DAVID ‘RED’ SAUNDERS Everything begins with the letter. It was 1976. There were one and a half million on the dole, belts tightened, cuts biting, prices soaring, wages frozen, the government looking for someone to blame and the loony fascists cashing in by stirring up hate. Three Asians killed in London. Notting Hill Carnival attacked by the police. The right-wing activist Robert Relf doing his house for sale – ‘to an English family only’ – bit. Enoch Powell ranting about ‘alien wedges’ in our culture and predicting a racial war in Britain. It was in this climate that I read a review in Sounds about an Eric Clapton gig in Birmingham on 5 August:
. . . he shambled on stage and began warning us all about ‘foreigners’ and the need to vote for Enoch Powell whom Eric described as ‘a prophet’ and the danger of the country ‘being a colony within ten years’ and of how Eric was thinking of retiring to become an MP . . .
DAVE WAKELING I was at the gig. Here’s this bloke singing Bob Marley songs telling everybody to get the ‘wogs out’. It seemed like he had had a few, so some of the speech was more gargling than pontificating but the thrust of it was ‘Enoch was right’ and that ‘we should all vote for him’ and that ‘England was a white country’ and then a lot of saying ‘wogs’ and ‘get ’em out.’
DAVID CORIO I was fifteen or sixteen at the time and I remember him coming on stage and being obviously drunk and saying something about how there were so many Pakis in Birmingham. He sounded like some bad, old racist stand-up comedian.
DAVE WAKELING And then there was a bit about Arabs annoying him in Harrods and that’s what piqued our interest: ‘Oh, hang on a minute. He’s just an aggrieved toff. He doesn’t give a sod about Birmingham.’ It was like, ‘Come on. We gave you the steam engine. Isn’t that enough?’ It didn’t seem to us that he had any particular knowledge of our city other than that he knew the Enoch Powell ‘Birmingham speech’, as we called it, had been made over the road. I don’t remember it all happening in one go. There were two or three episodes of it and he had a bit of a recap towards the end. But from the first rant there was a conversation going on in our area, down on the floor, and all you could hear was, ‘What a bleeding nerve’. And that carried on as we came out in the foyer.
RED SAUNDERS This was when David Bowie was prattling on about Hitler being ‘the first superstar’ and Rod Stewart decided Britain was too overcrowded for him. It just made me sick with disappointment, but then fucking pissed off. I was an activist on the left and I’d been involved in Vietnam solidarity and street demonstrations but I wasn’t a great believer in writing letters. So it was a letter of anger. It wasn’t difficult to write. I whacked it off quite quickly. I was in a theatre rehearsal and we all signed it because I wanted it to be a group of people. The next day I phoned round friends and said, ‘I’ve written this thing.’
ROGER HUDDLE Red phoned me up and said, ‘I’ve composed a letter about Eric Clapton to send to all the music papers.’ He read it to me over the phone and said, ‘Would you sign it?’
When I 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 colonized 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 chequebooks and plastic crap.
Rock was and still can be a real progressive culture, not a package mail-order stick-on nightmare of mediocre garbage.
We want to organize 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, 8 Cotton Gardens, London E2 8DN
PS. ‘Who shot the sheriff,’ Eric? It sure as hell wasn’t you!
Signed: Peter Bruno, Angela Follett, Red Saunders, Jo Wreford, Dave Courts, Roger Huddle, Mike Stadler, etc.
RED SAUNDERS I was a fan of Clapton. I had his albums and had seen Cream. I had a part-time job in the evenings at the Marquee Club in Oxford Street. I was a mod. I had to clear up the ashtrays and Coke bottles. This was the early sixties. I was seeing the Who when they were the High Numbers and Cyril Davies – who looked like a bald middle-aged schoolteacher – and the All-Stars. He got Mick Jagger up on stage. That was the first time I saw the Rolling Stones and the first time that I’d got consciously into the root of serious music. I’d gone beyond pop. Every now and again they’d have black American blues artists down there. I remember buying a pint for Sonny Boy Williamson in the pub up the road. All of us gathered round him in awe and he was giving us small renditions of mouth-organ music. The root of all this music was the blues and rhythm and blues and slave music, and then to hear Clapton, that’s what provoked not just massive disappointment but anger.
