ROCKING AGAINST RACISM
One of the great things about being in London was that it opened up my mind culturally and politically. For the first time in my life I went to rock gigs – gigs full of white people where I really was a minority but where I felt absolutely no fear at all. I once even bought a ticket to see 10cc play at Wembley, which was a strange experience. I had never paid so much for a concert ticket, or attended a gig with so many people to watch a band I could hardly see because the arena was so huge – there were no big screens then.
One of my true pleasures, though, was going to punk and post-punk gigs. The Ruts, X-Ray Spex, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Sham 69, the Slits and the Dammed were bands I would see again and again. The energy that came from the stage would go though you, and if you couldn’t dance you had to jump. These bands would sometimes play on the same bill as reggae outfits like Aswad, Misty in Roots and Birmingham’s own Steel Pulse. You had punk music thrashing out 125 beats per minute, and reggae, which could be as little as 90 beats per minute, but they had so much in common. These poor white kids lived on some of the same estates as the poor black kids; they felt persecuted by the same politicians, hated by the same bigots, and they felt as alienated as the black youth, so it made sense to share the same platforms.
A guy called Red Saunders, along with a few of his friends, had formed Rock Against Racism in 1976, not just as a reaction to the racist skinheads terrorising our streets, but also in response to comments made by Eric Clapton and David Bowie. It’s extraordinary to think that back then Eric Clapton (aka God) said he agreed with Enoch Powell and that Britain was in danger of becoming a ‘black colony’. And then there was David Bowie saying Adolf Hitler was the first superstar. Who’d have thought it?
Rock Against Racism gigs were a mixture of political rally and rock concert. There was always a good mixture of punk and reggae bands, but there were also poets. At one of these gigs, held at Alexandra Palace one hot Saturday night in April 1979, I had just seen the Ruts, one of my favourite punk bands, who had ended their set with ‘Babylon’s Burning’, which I think is one of the best punk songs ever written. I had been dancing like a crazy pogo stick with a funky punky girl from Billericay. We poured with sweat as we waited for another of my favourites, Sham 69, to play. Then a strange-looking poet emerged on stage. He was tall and really skinny, wearing dark glasses with jet-black hair, and he stood up so high that he almost touched the overhead stage lighting. His name was John Cooper Clarke.
He was a mess. His suit didn’t fit, his arm was in plaster and he looked as if he had come off worst in a fight and escaped from hospital to get to the gig. He said, ‘Hello, London’, and then he began to rant. I remembered having heard someone play a record back in Birmingham of a punk poet called Patrick Fitzgerald. Patrick was a white poet with Irish roots, living in east London, but he talked about living in the same conditions as we were living in, and his favourite music was reggae. But I’d only heard Patrick; John Cooper Clarke was the first punk poet I saw in the flesh. He fired off words so quickly but so effectively that it made his Mancunian drawl sound like music. Every punk and Rasta in that hall stopped to listen to him as he performed ‘(I Married a) Monster from Outer Space’. As I watched John, I thought, Yeah, that’s where I want to be. I want to be on stage with that freak.
It was less than two weeks later that some of the same people who had been pogoing to the Ruts were fighting the extreme right-wing National Front (NF) on the streets. The Battle of Southall started when we marched against racists under the banner of the Anti Nazi League (ANL) on 23 April 1979. The racists had been intimidating the people of Southall and the police were doing nothing, so we were going to do something – we were going to show the National Front that we would defend the people of Southall. We wanted to show the police that if they wouldn’t take on the racists then we would.
The police showed no mercy that day. Very few people who were there or who saw film footage of that demonstration doubted that they were doing the work of the National Front. That day the police killed Blair Peach, a gentle teacher and ANL member, and a martyr was created. On that day, too, the band Misty in Roots had their headquarters smashed up, a friend of mine was hit so hard with a police baton that she lost part of her memory, and someone took a photograph of me in that so-often-seen position: struggling as I was being arrested. Unfortunately I’ve never seen the photo and I’ve often wondered if someone still has it. Nose bleeding, my arms forced behind my back, I was bundled into a police van and beaten even more once inside it. And for good measure the police ripped out a handful of my dreadlocks as a trophy. The police at Thornhill Road, Birmingham, would have been proud.
These were politically volatile times. I don’t think Mrs Thatcher actually said it, but you were either with her or against her, and I didn’t know anyone that was with her. There were of course lots of people who were with her, but they didn’t live in the areas where we lived, and if we ever strayed into real Tory territory we were soon made to feel unwelcome. When she came to power she sold a lifestyle to the aspirational working-class voter, but she was only ever addressing her vision to white people. We were the ones she’d mention in other conversations as swamping the country.
She said what she was going to do and she got down and did it: she privatised everything she could; she clamped down on trade unions; she despised feminists and the politically organised working class, and she openly supported the racist apartheid regime in South Africa. Unsurprisingly she wasn’t doing much about the racist skinheads on the streets of Britain. We were left to defend ourselves, which was pretty hard when you also had openly racist police who would sometimes arrest us when we told them we had rights too. All this meant that the music, poetry and comedy of the time were highly politically charged.
Different strands of youth culture were coming together to take a stand against oppression. The Midlands had always been a hotbed of musical talent but something special was beginning to happen there. They came out of Coventry and they really were the Specials. This band was a mixture of black and white kids who, in the midst of all the punk and reggae music around at the time, looked even further back, to ska. Ska had always been popular with non-racist skinheads, but the Specials injected new energy into it. I got to know them quite well, but I was closest to Neville Staple.
Neville sang a little, but most of all he danced. He danced everywhere: on the lighting rig, on the speaker boxes, on the heads of audience members, and sometimes he even danced on stage. He was an energy ball, full of life. I was with Neville after one of their early London gigs. Their EP, Gangsters, had come out and they were doing okay. As we watched the punky stragglers leave the hall, Neville told me of their grand plan. They wanted the punks to tidy up – to throw away their bondage trousers and safety pins and get smart suits with razor-sharp creases, and pork-pie hats. He wanted to transform that subculture and start a new craze. I’d heard people say things like this before, so I didn’t take much notice, but less than six months later the two-tone craze was in full swing. Some punks kept their bondage gear, and not all Specials fans wore razor-sharp suits, but overall Neville got it right.