by David Renton
Fighting between Pursey’s fascist and anti-fascist followers disrupted several of his gigs including those held under a Rock Against Racism banner. But Pursey saw his band and its supporters as a family. He refused to denounce his followers. He was going to convert them; whether they liked it or not.
The typical RAR running order was split in two: a white and a black band. According to Red Saunders:
It very quickly became our thing to mix up the bands. We had to have black bands on stage . . . Putting black and white bands together broke down the fear. One of the most wondrous gigs we did was at Hackney Town Hall [in August 1977]. We had the reggae band The Cimarons on with the punk act Generation X. Everyone jammed together at the end. It became the blueprint.65
There had of course been bands before that had tried to fuse black and white sounds. What was different now was the extent of the fusion. In 1970s London, there was no significant white audience for black music. RAR bands set out to break through this barrier. Nicky Tesco of the Members remembers playing alongside Misty in Roots at RAR gigs and sharing instruments. Jake Burns of Stiff Little Fingers recalls that ‘RAR’s raising of cultural awareness meant more and more people started experimenting with the type of bill to put on’.
The Clash recorded ‘Police and Thieves’, a cover of Junior Murvin’s reggae track and also Willie Williams’ ‘Armagideon Time’. They also hired a black producer, Lee Perry and wrote perhaps their greatest song, ‘White Man in Hammersmith Palais’. The sound is noticeably slower than ‘White Riot’, with the bass turned up. The narrator is the only white man at a reggae night. Looking for an evening of authentic political music, he senses that everyone else is there for entertainment. This apathy, the narrator insists, is tolerant even of fascism, using an image that recalls Bowie’s far-right flirtation in 1976: ‘If Adolf Hitler flew in today, they’d send a limousine anyway.’ The words of the song move to unease, even despair, while the music of the song takes up the pauses and missed-beats of reggae, subverting the lyrics.
The Ruts also tried to fuse reggae and punk, while Siouxsie and the Banshees, having worn swastikas, now wrote ‘Metal Postcard’, influenced by the collages of the German anti-fascist Johnny Heartfield. ‘Metal is tough,’ Siouxsie sang, ‘metal will sheen. Metal won’t rust when oiled and cleaned.’
In the alliance between reggae and punk, Ruth Gregory recalls, all the authority belonged to the former:
The reggae artists were such skilled musicians, with a strong sense of who they were. If you listen to Aswad’s Concrete Slave Ship it carries such a great sense of who the performers are. The punks weren’t nearly so clear. They were the first generation of unskilled workers, everything they were brought up to believe had all disappeared. If you listen to Gang of Four’s ‘At Home He’s a Tourist’, it captures that sense that nothing is where it should be.
Meanwhile, RAR also helped create a space for a number of punk-feminist bands, including X-Ray Spex, whose debut single opened with 20-year-old part-Somali part-Scottish-Irish frontwoman Poly Styrene briefly saying in awful, coy, voice, ‘Some people say that little girls should be seen and not heard’, before screaming rejuvenated into her microphone, ‘Oh Bondage, up yours.’
In summer 1977, Caroline Harper was living in a squat in London. She heard about the first RAR gigs and was attracted by the music and its anti-establishment feel, but she described herself as ‘unpolitical’ or ‘an anarchist’:
It was part of our culture, living in London as punks. We were getting harassed by the police. We naturally identified with other people getting harassed by the police . . . It didn’t matter if you had green hair or were black, you would be stopped by the police, for any reason . . . .
From 1977, voices could be found all across London insisting that punk had died. But through summer and autumn 1977 and into the following year a new infrastructure was being created as punk evolved, with new labels being launched: Fast Product, Rough Trade, Postcard, Factory and Mute.