RUTH GREGORY ‘Who shot the sheriff, Eric? It sure as hell wasn’t you!’ That is so Red! You could have written a letter like that at any point in history and it wouldn’t have had the same effect. I was a fan of Clapton. Who wasn’t? If he had been a musician that nobody liked then nobody would have given a shit. He was one of the greatest guitarists of all time.
DENNIS BOVELL It’s very hard to believe that someone who was supposed to be an intelligent man and an accomplished musician would utter such dross.
KATE WEBB That a man who had made his living playing the blues could think like that was extraordinary. It was the inherent contradiction. And astonishing for who Clapton was and where his heart had been. He clearly understood the blues.
PAULINE BLACK If you’re a creative of any kind you assume that people maybe have looked at the world with a bit of a leftish understanding. And suddenly some idiot, who may well be the king of playing the guitar, turns round and reckons that Enoch Powell – a former Conservative cabinet minister – is a prophet. It just seemed incredible.
DAVID HINDS Clapton was hailed as a god because of the Yardbirds and then Cream, but I thought ‘I Shot The Sheriff’ was utter rubbish. It was nowhere on a par to Marley’s version: Sheriff John Brown always hated me . . . every time I plant a seed he said, ‘Kill it before it grow.’ You could hear the suffering and frustration in Marley’s voice, but he did an interview saying all kinds of positive things about Clapton’s version. I was saying, ‘Is Bob crazy? What’s he talking about?’ Then it dawned on me: ‘Why wouldn’t he? He’s raking in the money for it.’ Reggae had different ways of being born to the public and if it took Clapton for other people to start listening to reggae, so be it.
MYKAELL RILEY Bob Marley was being marketed as a rock act. Rock bands were looking at reggae and looking how they could get some of that focus, and that’s where Clapton comes in because – after ‘Layla’ two years earlier, his career hadn’t been doing that well – he took on ‘I Shot The Sheriff’ and it went to number one in America and top ten here. So for a while we were going, ‘Yeah, reggae’s on the up,’ and being recognized by international rock stars. And what was good for reggae was good for us.
DAVID HINDS My parents came over to England from Jamaica in the fifties and had very thick Jamaican accents. They were already in their thirties and were very set in their ways. They came trying to survive in a country that promised them that the streets would be paved with milk and honey. So there I am raised as Jamaican, speaking as Jamaican, eating Jamaican food, and then all of a sudden I’m thrown into school and exposed to racism: ‘Get back on the banana boat.’ ‘Wog’s the matter?’ ‘You’re browned off.’ ‘Nigger mind.’ ‘You all white?’ My parents were very strict: ‘We want you to be a lawyer or a doctor,’ but then in school I’m being kicked in the rear and clapped around the ear. And they would be coming home and moaning about how they’d been treated by the hierarchies in the workplace.
DENNIS BOVELL Linton Kwesi Johnson wrote Inglan is a bitch / Dere’s no escaping it. It described how hard it was for our parents’ generation to survive and to hold their dignity while being subjected to all kinds of abuse. They had families to feed and they couldn’t just down tools and walk off the job. They had to bite their lips and swallow unscrupulous behaviour: Yu haffi know how fi survive in it.
MYKAELL RILEY I’m part of the first-generation British-born Caribbean community, but the issue is we’re not aware we have a dual identity. We assume we’re Jamaicans because we’re brought up in a Jamaican community. Handsworth in Birmingham was as close to Jamaica as you could get whilst living in England, but there was still very much a focus of ‘Everything we’re doing here is to purchase a property back in the Caribbean and to move back home.’
ANGELA BARTON I remember having serious conversations in school when we moved to Putney with people making out, ‘You should go back to the jungle.’ I’d say, ‘There’s no jungle in Birmingham where I was born. Where do you want me to go?’ I was challenging conversations with people and saying things like, ‘I’ve got probably got more lineage to the Queen than you have, mate, because you’re blond and probably came from Sweden.’
WILLIAM SIMON I knew people with great brains who were academics in the Caribbean but here they worked in the post office or on the buses because their teaching qualification meant nothing in England.
