3. Poster for RAR gig at the Royal College of Art, 10 December 1976.
CAROL GRIMES One day, Red came knocking on my door. He was quite a big man and my place was like a doll’s house. He asked a lot of questions and then said would I do a gig because they wanted to set up as Rock Against Racism. I had had my own falling-out with Eric Clapton about something else before then. I did a tour in Scandinavia supporting him when he was in Blind Faith with Stevie Winwood and Ginger Baker. I knew, as everybody in the music business knew, that he was a mess from drugs and drink. We’ve all been guilty of coming out with things that perhaps aren’t deeply held and at first I thought, ‘What a silly man,’ then I was very angry.
RED SAUNDERS Carol was wonderful. I knew her through the benefit scene. She was the classic left feminist; a real Notting Hill bohemian girl. The beginning of RAR was totally organic. The response to the letter was a complete shock. And then it was, ‘You better get your fucking act together. We better do a gig.’
ROGER HUDDLE The first gig was at the Princess Alice in Forest Gate in the East End in October 1976 as a one-off. It was quite funny because one of Carol’s band made an Irish joke and when it was pointed out to her she sacked him at the end of the gig.
RED SAUNDERS We were doing the soundcheck and Carol’s sax player comes on and goes, ‘One, two. Did you hear the one about the Englishman, the Irishman . . .’ and does a soft, idiot joke. We were like, ‘What? Hold on, mate . . .’
CAROL GRIMES The Princess Alice was like any other scruffy pub that had live music. I remember thinking, ‘Blimey, talk about going into the lion’s den.’ The East End had quite strong support for the National Front from old displaced indigenous white communities that had suffered. Their lives had been turned upside down post-war: bomb sites; the docks dying. It was very easy for the National Front to influence people who were less able to speak up for themselves. It was a very good place to start. There were a couple of people there who said to me, ‘I’m not here for the politics. I’m here because I like you.’ But this wasn’t like a normal gig. We had banners and it was very clear what we were doing.
MIKE HOBART It was in the air to use music with politics; but nobody knew how Rock Against Racism was going to work. The question was how the hell do you build it? But enough people came to give everybody hope.
DAVID WIDGERY Security had to be reliable, and the Royal Group of Docks Shop Stewards Committee were recruited to provide it. They arrived on the night with a bulky Adidas bag, saying, ‘Not to worry, the tools are here.’ There was one racist in the audience who happened to like Carol Grimes. There he was, enjoying himself, but there was a big banner up saying ‘Black and White Unite’ and stickers and leaflets asking ‘What are we going to do about the NF?’4
•
RED SAUNDERS NME called me up. I used to know Miles, the great hippy writer, and he said he was doing this story. ‘There are these people called “punks”. Have you heard about them? I’m doing this interview with this band. Would you come and take some photographs?’ So I go, and the Clash are doing their sixth gig ever at the Institute of Contemporary Art. It bowled me over: the fucking energy! Our chance to do this was because of the punk explosion. It was a cultural awakening. Without punk the intervention of Rock Against Racism would have been tiny. Reaching a white punk audience and involving a British black reggae audience was vital because that was the principle of what we were doing: you’re showing a better future; this is how we can be; we can work together; if we can work together we can live together; if we can live together we can work together. We don’t have to love each other. We just have to have a realistic situation where we get on.
DENNIS BOVELL I met Red in a pub in New Cross and he had this idea for black and white bands to play on the same stage. So over a few pints I went, ‘Yeah, Matumbi will do it.’ Then he called up and said, ‘Are you ready to do it, NOW?’
JOHN DENNIS The first official Rock Against Racism gig was at the Royal College of Art with Carol Grimes, Matumbi and Limousine on 10 December 1977.
MIKE HOBART There were banners all round and we tossed up who would go on first. I was knocked out by Matumbi. They were very deep, musically. Limousine went middle, and we went down a storm. We were a mixed band: black bass player, three white horn players, white drummer, and a black guitarist and vocalist. We were sharp and focused and on a mission. Funk had a fantastic energy live. We could see the power of the music pulling people in. Then afterwards, we all got up and jammed.
WAYNE MINTER The audience was mostly students. It was a good gig, maybe a couple of hundred people, not that big.