Meanwhile, Rock Against Racism groups were being set up in increasing numbers outside London. In Leeds, Paul Furness, Dave Bash and Ian Williams organised regular performances at the Polytechnic student union, starting with a one-off performance by the band Foxy Maiden and building up to weekly performances by the likes of the Mekons, Gang of Four and Delta 5.66
In Birmingham, RAR was set up after a letter in local magazine Broadside called for volunteers. The group ran a weekly club night at Digbeth Civic Hall and were supported by West Midlands post-punk band the Au Pairs. Sheryl Garratt recalls an evening when skinheads danced to soul classic ‘Liquidator’, while chanting ‘British Movement, British Movement’. Garratt confronted them, indicated the music and said, ‘Do you know what colour these people are?’ The skinheads stopped chanting, remained and at the end of the evening one of the organisers gave them a lift home: ‘They were National Front in the same way as I was left-wing. It was like a vague unease that things weren’t right and life wasn’t fair.’67
In Deptford, RAR was a collaboration with the Combination Theatre Group and bands Eddie and the Hot Rods, Menace and Amber. In Lymington (‘the most boring place in the world’), RAR held a first gig with the band Criminally Insane. On Merseyside, a carnival was organised jointly with the local Anti-Racist Alliance, with 4,000 people turning out. In Nottingham, organisers described themselves as breaking from a ‘populist, mediocre’ local Anti-Nazi League. Gigs were performed at the town’s one punk venue, the Sandpiper.68
Hull RAR brought out its own fanzine, Official Secrets, and held events at the Spring Bank Community Centre on Wellington Lane. The bands who performed are a list of ephemeral and local acts and none the worse for it: the Tar Babies, Mental Block, Nyam Nyam, the Posers, Red Stripe, My Silent War. Probably the best known were Akrylyk Vyktymz, a group of undergraduates from Hull’s art college who saw themselves as socialists and who once supported the Clash at Bridlington Spa. Their saxophonist Roland Gift later played with the Fine Young Cannibals.69
Several of Rock Against Racism’s early members were also members of IS/SWP. Yet even within RAR, the SWP were a minority. They were well represented among the writers and graphic designers, but only a tiny number of the musicians and performers. Kate Webb, RAR’s first paid worker, was interviewed by Sounds: ‘I don’t know how many times we’ve got to say it but RAR is completely independent. I’m not an SWP member, other people aren’t. In fact most aren’t.’70
Moreover, the Socialist Workers Party members in Rock Against Racism were drawn from a particular layer. They were active members of the party, loyal but far from the most orthodox of Leninists. Syd Shelton worked in the SWP print-shop but saw one of his tasks as keeping his comrades away from RAR: ‘The SWP did supply troops on the ground: people to put out leaflets; put up posters; sell badges and fanzines. We were really grateful for their contribution but it was very important that we had no party politics.’ Indeed, several of them were in the process of leaving the SWP, including Syd Shelton, Ruth Gregory71 and Nigel Fountain.
Supporters of the SWP also disagreed among themselves in analysing the new movement. Because RAR was aimed at a young audience, not at existing socialists, some SWP members regarded it with suspicion. John Shemeld from south London was one of them: ‘I was thirty and conscious of my age.’ The Rock Against Racism paper Temporary Hoarding relayed left ideas in a more radical format. The look relied on collage, images and irony. Not everyone liked it. Colin Fancy was an 18-year-old member of the Deptford Rock Against Racism group. Although his parents were in the SWP, Fancy declined to join that party. He thought that Temporary Hoarding was too political for its own good and not enough of a fanzine: ‘I was a music press and fanzine reader and I wanted to read interviews with bands . . . I wasn’t going to read an article about internment, whatever that meant.’
Red Saunders recalls showing a copy of Temporary Hoarding to the SWP’s founder Tony Cliff, who found the artwork incomprehensible and tried to read the magazine upside down.
Ignoring the politics and moving the conversation back to more familiar topics, Cliff told Saunders off for being overweight.72
Ruth Gregory of the London RAR committee insists that the group operated in a ‘collective, bottom-up fashion. For the Punk and Reggae bands, hierarchy smelled of oppression and we felt pretty much the same.’73 She describes negotiating with leading members of the SWP and compares the experience to ‘arguing with your parents’. Red Saunders recalls negotiations with his ‘uncles’ in the left groups, ‘But even I could see that there were limits to what RAR could do on its own.’
Notes
1 P. Doggett, There’s a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars and the Rise and Fall of ’60s Counterculture (London: Canongate, 2007), p. 197; A. Mitchell, ‘Beatles’, Listener, 3 October 1968.
2 T. Stewart, ‘Heil and farewell’, New Musical Express, 8 May 1976, p. 9.
3 C. Crowe, ‘Candid conversation’, Playboy, September 1976. Bowie, unlike Eric Clapton, later offered a full apology.
4 D. Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain 1974–1979 (London: Penguin, 2013), p. 587; I. Goodyer, Crisis Music: The Cultural Politics of Rock Against Racism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), p. 18; D. Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down: The Music and Politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge (London: Picador, 2016), p. 13. At the time of writing, Clapton’s explanation was that his mind was disturbed by excessive drug-taking – ‘I was so ashamed of who I was, a kind of semi-racist, which didn’t make sense. Half of my friends were black’: D. Sanderson, ‘Drugs “turned Eric Clapton racist”’, The Times, 13 January 2018.