LYNVAL GOLDING I didn’t realize how painful it was for my mother when I had to leave her in Jamaica to come and live with my father and stepmother. There was an outside toilet and I locked myself in it and cried. I was eleven years of age. It was the same year that Jamaica got independence: 1962. It was incredible – ska, ska, ska, Jamaica ska. At school they gave you little cups and flags. I brought all that sort of vibe with me to England when I went to school in Gloucester. Then I became aware of racism when this guy spit in my face and called me ‘golliwog’. I got mad and smashed his face in. I was one of about ten black kids. I couldn’t understand why this teacher was picking on me all the time.
NICKY SUMMERS There were a few black girls at school but the groups separated outside, so socially black people hung around black people. There would be black music and black people would follow that and there would be white music and white people followed that. It was rare for cultures to mix.
MYKAELL RILEY At school there was a constant stream of new kids with proper Jamaican accents and real Jamaican history. You gravitated towards these individuals because they had authenticity. They made you more Jamaican. You polished up your accent and you polished up your sense of history and relationship to this place that you’d never visited. Then immigration policies made it more and more difficult for Caribbeans to come and then almost impossible: suddenly your grandmother had to be born in the UK. It was very calculated; it was how local politicians were appealing to the white community; the notion that the black community was taking away white jobs. It was political hype. The black and Asian communities were actually quite closely knit but we felt as though we were being oppressed and targeted. You would be stopped by the police on the way to school. Your parents would say, ‘Don’t go out alone . . . where are you going . . .’ for the simple reason some of the kids didn’t come back. It was not uncommon for a group of us to say, ‘We’ll meet you at eight o’clock at the club,’ and for a member of that group not to turn up. The first place we’d go was the local police station to check if they’d been arrested.
LINTON KWESI JOHNSON There was quite a significant amount of socializing between black and white kids. As bad as things were in this country, we didn’t grow up in an apartheid state. We went to the same schools, grew up in the same neighbourhoods, played football and rugby and cricket together and all the rest of it. It wasn’t as though we were alien to each other.
KEITH HARRIS My mum was a founder nurse in the NHS and my dad was a doctor, so yes, my parents were immigrants but they had contributed to British society. And I was born in Newcastle. I have black skin but everything else about me is British: my accent; my education; my upbringing; my friends. When we moved to the appropriately named Whitehaven in Cumberland we were the only black family in the town, and years later I went back to my infant school. I was looking over the wall and this old woman came up and politely said, ‘What brings you up here, then?’ I said, ‘I used to go to school here back in the fifties.’ She said, ‘I was your dinner lady. You must be one of Dr Harris’s children.’
NORMAN ‘JUNIOR’ GISCOMBE There were six black people in the whole of my primary school. It was common to be called ‘sunshine’ or ‘golliwog’. ‘Can I touch your hair?’
BERNIE WILCOX When you lived on the council estates, words like ‘wog’, ‘Paki’ and ‘nigger’ were used day in, day out at pubs and bus stops. Manchester was as racist as anywhere else.
LYNVAL GOLDING Some of the TV sitcoms that were around then couldn’t be broadcast today. They’d have people calling a black person ‘coon’.
DAVE RUFFY When the sitcom Till Death Us Do Part was on telly, some viewers, my nan included, who was a nice old lady, thought Alf Garnett was speaking for people. But they weren’t really racist. You’ve got to remember that people went through the war and they were promised a better life and they didn’t really get a lot.
JOHN JENNINGS There was a thin line between Alf Garnett and Enoch Powell. People were ignorant. It was very easy to say, ‘Look at all these people coming over here. They’ve got all that and you haven’t got anything. You fought for this country?’ And everyone was, ‘Yeah, you’re bloody right.’
SYD SHELTON I firmly believe you have to learn to be racist. It was cranked in you by papers like the Daily Mail and the Daily Express and the Sun and all those racist jokes on TV and The Black and White Minstrel Show; all that history that we were taught about. You never saw a black policeman. You didn’t see any black politicians. There were no black judges. There were no black TV presenters.
TIM WELLS Older generations did have different attitudes about race and a lot of the time the children didn’t share that. When I was a young kid you could sit in a pub and tell a racist joke and most people would be, ‘Yeah, whatever.’ That’s why music is important. If the culture is, this is acceptable and it’s OK to strut around Sieg-Heiling and putting shit through letter boxes, then it’s, ‘Oh, that’s what we’ll do.’ But if it’s, ‘Nah, mate, that’s wrong,’ then they’ll stand against it.