JOHN DENNIS I was a student there and saw the poster and thought it was deeply uncool. Carol, bless her heart, represented old school R&B; pub rock and reggae did not fit. I was into jazz and the uniform of the day was OshKosh dungarees, Hawaiian shirts and Kickers. We were hipsters. So I didn’t go. Until punk was welded with British reggae, RAR was not the phenomenon it became.
RUTH GREGORY People said, ‘All this white rock music is getting very boring.’
BOB HUMM It was beyond ordinary people. It was getting so grand and pompous.
NICKY SUMMERS I remember being so tremendously bored. Top of the Pops had gone stale. It was either novelty bands, or long-haired relics from the Sixties playing prog rock, or the Brotherhood of Man. I didn’t relate to any of it. A whole generation was waiting for something. There was absolutely nothing to do. There were only two or three channels on TV. No technology. No jobs around. It was electricity blackouts and garbage strikes. Something had to happen; something had to give.
TOM ROBINSON We got rumbles of punk quite early with what was coming over from New York – Television and Richard Hell – people who were ripping their clothes and wearing razor blades round their necks. We were playing the Scarborough Penthouse and at the end of the evening the DJ came on and said, ‘OK, ladies and gentlemen, that were Café Society and next week we’ve got this band coming up from London. I don’t know anything about them except they’re meant to be the worst band in Britain and they’re called the Sex Pistols.’ You knew the place was going to be rammed just on that sell.
RICHARD BOON It was Neil Spencer’s review in the NME, ‘Don’t look over your shoulder but the Sex Pistols are coming.’ He was obviously intrigued enough to go backstage and get the quote from Steve Jones, ‘We’re not into music. We’re into chaos.’ It was brilliant.
NEIL SPENCER The Sex Pistols was deliberate moronic-ness. It was like the Ramones: Now I wanna sniff some glue / Now I wanna have somethin’ to do. And the Pistols were, We’re so vacant and we don’t care. It was liberating after Pink Floyd moaning away on The Dark Side Of The Moon.
TOM ROBINSON I went to see them at the 100 Club. They were being supported by a prog rock band called Krakatoa so most of the audience were dressed in denim flares and had long hair. The Pistols were late turning up. They didn’t bother to tune up and then they ambled onto the stage in a completely unprofessional way. The first thing Johnny Rotten said was, ‘Who’s going to buy me a drink, then?’ Part of me was completely appalled by the sloppiness of it. It was loud and out of tune and aggressive. They did a Small Faces tune and changed the lyrics: I want you to know that I hate you baby / I want you to know I don’t care / I’m glad when you’re not there, and then the refrain challenging the audience, whatcha gonna do about it? They converted it into a Dadaist statement. I hated it and left after about fifteen minutes. But I couldn’t forget it.
PAUL WELLER You hadn’t seen a band with that sort of attitude. My generation’s wake-up call, I thought. Seeing the Pistols, and the Clash as well, who were writing about unemployment, writing about society, teenagers being bored; just things you could relate to.5 I was really influenced by a lot of the things that Joe Strummer said. It was so different, no group had ever fucking said it before.6
SUE COOPER There was this sense of the Sex Pistols and the Clash being something different. It was really fast and intense and very loud. They were brilliantly anti-establishment. I thought here was a resurgence of the energy that was there in the Sixties. I pulled down a poster when we were walking out but then somebody asked me for it and I gave it away.
RICHARD BOON I persuaded the student union in Reading to put the Sex Pistols on in a bare white-painted studio with no lights and a tiny PA. There were about thirty people. The opening act was Harry Kipper from the performance artists the Kipper Kids, who sat on stage rambling, kind of like Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, drinking whisky and punching each other in the face. Then the Pistols rocked up. ‘We’ve seen your paintings,’ says Johnny (Lydon aka ‘Johnny Rotten’), ‘that’s a waste of taxpayers’ money.’ He’d just whine a lot and moan and go off at tangents. He had such presence; a fallen angel and utterly compelling to watch. And doing ‘No Fun’; how many Stooges fans were there in the country? ‘THEY’RE DOING “NO FUN!”’ And all these mod songs like ‘Substitute’ and Dave Berry’s ‘No Lip’. It was speed, clothes, rapid songs, in your face but with a funny thing John brought to the stage; very Brechtian and breaking the fourth wall. Janey, from my painting studio, ran up to the manager at the end and said, ‘MORE! TELL THEM TO PLAY MORE!’
