns for women’s refuges, Jayaben Desai on a Grunwick picket line. ‘[The Ants] were unable to engage with the debate,’ Whitman recalls, ‘other than to repeat they were nice people and didn’t mean any harm.’ Despite her doubts, the RAR booked the Ants to play benefits.36 ‘It was better to have them inside the tent.’
The audience for punk was the first generation of young people since the war to see their life-chances diminish. At its best, punk taught them to resist. As the journalist Caroline Coon wrote in Melody Maker:
The musicians and their audience reflect each other’s street cheap ripped-apart, pinned-together style of dress . . . The kids are arrogant, aggressive, rebellious . . . Punk rock sounds simple and callow. It’s meant to. The equipment is minimal, usually cheap. It’s played faster than the speed of light . . . No indulgent improvisations . . . Participation is the operative word.37
The fanzine Sideburns drew an A, an E and a G chord: ‘This is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a band.’38 At moments such as the Pistols’ concert at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester (attended by fewer than fifty people but including future members of Buzzcocks, the Smiths and Joy Division), the membrane between performer and audience was stretched so tight that the audience could almost walk through.39
Punk was played in a register that veered between anger and foreboding, whether in the Clash’s ‘London Calling’, with its language of war declared and battle coming down, the Ruts’ ‘Babylon’s Burning’ or Elvis Costello’s ‘Less Than Zero’, with its images of ‘Mister Oswald with the swastika tattoo’, plainly Oswald Mosley.
The Sex Pistols were arrogant, destructive and utterly mercenary. Viv Albertine, later of the Sl
its, heard them playing in a school hall. They were ‘[l]oud and raucous,’ she recalls, ‘it’s the singer who stands out. Johnny Rotten slouches at the front of the stage . . . sneers at us in his ordinary North London accent, his voice isn’t trained and tuneful, it’s a whiny cynical drawl.’40 Rotten told Temporary Hoarding’s Dave Widgery that he despised the Front: ‘No one should have the right to tell anyone they can’t live here because of the colour of their skin.’41
The Clash dressed in black battle uniforms stencilled with Caribbean phrases, copying at different times the look of black Jamaican street style: narrow trousers, black brogues, even the pork pie hat. The comedian Mark Steel, then a young punk living in the suburbs, recalls listening to his first Clash album: ‘While the lyrics were indecipherable, the meaning boomed out of the chipboard speakers and echoed around the Swanley walls. It was all right to be angry. You be angry, mate. There’s a whole generation of us.’42 The future musician Julian Cope, then a mere foot-soldier of the Liverpool punk scene, recalls seeing the Clash at Eric’s, during the band’s White Riot tour:
It was as cartoony as the Ramones but blazing with colour. And they all moved in rigid formation . . . The club burned on free energy for the rest of the night. All the right-on guys loved Strummer. All the women wanted to fuck Simonon.43
Rock Against Racism related to an audience of punks, yet the punk scene itself was in constant change. Soon the Pistols were breaking up and new bands were coming to the fore including the Clash and Tom Robinson. Others, including the Mekons, the Ruts and the Gang of Four started out at RAR benefits. Music and politics worked together, as RAR poet Steven ‘Seething’ Wells recalls:
Punk wouldn’t have had so much impact outside London without the anti-fascist movement but then the anti-fascist movement would not have had so much impact without punk. In Leeds, where the Young National Front were really strong, some of the early punks had formed fascist groups like the Dentists and the Ventz. Punk was apolitical in that context; many people saw it as fascistic even though Martin Webster came out against it. RAR caused punk to make real contact there – the time when most people see punk as being diluted was the time when it was gaining substance.44
The music papers were at the height of their influence. By the end of the 1970s, the combined sales of Sounds, Melody Maker, NME and Record Mirror was over 600,000 a week.45 Indeed as the likes of the NME turned towards radical politics, their circulation grew. The coverage of RAR was continuous. A typical Sounds issue featured a dozen black musicians from George Csapo of Bethnal to Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex and Arri Up of the Slits, their faces stamped with the word ‘Deported!’.46
Outside its circle of young followers, punk was a despised, reviled sub-culture, seen by millions of older people as disrespectful. ‘No subculture has sought, with more grim determination than the punks,’ sociologist Dick Hebdidge wrote, ‘to bring down upon itself such vehement disapproval.’47 When the Sex Pistols toured the UK, twelve of their nineteen gigs were banned and the band was confronted at Caerphilly by crowds of Christians waving placards and singing carols at the rebellious youth. ‘I think it’s disgusting the way these punks sing about violence all the time,’ complained Radio 1 DJ Tony Blackburn. ‘Why can’t they sing about beautiful things like trees and flowers?’ In July 1977, following the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and the band’s boat-tour along the Thames with ‘God Save the Queen’ playing, Bernard Brook-Partridge of the Greater London Council announced that the Pistols were banned from all GLC venues.48 A week later, Mecca announced that no punk gigs would be allowed at any of their venues. Virtually all major concert halls followed suit, a censorship ‘unprecedented’, according to Caroline Coon, ‘in the entire history of rock’.49
Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols and Johnny Rotten were attacked in the street.50 Indeed, this hostility was extended even to punk’s most junior, local supporters. In an interview with The Mirror, two punks Jean Mahoney and Dough Stowe complained that they were under constant police surveillance. ‘It’s just our clothes,’ they said, ‘nothing else.’ According to John Robb, later a bass guitarist with the Membranes, ‘Everyone involved can recall beatings being handed out by members of the public . . . You didn’t have to look that punk to get attacked.’51
By summer 1977, the first generation of punks were being replaced by new generations of supporters. Some were young and middle class, with the spare money to buy into the style. According to one participant, George Marshall:
When it became High Street fashion with High Street price tags, it also became the preserve of those who could afford it rather than those who could feel it. Buying a pair of ready-made bondage trousers for thirty quid down the King’s Road could hardly be chalked up as one in the eye for the system. And neither could paying a fiver for a ripped bin liner.52
Yet the opposite dynamic was at work outside the capital, with punk winning an audience among young working-class people, whether in work or still in education.