BRINSLEY FORDE Scenario: one-thirty in the morning. You have got to go down this dark alley and on one side you can see a lot of black guys with hoods playing reggae music and on the other side there’s white guys. Which side of the street do you choose to walk on? You walk where you think you’re going to be safer. Racism is a security measure. All you need is someone to trigger it to start that fear. That’s what Hitler did. It was an economic situation so they used it. I remember when Aswad played in Liverpool. After, Tony and I went to this club with a couple of girls. It was like a massive house with all these different rooms and we were probably the only black guys in there. We could make out these boys who were checking us out. Suddenly, the group got bigger and bigger. I said, ‘Tony, we’re going to get a kicking. Let’s go to the bar, get a drink and get something to defend ourselves.’ It seemed like the longest time and my heart was beating really fast. Suddenly I saw one of them. I said, ‘Here they come.’ The guy walks up to us and says, ‘Are you guys in Aswad?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said to his mates, ‘I told you.’ We might have struck out at those people just out of fear.
LESLEY WOODS Enoch Powell had made his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech: ‘Thirty additional immigrant children are arriving from overseas in Wolverhampton alone every week.’ Black people who wanted to get housing were discriminated against. And at school we were learning about the Berlin Wall and apartheid. I was saying, ‘How can people put a wall up between people? How can you stop a white person sitting with a black person on a bus? That can’t be right. Mum, you just can’t do that.’
DAVE WAKELING My dad could recite the Enoch Powell speech. He was his hero. That’s when the trouble started. It was bad enough watching Alf Garnett on TV, without your dad doing impressions of it. It was against everything you’d ever been taught at primary school about share and play nice. I knew from being on the swimming team at school that you won by everybody working together.
LYNVAL GOLDING Powell’s speech was aimed at us. He said, ‘In fifteen or twenty years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man,’ and then the famous line, ‘Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.’ We understood the hatred that he was drumming up was directed towards blacks and Asians and Indians. Jamaicans had been invited by Sir Winston Churchill to come and rebuild the mother country. That’s why my father came. It’s not like they could go back home every year for a holiday. It might take five years before they could afford to go back, because of the cheap labour.
CLARE SHORT People say when the American soldiers were here in the Second World War white and black soldiers were segregated and British people were shocked at how badly they treated their black soldiers. Birmingham had been a city of inward migration since the thirties because there were jobs. And then from the Powell days when people came to work from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent we saw racism increase.
DOTUN ADEBAYO I remember saying to my best friend at school, ‘I don’t know how long I’m going to be here.’ I thought I was going to be asked to leave the country and go to Nigeria.
BRINSLEY FORDE Enoch Powell initiated the influx of people from the West Indies to work on the transport and then suddenly he was saying, ‘I made a right fuck-up.’ But I much prefer a person to be outspoken about what they believe. A lot of the rock artists were not really working class so their ideology came out when they were in a position to say what they really and truthfully felt. To progress they had to appeal to the working class.
GERED MANKOWITZ Clapton did everybody a favour by bringing to the fore what was being said backstage by musicians.
KATE WEBB A month after the Birmingham gig Clapton wrote a handwritten apology of sorts to Sounds.
RED SAUNDERS Clapton has never really ever apologized. His interview with Melody Maker two years after the Birmingham rant was equally shocking:
I think Enoch is a prophet. He’s not a racist – I don’t think he cares about colour of any kind. I think his whole idea is for us to stop being unfair to immigrants, because it’s getting out of hand. The government is being incredibly unfair to people abroad to lure them to the Promised Land where there is actually no work. The racist business starts when white guys see immigrants getting jobs and they’re not. The whole thing about me talking about Enoch was that it occurred to me that he was the only bloke telling the truth, for the good of the country. I believe Enoch is a very religious man. And you can’t be religious and racist at the same time. The two things are incompatible.
PAUL FURNESS I’ve never trusted Clapton since. If that had happened to me, I’d be grovelling to explain it.
•
RED SAUNDERS The phrase ‘rock against racism’ just came straight out of my head. No one was using music to fight racism so a group of rock fans and musicians thought it was high time we stood up to be counted. What a simple fantastic idea. I had a studio. I was a functioning photographer. I had all the accoutrements – an electric typewriter – so we could write out several letters. Jackie, who used to work with me, did all that, and the letter appeared in everything we sent it to.