PAUL FURNESS I remember walking along the Headway in front of Leeds Town Hall and seeing this woman called Audrey who was a lot older than me and she said, ‘You can sniff this rebellion that’s in the air.’ You could. Something was happening but nobody knew what it was. There was a sense of change.
NICKY SUMMERS Then the Sex Pistols were interviewed by Bill Grundy on Thames TV’s Today programme, and swore, and the next day there was the Daily Mirror headline ‘The Filth and the Fury’ and everyone was talking about it. And coming home from school and walking to the Tube station, people in the street were calling me ‘punk’ because I had reworked my school uniform. I decided to check out some of the bands, thinking the whole scene might be something I might be into. The Damned, Buzzcocks, Subway Sect, John Cooper Clarke, X-Ray Spex, Penetration, the Jam, XTC, the Slits – and the Clash, who were glamorous – but the Pistols were really like a knife-edge. I saw them at Brunel University. You could go out every single night and for £2 you could get in anywhere.
DOTUN ADEBAYO We had just started doing our A levels and a friend of mine said to me he had this great record called ‘Anarchy In The UK’. I remember going to several record stores saying, ‘Can I hear the new record by the Sex Pistols?’ ‘We don’t stock that record.’ Then the next place, ‘We stock it but we don’t play it.’ Then after about the third place I said, ‘Just give me the record.’ I was immediately hooked. My friend said, ‘These guys that love the Sex Pistols; they’re called punks.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, “punk”?’ I was thinking of some kind of American terminology that James Cagney would have used: ‘You dirty punk.’
DAVE WAKELING It seemed to me that punk came from an artistic intelligentsia that had access to New York art. Even the word ‘punk’ was American.
NEIL SPENCER A lot of the most significant artistic and cultural movements are created by a tiny cadre of people: surrealism, Dadaism. The Sex Pistols were once described by Barbara Harwood as a homeopathic remedy for the nation. She said you take a tiny amount of ultra-diluted toxic material and you administer it into the cultural body politic, which then goes into spasm and all the poisons come to the surface. It is exactly what happened. Within a matter of months you’d got all those Welsh Calvinist nutters threatening to burn down the church hall and these four slightly dodgy London teenagers being denounced as the Antichrist. All kinds of bigots and idiots were denouncing this threat to society.
RICHARD SWALES The Pistols were brilliant self-publicists and by bringing out a single called ‘Anarchy In The UK’ and then ‘God Save The Queen’, bloody hell! They completely got under the skin of the establishment. They were like something else. You can’t imagine what sort of effect they had on the general public. They thought it was the end of the world and the whole of civilization was going to crumble.
RED SAUNDERS Jamie Reid’s artwork was fantastic; sticking a safety pin through the Queen’s nose. And the lyrics were outrageous. No wonder they banned them. And then it was number one.
BRINSLEY FORDE ‘God Save The Queen’ really shook the whole music industry establishment. We were having problems with Island Records and Chris Blackwell said, ‘Punk’s happening. Why don’t you use it?’ We said, ‘Chris, come on. If we do it we’re convicted.’ Can you imagine if the Sex Pistols were four black guys?
TOM WATSON The first disco I ever went to was a Labour Party Young Socialist one at the Market Tavern in Kidderminster. I was only eleven or twelve and my mum cut holes in an old jumper and sewed some zips in because I wanted to be a punk rocker. ‘God Save The Queen’ was played and we pretended to like it. But the truth is, the Sex Pistols were incredibly inaccessible for a provincial kid like me. Punk seemed like middle-class London rebels, and ‘bollocks’ was a rude word.
PAUL BOWER Punk was about getting off your arse and making your own future. You didn’t have to spend three years in a rehearsal studio practising your guitar solos before you could go out and play, but in Sheffield we thought a lot of the London scene was posturing: £40 for a pair of rubber trousers in Vivienne Westwood’s shop; over two weeks’ wages. We went down to the Roxy Club in Soho and thought it was hilarious: a lot of people sucking their cheeks in and trying to look cool.