Part of the punk instinct was the urge to shock an older generation for whom the defining moment of British history was the Second World War. The critique was one which Rock Against Racism shared: the ‘gravestones, bayonets and forced starvation’ which in Widgery’s words linked the wartime effort to the British Empire. Yet punk’s critique of British imperial myth-making was shallow. It went little further than pointing at the older generation and goading them.
Several punk bands took their name from moments in fascist history, including RAR supporters Joy Division, named after the brothels which the SS maintained in its extermination camps.53 After Ian Curtis’s death, they became New Order, another name derived from the Nazi past. Other bands to reflect this history included Blitzkrieg, Martin and the Brownshirts, Stormtrooper, the Stukas, Warsaw, Zyklon B and even London SS, whose stick-thin guitarist with fluffy backcombed hair54 was Mick Jones, later of RAR mainstays, the Clash.
Numerous early punk bands were photographed wearing iron crosses, SS insignia, or swastikas.55 At the start of the punk movement, the Sex Pistols were invited onto the Bill Grundy show and goaded by the older man’s flirting with Siouxsie Sioux (‘We’ll meet afterwards, shall we?’). They answered by swearing at him live: ‘You dirty sod, you dirty old man . . . You dirty bastard’.56 The press coverage focused on their profanity, with The Mirror’s account headlined ‘The Filth and the Fury’. No one seemed to notice the orange-haired Simon Barker, standing beside Bill Grundy, his swastika armband in full view. It wasn’t just Barker who wore a swastika; other members of the Pistols and their entourage, Siouxsie Sioux, Soo Cat Woman and Sid Vicious were all photographed repeatedly with the image, earning the ire of Lucy Toothpaste in her early punk fanzine JOLT.57 The Damned’s Captain Sensible was photographed in a swastika armband,58 as were Jimmy Pursey of Sham 69 and Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols. ‘I’m not a racist and never have been,’ Jones later wrote, ‘I suppose it was just a way of summing up the darkness I felt.’59
To this day, Siouxsie insists that nothing more was intended by the wearing of swastikas than simply getting back at the older generation:
There was that film, the Damned and everyone who saw it thought it looked great . . . There was nothing coming out about what went on in the concentration camps . . . I became aware when skinheads latched on to it and took it quite seriously and it was used politically and started talking about race and I thought what? . . . I thought fuck off, no way.60
Beyond the swastika, there were other parts of punk’s aesthetic which were amenable to fascist politics. The sound of early punk, with its jagged three-chord repetitions, was the antithesis of reggae or dub. With the exception of a tiny number of black artists who were accepted in the punk scene (such as Don Letts, DJ at the Roxy and a friend of the Clash or Barry Adamson, bassist with Manchester band Magazine), it was an overwhelmingly white scene.
The demise of bands like the Pistols created a space some of which was taken by a revival of the late-1960s smartly dressed, reggae-following skinhead s
ubculture. It was here that punk’s flirtation with fascism held. A number of skinheads sided with the NF – not all, not a majority, but enough to be noticed. One skinhead writing for the RAR magazine Temporary Hoarding spoke in negative terms about their own scene:
skinheads, not the punk spill-over of now but the real thing . . . hated hippies, pretended to hate blacks and were desperate for some positive ideology to give the movement permanence. None came – we never had any heroes. No movies to attach ourselves to, not even our own music – we nicked reggae from the blacks.61
The skinhead style, as Dick Hebdidge points out, was open to black influences:
It was . . . through consorting with West Indians at the local youth clubs and on the street corners, by copying their mannerisms, adopting their curses, dancing to their music that the skinheads “magically recovered” their lost sense of working-class community.
And yet this seeming -idealisation of one black culture did not extend to an anti-racist consciousness – for some it did, but not for most.62
Soon there was a post-Pistols sound: slower and heavier than the first punk acts, watered-down beer compared to their predecessor’s amphetamine buzz. Among the most popular of the skinhead bands was Sham 69. Among the band’s roadies were two supporters of the far right, Glen Bennett and Kev Wells.63 According to the skinhead scene’s historian George Marshall:
Lyrics to [Sham 69] songs like ‘Borstal Breakout’ and ‘If the Kids are United’ might look simple and naïve on paper but they weren’t being entered into a sixth form poetry competition anyway. And it’s only when played live that they genuinely come into their own and sound as sharp as any Stanley blade. The pride and passion with which Jimmy [Pursey] belted out his three minute masterpieces and the way every word was unanimously echoed by the crowd, is what it’s all about. And going to Sham 69 was about being part of something, a part of probably the best band ever to tell it as it was on the streets.64