5 ‘Rock Against Racism’, Socialist Worker, 2 October 1976.
6 D. Widgery, Preserving Disorder (London: Pluto, 1989), p. 201.
7 Of the letter’s signatories, four were Klowns (Saunders, Peter Bruno, Jo Wreford and Angela Follett), another was Saunders’ agent Mike Stadler, the sixth a friend (an arts student and jeweller Dave Courts).
8 S. Frith and J. Street, ‘Rock Against Racism and Red Wedge: from music to politics, from politics to music’, in R. Garofalo (ed.), Rockin’ the Boat: Mass Music and Mass Movements (Boston, MA: South End Press), pp. 67–81, 76.
9 Including the future journalist and broadcaster Rod Liddle, then living on Teesside. ‘I am 16 and where politics are concerned am left wing, also the biggest love of my life is rock music . . . I should like to help in any way I can.’ Rock Against Racism poster, ‘Musicians . . . fans . . . we need you’, Bishopsgate Institute archive, LHM 128.
10 A December 1978 list provided that the RAR committee comprised Jo Wreford, Syd Shelton, Ruth Hotpinkheart (i.e. Gregory), Robert Galvin, Dave Widgery, Irate Kate (Webb), Jane Harrison, John Dennis and Red Saunders: Rock Against Racism, ‘Dub Conference’, leaflet (1979?), p. 4.
11 R. Huddle and R. Saunders (eds), Reminiscences of RAR (London: Redwords, 2016), p. 216.
12 D. Widgery, The National Health: A Radical Perspective (London: Hogarth Press, 1988), pp. xiv, xv, 56.
13 D. Widgery, ‘Interview with Allen Ginsberg’, U – University & College Magazine 3(7), October 1965.
14 R. Neville, Hippie Hippie Shake: The Dreams, the Trips, the Trials, the Love-ins, the Screw-ups . . . the Sixties (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), pp. 173, 271; N. Fountain, Underground: The London Alternative Press (London and New York: Comedia, 1988), p. 43; J. Green (ed.), Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground 1961–1971 (London: Minerva, 1988), p. 65.
15 D. Widgery, Beating Time: Riot ’n’ Race ’n’ Rock and Roll (London: Chatto and Windus, 1986), p. 56; also Widgery, Preserving Disorder, pp. 76–87, 206–210.
16 Widgery, Beating Time, p. 43.
17 Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, p. 17.
18 Widgery, Beating Time, p. 45.
19 Black Echoes, 20 November 1976.
20 Widgery, Beating Time, p. 59.
21 Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, p. 81.
22 C. Blase, ‘A woman called Toothpaste: an interview with Lucy Whitman’, The F-Word, 20 May 2011.
23 D. Widgery, ‘What is racism?’, Temporary Hoarding 1 (November 1976); J. Ash, N. Fountain and D. Renton (eds), David Widgery. Against Miserabilism: Writings 1968–1992 (Glasgow: Vagabond Voices, 2017), pp. 123–126.
24 This excludes Sniffin’ Glue, Mark Perry’s punk fanzine which had begun in July 1976 and ended in August 1977 (i.e. around the third issue of Temporary Hoarding) with a circulation of 15,000 D. Baker, Going to Sea in a Sieve (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012), p. 153.
25 One comparison of UK chart singles in 1976 with the songs on the first five albums by the Damned, the Clash, the Stranglers, the Sex Pistols and the Vibrators, suggests that chart songs were three times more likely to have romance or sex as their main theme, while punk songs were six times more likely to have political or social themes: R. Bestley, ‘Hitsville UK: punk rock and graphic design in the faraway towns 1976–1984’, PhD Thesis, University of the Arts, 2007, p. 100.
26 I. Birchall, ‘Culture’, Young Guard, September 1963, p. 6; I. Birchall, ‘Pop music dialectics’, Young Guard, April 1965, p. 5; I. Birchall, ‘The rhymes they are a-changing’, International Socialism 23 (1965), pp. 16–17; also D. Harker, One for the Money: Politics and Popular Song (London: Hutchinson, 1980), and D. Harker, Fakesong: The Manufacture of British ‘Folksong,’ 1700 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985).
27 I. Goodyer, Crisis Music: The Cultural Politics of Rock Against Racism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), p. 103.
28 M. Worley, No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture 1976–1984 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 143.