NICKY SUMMERS The Roxy was hostile. I expected people to be discussing ideas and getting things going and people were just posturing and sneering. I didn’t feel at ease in that environment so I didn’t bother to go back.
SYD SHELTON Punk could very easily have been a nihilistic bunch of people who were against everything and stood for nothing. The way in which people like Siouxsie Sioux took to the swastika as a symbol of opposition to their parents and normality; it was something that you could get up people’s noses with instead of being about empowerment.
LUCY WHITMAN I saw Siouxsie Sioux at the Screen on the Green. I don’t know if she was performing or just posing. She was wearing a black cupless bra, fishnet stockings and a swastika armband. Punk’s flirtation with Nazi imagery was very dangerous and needed to be challenged. People were making films and writing plays to warn each other about what could happen if we let a fascist party get a grip on our national life. I was at UCL doing English and I started a fanzine called Jolt. I did three issues from my bedroom and in the first edition I wrote:
I know just ’cause punks wear swastikas doesn’t mean they really like the idea of fascism; it’s just supposed to shock our parents etc. who sacrificed so much in the war etc. . . . chances are that while we’re putting our energies into playing the guitar or pogo dancing we won’t feel the need to join the NF. The only trouble is we won’t feel the urgent need to bring about real anarchy in the UK either. Punk isn’t going to change the world but punks might – one day.
NEIL SPENCER People don’t realize how finely poised things were in punk rock. It could have gone another way quite easily. A lot of those early punks were really racist. This goes back to the irresponsibility of Malcolm McLaren and the whole conundrum of the Jewish rag trade shopkeeper flogging swastikas on the King’s Road. The worst of it was the Cambridge rapist T-shirts. It was fucking nonsense. But then people get seduced by it and buy into the bullshit. Malcolm filled up a lot of people’s heads.
NICKY SUMMERS Even if punk was orchestrated by Malcolm McLaren, it was bang on the moment and gave a sense of empowerment to a young generation initially through music and subsequently art, fashion and film. Punk opened the doors for the future and the next decade. It kicked out the stale dead stuff.
FRANCES SOKOLOV I hated the sight of the swastika. My family were refugees from the war. My father’s family disappeared and he arrived here as a baby. Once or twice we went to a gig and found a bloody great swastika banner hanging up behind where we were playing. We took them down and burnt them.
PENNY RIMBAUD Sieg-Heiling, for fuck’s sake; kids arse about. To say to some Glaswegian kid who lives in pretty dire poverty, who’s been given virtually no education, who lives in some shitty unbelievable place which they’re told is a home which they have to pay rent for and they can’t even get a fucking job; to say these guys have got Nazi ideologies. They wouldn’t even know what Mein Kampf was. When the economic system is collapsing the right always appears. People start becoming threatened and the middle classes’ inability to understand working-class anger is because they haven’t experienced that sort of insult in life, the insult of un-allowance. Any idea of neighbourly love goes out the window for self-protection; it’s people really fearing for their lives.
ROBERT ELMS The same people that wore swastikas also wore a shirt with Karl Marx on it. It was shock tactics and winding up the establishment. I was an eighteen-year-old from a council estate. I’d got Vivienne Westwood bondage trousers on and a leather biker jacket and walked into the London School of Economics looking for like-minded souls. There was a big poster for a meeting with the proposal ‘Punk rock is fascist.’ This was a riven, driven, angry, violent England.
DOTUN ADEBAYO At the 100 Club you would see a group of guys going Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil. I didn’t know whether punks were racist or not, and with tunes like the Clash’s ‘White Riot’ it wasn’t altogether clear: Black man gotta lot of problems / But they don’t mind throwing a brick. It was the kind of thing the National Front would say.
JOE STRUMMER There was a time when that wasn’t clear. But when the West Indian community realized punk rockers weren’t NFers they were much more open to it. They could see that it was a rebel thing.7
TOM ROBINSON I reviewed ‘White Riot’ in NME and said, ‘It’s the first meaningful event this year,’ and they put the headline, ‘The answer is a Brick . . .’ because I’d quoted the lyric . . . but they don’t mind throwing a brick.
