DAVID WIDGERY What really announced the Anti-Nazi League as a mass movement – a movement which genuinely brought culture and politics into each other’s arms and set them dancing – was the alliance with Rock Against Racism in the great outdoor carnival of April 1978.21 We agreed on the format: a juxtaposition of a meeting in Trafalgar Square and an open-air concert in Victoria Park would make the politics more fun and the music more political. But RAR’s unannounced ambition was to turn the event into the biggest piece of revolutionary street theatre London had ever seen, a tenth-anniversary tribute to the Paris events of May 1968.22
PAUL HOLBOROW We thought it would be a few thousand people in Victoria Park on a tiny little platform provided by Tower Hamlets council and a couple of stacks of speakers. Until then there hadn’t been a demonstration in London of notable scale.
RED SAUNDERS The original idea for a carnival came from Jim Nichol, who was a civil rights lawyer and a member of the Socialist Workers Party. But he wasn’t cultural.
RUTH GREGORY The ANL wanted to have the bands on the back of a truck and we said, ‘No, no, that won’t work.’
SYD SHELTON We said, ‘That’s Mickey Mouse. We want to do a Rock Against Racism Woodstock. We want it to be on the main evening news; not off-the-back-of-a-lorry stuff.’ We used to give out RAR stickers and sell Temporary Hoarding at the Notting Hill Carnival – it was a great example of how multiculturalism worked – that’s why we borrowed the word ‘Carnival’. And the Anti-Nazi League dictated the date.
RUTH GREGORY It was the day before the May Day elections: 30 April 1978, in Victoria Park in Hackney.
KATE WEBB Victoria Park was a statement. The East End was the place of the forgotten.
ROGER HUDDLE I was in meetings with the park authorities and I kept telling them we didn’t need Portakabins because we only expected five or six hundred people. Me and Jerry Fitzpatrick went and met a couple of blokes in a pub in Covent Garden and gave them £4,000 cash for the sound system. Jerry was a revolutionary who would always take a chance. Then Red got a stage via contacts of his and Gered’s and we got a sound system, but it was a rock ’n’ roll system and couldn’t deal with bass at all.
KATE WEBB Pink Floyd offered us their PA because some of the old hippies understood what we were doing, but there wasn’t a crew to rig it up. It was done in this great well of enthusiasm.
SYD SHELTON In the end the Who’s recording studio provided the PA for nothing and Star Hire built us a stage.
ROGER HUDDLE The stage was overseen for a week before the actual gig – it was attacked three times by the National Front – so Tower Hamlets SWP and people from the ANL slept on it and protected it.
RED SAUNDERS I was busy worrying about if the NF were going to burn down the stage and the thousand others things we all had to do. All these people had been round our house a couple of nights before and we had a bathtub full up with cheese rolls to sell at 20p each. And our daughter was only a few days old, so the build-up was just extraordinary because I had all these emotions.
SYD SHELTON We originally had the Tom Robinson Band, Steel Pulse, Patrik Fitzgerald the punk poet and X-Ray Spex to do the opening. The posters went up – we used this man in Hendon called Terry the Pill who was the main mafia for fly-posting in London. It was a semi-illegal set-up – and the Clash apparently saw them. Their manager, Bernie Rhodes, rang up and said, ‘My boys want to be involved in this.’ We said, ‘All right, bring ’em round. Let’s have a talk.’ A few days later the whole of the Clash turned up with Bernie. They sat on these old sofas in the studio and they were really friendly but Bernie was completely ‘out to lunch’. We talked to them for about an hour saying they couldn’t be the headline act. It wasn’t fair because Tom had worked so hard for Rock Against Racism.
RUTH GREGORY Bernie was trying to negotiate and he said, ‘If you buy a tank for the freedom fighters in Zimbabwe then my boys will do it.’ We just laughed and said, ‘We haven’t got any money. What are you talking about?’ And Joe Strummer turned round and said, ‘Fuck off, Bernie. Get it into your head there ain’t any money.’
KATE WEBB The question of getting the Clash was a big thing. But the question about the running order was also important because of the egos of the bands involved. And for us there was also the question of how the Carnival would be rounded off. Everybody was aware of the Clash’s massive, dynamic ferocity and energy and how great that was going to be, but was that where you wanted to end the thing? Roger and I argued that it should be the Tom Robinson Band [TRB]. The others said, ‘Fine. You go and tell the Clash why they can’t go on at the end.’ So we went to see them at Rehearsal Rehearsals in Camden. It was a completely lunatic meeting. They had a painting on the wall in black paint and an effigy of Bernie Rhodes with candles on either side of it and they kept on trying to do things to freak us out. The lights went out and they all did this, ‘Heil, Bernie.’
PAUL SIMONON I painted this mural on the wall of Bernie naked and another one on the ceiling of him with pigeons on his head. The naked one was over the fireplace and I hung a piece of silk material over it, and lit candles so it looked like an altar. Mick and Joe were laughing their heads off when Bernie came in with these guys from Rock Against Racism and we were singing, ‘Praise Him, Praise Him,’ and they must have thought they’d come into some weird sect or something.23
KATE WEBB Mick and Joe were worried and wanted to know exactly how many members of the NF were going to be there. Questions like that that we couldn’t possibly answer. And they asked us about our allegiance to different political groups and our feelings about the Red Army Faction and Baader-Meinhof. It took various negotiations with various people over a period of time. It wasn’t straightforward.