29 ‘Marxism and the mass media’, Jolt 2 (1977). Max Farrar tells the story of attending a Beyond the Fragments Conference in Leeds in 1980, attended by 1,600 adults and their 130 children. Two benefit concerts were put on that evening, one by RAR-supporting punk band the Au Pairs, the other with Leon Rosselson. The children decamped to the former, the chose the latter, preferring a ‘quiet communion with . . . an era that was disappearing before our eyes’: M. Farrar, ‘The libertarian movements of the 1970s: what can we learn?’, Edinburgh Review 82 (winter 1989), pp. 58–74, 67.
30 E. Meadows, ‘Pistol-whipped’, National Review, 11 November 1979.
31 ‘I wasn’t right-wing wing,’ he says now. ‘I was just an ignorant, green kid’: Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, p. 376.
32 Roger Sabin criticises Dave Widgery for promoting the ‘myth that punk was somehow anti-racist’: R. Sabin, ‘I won’t let that dago go by: rethinking punk and racism’, in R. Sabin (ed.), Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 199–291, 200. It would be more accurate to say that Widgery and RAR saw punk as a potential ally in the struggle against fascism and a potential adversary, a point they did not hesitate to make in (for example) criticising even punk royalty such as the Sex Pistols or Adam and the Ants at the same time as trying to work with them.
33 G. Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), p. 109.
34 In 1977, Whitman (writing as Lucy Toothpaste) had interviewed the Slits, Poly Styrene, Buzzcocks and the Fall for her fanzine, JOLT. By 1979, she had been part of the RAR collective for over a year, writing pieces such as ‘No more normals’ about what later generations would call heterosexism.
35 Temporary Hoarding 6 (summer 1978).
36 The same article included photographs of a RAR/Ants gig on 17 June 1978.
37 C. Coon, ‘Rebels against the system’, Melody Maker, 7 August 1976.
38 Sideburns, December 1976. The writers’ DIY equivalent was a piece in the established music press: J. Savage, ‘Fanzines: every home should print one’, Sounds, 10 September 1976.
39 Steve Jones writes of this concert, ‘Looking down from the stage, you wouldn’t have known Morrissey and everyone else was there. Apart from anything else it wasn’t that big a crowd and the
y just looked like a standard bunch of Northern cunts with moustaches and kipper ties from where I was standing’: S. Jones, Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol (London: Windmill Books, 2016), p. 165.
40 V. Albertine, Clothes, Music, Boys (London: Faber and Faber, 2014), p. 85.
41 Johnny Rotten interview with Dave Widgery, Temporary Hoarding 2 (June 1977); the Front respond to the interview with ‘“I despise NF” (we’re shattered)’, NF News 10 (August 1977).
42 M. Steel, Reasons to be Cheerful (London: Scribner, 2001), pp. 12–13.
43 J. Cope, Head-On (London: HarperCollins, 1999), pp. 28–30.
44 J. Savage, England’s Dreaming (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), p. 482.
45 Worley, No Future, p. 29.
46 New Musical Express, 25 February 1978, 11 March 1978, 8 April 1978; Sounds, 25 March 1978.
47 D. Hebdidge, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979), p. 117.
48 J. Savage, ‘What did you do on the Jubilee?’, New Musical Express, 18 June 1977.
49 C. Coon, 1988: The New Wave Punk Rock Explosion (London: Orbach and Chambers, 1977), p. 126; D. Haslam, Young Hearts Run Free: The Real Story of the 1970s (London: Harper, 2007), p. 229.
50 Jones, Lonely Boy, p. 196.
51 Daily Mirror, 20 December 1977, p. 1; Bestley, ‘Hitsville UK’, p. 17.
52 G. Marshall, Spirit of ’69: A Skinhead Bible (Dunoon: S. T. Publishing, 1994), p. 71.
53 S. Wells, Anarchy in the UK: The Story Behind the Anthems of Punk (London: Carlton, 2004), p. 74.
54 Albertine, Clothes, Music, Boys, p. 77.
55 Indeed not just punk bands were taking up this look. In his memoir, the socialist miner David Douglass recalls being at a gig at Strathclyde in spring 1978 and beginning to reason with Motörhead’s Lemmy, dressed in swastikas and Iron Crosses. ‘Do I look like a Nazi?’ Lemmy asked and such was his tone of voice that Douglass decided not to pursue the issue: D. J. Douglass, The Wheel’s Still in Spin (Hastings: Read ’n’ Noir, 2009), p. 395.