DAVE RUFFY Joe Strummer took himself very seriously. The kids he was speaking to were a few years younger than I was but if I’d been fourteen or fifteen and heard ‘White Riot’ I would have gone, ‘Fuckin’ hell.’ I always wanted to do music for a living and it was the punk movement that made me take the leap to say, ‘This is what I wanna do.’ It was liberating. I stopped wearing flares and had my hair cut short. Music was a way out of the ghetto. I couldn’t do football. I’m not a boxer. Ghetto music, rock ’n’ roll, roots music, reggae, it’s the voice of the poor people; the only voice they’ve got. We did Rock Against Racism because we had black friends and we were working class. It wasn’t that we were ever particularly politically minded. That and of course the fucking Eric Clapton fucking speech. Music is music. And the whole thing about music is, it liberates one above the common muddy ground of stupidity. It’s not about being a bleeding-heart liberal. There is no argument for racism.
RED SAUNDERS The swastika didn’t become a big part of punk because of Rock Against Racism and because of Joe Strummer as well. He was extremely clear in interviews about his anti-fascism and that the National Front were Nazis. He clearly articulated that as part of the argument against his contemporaries like Siouxsie Sioux or Soo Catwoman or all those hangers-on from the Sex Pistols.
KATE WEBB History was so important in Rock Against Racism and trying to get people to think about things historically, which is an odd thing to do if you’re talking about being at the front of pop. RAR had a didactic educational function. It wasn’t, ‘Don’t do this.’ It was asking bands to think reflectively about what they were up to; getting kids who are growing up in a multiracial Britain to think about was there a connection between contemporary racism against their mates at school and the Holocaust. And to see how easily these things can just arise out of ignorance and blindness.
LESLEY WOODS Suddenly it was like all these things that I’d been feeling as a child were being articulated and given a voice and a language in music and what was being discussed politically. And punk gave me the freedom to express that. That’s what it was about. Not dyeing my hair and putting swastikas on and dressing up in uncomfortable clothes. It was about getting up on stage and wearing what you liked. I had feelings inside me but I didn’t have a language or a way of articulating those things; suddenly you could write songs about things that you felt passionate about that didn’t conform to what would normally be perceived as a good song.
PAUL WELLER Just singing about anarchy [wasn’t] going to achieve everything; then what are you going to do? You still have to have leaders and so it starts all over again.8 We [were] all standing around saying how bored we [were] and all of this shit, right? But why [didn’t] we go and start an action group up, help the community? How many people can you see getting up off their arses – not fucking many!9
PENNY RIMBAUD We regarded the Pistols and the Clash as very good rock ’n’ roll bands that had very little genuine political motivation. They were signing up to big labels and becoming part of the music industry. They were slightly revolutionary, slightly edgy, but always in a rather cosmetic way. If Lydon said, ‘Make your own band,’ then we made our own band. And if he said, ‘Anarchy In The UK’, he also said, ‘No Future’. We were deadly serious. We said, ‘Anarchy in the UK with a future’. We were going to take it literally.
FRANCES SOKOLOV The music business were doing very well out of punk. The contradictions were so blatant. The Sex Pistols’ anarchy didn’t mean anything to me. What were they about, philosophically? John Lydon was a naughty boy and he did it very well. The young needed to hear something like the Sex Pistols. I liked the disrespect for authority. The anarchism I had grown up with in the fifties was a fairly intellectual analytical discussion around the history of the Soviet Union and Trotsky. There were people there who were organic gardeners and farmers and had ideas about education and schools. And that appealed to me. I was a social anarchist. I wanted a better way of life without so much violence and bullying.
TINY FENNIMORE Punk was important in that it was anti-establishment but I couldn’t see where we were heading with it politically.
RICHARD BOON Johnny Rotten said, ‘I wish there were more bands like us.’ He meant bands with similar attitude but it became hundreds of bands that slavishly sounded like the Pistols. It wasn’t the point. We didn’t really use the word ‘punk’ except later when you said, ‘Oh, it’s another fucking punk band sounding like all the other fucking punk bands.’
DOTUN ADEBAYO I disappeared to Nigeria for the first time in November ’77 and on the flight back in January we were given a free copy of the papers and to my dismay it said the Sex Pistols had split up after a gig in San Francisco. I knew I was coming back to a post-punk London.
RICHARD SWALES John Lydon said on stage at the Sex Pistols’ very last gig, ‘Do you ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ You got the impression he knew exactly what he meant.