JOHN DENNIS ‘Rock against racism’ was an important slogan because it was ‘against’ racism. To be ‘against’ something is a political expression.
JOHN JENNINGS A lot of people said, ‘You can’t mix music with politics.’ I’m sorry, but Clapton just had. He laid the gauntlet down.
ROGER HUDDLE At the end of Red’s letter it said, ‘All those interested please write to . . .’ but we had no way of doing anything, so before sending it out me and Red went and saw a man called Chris Harman who was the editor of the Socialist Worker. We said, ‘Can we use your PO Box?’ Within two weeks there were 500 letters. It gave us real hope.
TOM ROBINSON I read NME religiously, and Melody Maker and Sounds. It was a way to keep track of the music scene and what was happening. That’s why I saw the letter. It was under the heading, ‘Enoch Clapton?’ I wrote to Rock Against Racism [RAR] and said, ‘I’m in this band and we’d like to be part of it. How can we join?’
DAVID WIDGERY Clapton was not the only musician coming out with this garbage. David Bowie told a Playboy interviewer of his sympathy with fascism, which he rightly defined as ‘a very extreme form of nationalism’, and staged a Nazi-style return to Victoria Station with Mercedes limousine, outriders and salutes which chillingly mixed rock-star megalomania with Third Reich references.1
SYD SHELTON Clapton’s outburst was a great trigger for Red to write the letter but I think it’s wrong to have demonized him. I don’t think Clapton was a racist; same with David Bowie, who said in Playboy, ‘Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.’ The journalist said, ‘How so?’ And Bowie riffed off:
Think about it. Look at some of his films and see how he moved. I think he was quite as good as Jagger. It’s astounding. And boy, when he hit that stage, he worked an audience. Good God! He was no politician. He was a media artist. He used politics and theatrics and created this thing that governed and controlled the show for twelve years. The world will never see his like again. People aren’t very bright, you know? They say they want freedom, but when they get the chance, they pass up Nietzsche and choose Hitler because he would march into a room to speak and music and lights would come on at strategic moments. It was rather like a rock ‘n roll concert. The kids would get very excited – girls got hot and sweaty and guys wished it was them up there. That, for me, is the rock ‘n roll experience.2
And then in 1977 Bowie did that wave in Victoria Station and the still photograph made it look like a Nazi salute.
CHALKIE DAVIES That photograph caused an awful lot of trouble. Bowie had been absent from Britain for three years and to herald his triumphant return to these shores an elaborate arrival at Victoria Station was planned. He stepped off the train and into a waiting open-topped Mercedes limousine near to where screaming hordes of fans were gathered. He stood up and waved to his adoring admirers; the whole thing lasted about thirty seconds. I managed to grab two frames, but, sadly, when I saw the negatives I realized my image was a little blurry and Bowie’s hand had been reduced to a mere sliver. The NME needed the picture first thing Monday morning but after I’d sent it the retouchers attempted to draw a hand onto his arm. When the image appeared in that week’s edition he appeared to be giving a Nazi Salute. Given the headline said ‘Heil and Farewell’ and the copy used a quote about fascism it inflamed the situation. And then the whole thing was blown out of all proportion.
SYD SHELTON Melody Maker asked him about it and he panicked:
That didn’t happen. THAT DID NOT HAPPEN. I waved. I just WAVED. Believe me. On the life of my child, I waved. And the bastard caught me. In MID WAVE, man. And, God, did that photo get some coverage . . . As if I’d be foolish enough to pull a stunt like that. I died when I saw the photo. And even the people who were with me said, ‘David! How could you?’ The bastards. I didn’t . . .3
JOHN BAINE Clapton was an old hippy whose music was shit but Bowie was someone I really admired: you gotta make way for the Homo Superior. I was confused and smashed up his albums.
KATE WEBB Bowie unequivocally apologized. He said, ‘I have made my two or three glib, theatrical observations on English society and the only thing I can now counter with is to state that I am NOT a fascist. I’m apolitical.’ The point is, Red’s letter was really important, but without it Rock Against Racism would have happened anyway. It wasn’t just that Clapton was saying those things and Bowie and Rod Stewart – who had told International Times in 1970, ‘I think Enoch is the man. I’m all for him. This country is overcrowded. The immigrants should be sent home.’ There was the National Front [NF] – there was a climate.