TOM ROBINSON In all the smaller gigs up to Victoria Park, RAR always made a point the black band did the last slot. It was only at the Carnival that they changed the game from local unknown to biggest names possible. Bernie Rhodes was saying, ‘The Clash are a much more important band.’ And the guys from Rock Against Racism were saying, ‘That’s as maybe, but TRB have been with us from the start.’ So there was all this, ‘Will they, won’t they,’ because the Clash wouldn’t confirm whether they would turn up or not.
ROGER HUDDLE We had long discussions because the key bands for RAR up until then had been Matumbi, Misty In Roots, and Limousine. We didn’t get them on the stage list so they were really pissed off. We had a big row with Widgery that Tom Robinson should be top of the bill, then the second one must be Steel Pulse and third the Clash. It seemed totally logical because Tom was really buzzing on the airwaves and ‘2-4-6-8 Motorway’ had been top five.
RED SAUNDERS There was a crucial moment when the Clash weren’t going to do it because their manager was so fucking annoying and had no real understanding of what RAR was about. In a sense the Tom Robinson Band were even more political than the Clash, and they were having a run of hits in the charts and doing ‘Winter Of ’79’ and ‘Glad To Be Gay’. Then somebody said, ‘The Clash are rehearsing at Jacksons Lane Community Centre up in Highgate and they’d be happy to see you again.’ Me and Nina went with the baby and there were all these leather-jacketed punks throwing flick knives at the wall and we came in with a pushchair. They were all absolutely charming and Strummer went, ‘Oh, hello, little ’un.’ It was really nice and we talked and they said, ‘Look, we’ll do it, mate. Don’t worry about what Bernie said.’ In the Melody Maker the week before there’s a quote from me saying, ‘We’ve finally got the Clash and thank God we got their energy and passion.’
SYD SHELTON I was so thrilled that they agreed to do it. But there was no real publicity because it was too late to change the posters, except for the music papers who picked it up: ‘The Clash join the Rock Against Racism Carnival.’
COLIN BARKER Paul Holborow phoned me up in Manchester and said, ‘We’ve got this idea of having a carnival with Rock Against Racism and we can get some acts. How many people do you think we can get there?’ We talked about it and Paul said, ‘Let’s say we’ve got 5,000 in the SWP and everyone brought one person on average. We’d have 10,000.’ So when he negotiated with the police they agreed to send enough for a demonstration of that size. I booked a coach and it filled up so I booked a second coach. I thought, ‘Ooh, I’m doing really well here.’ Then I got a call from the National University Students’ Union and they said, ‘We’re thinking of booking coaches to go to this Carnival. Is it all right if we do it ourselves?’ I said, ‘Yes, of course. How many?’ He thought about twelve. All of a sudden we realized that something much bigger than we had expected was going to happen.
GEOFF BROWN I booked the last coach to go down to London the night before at about eleven o’clock. It was coach number forty-nine. We sent 2,500 people just from Manchester. I was organizing, organizing, organizing. Coaches were leaving from Bolton, Rochdale, Stockport, Salford, and all across Greater Manchester.
COLIN BARKER The Albert in Rusholme was the first pub in Britain against the Nazis – Albert Against the Nazis – where the local SWP branch used to meet. They all went down wearing black bin bags and badges saying, ‘Albert Against the Nazis’. There was about thirty of them. We were overwhelmed by the people that wanted to come.
PAUL HOLBOROW It was deliberate to start the event at Trafalgar Square – with speeches and then a march – because that was the apex of public political protest. I was anxious to marry that tradition of protest with the new tradition of protest music. I can remember arriving there on the Sunday morning and it was drizzling and I thought, ‘This is going to be a complete failure.’ It had poured with rain for three days before and it poured with rain the three days after.
RUTH GREGORY I was squatting in Charing Cross Road. There was a whole bunch of us living there and we could hear all these people going down the road in the middle of night but we really didn’t think much of it because we thought most people would just go straight to the park.
SYD SHELTON The ANL said to us, ‘They’ll only come for the music. They’ll all go straight to Victoria Park.’ I remember hearing people throughout the night from my third-floor room on Charing Cross Road singing Clash songs. I couldn’t sleep any longer, so about half six, seven in the morning I went down to see what was happening. When I got there, there was 10,000 people singing and dancing, mostly Scots. They’d come so early. It was like the show was already on the road. Coaches and trains started coming from all over the country.
RED SAUNDERS We had no idea if anybody was going to turn up. I went up to Soho to get a bacon butty and a cup of tea and by the time I got to the Square all these coaches were arriving. Two arrived from Liverpool, the doors opened and it was like a smog, and out tumbled a bunch of punks. By ten o’clock dozens more coaches had arrived from Sheffield and Middlesbrough and Newcastle and Aberystwyth and Bristol and Norwich and Oxford: everywhere. By elevenish the square was packed and we just knew it was going to be fantastic.
PAUL FURNESS We left from Leeds in the middle of the night. We had tons of coaches from all over the place all going down the M1 with ANL posters in the windows. When we got to Trafalgar Square me and some friends climbed onto the steps of the National Gallery and it was just a sea of colour and yellow Anti-Nazi League lollipops. It was unbelievable.
PETER HAIN I’d been to anti-apartheid rallies and anti-Vietnam War protests there for years but I had never experienced anything like this. There were thousands and thousands of kids. Tom Robinson spoke and said, ‘The message of this Carnival, not only to the loonies of the National Front but all bigots everywhere, is hands off our people: black, white, together, tonight, forever.’ I spoke briefly, adding, ‘We’re building a people’s movement to defeat the Nazis.’
PAUL HOLBOROW I spoke after Peter and then led the pivot of the march from Trafalgar Square to Hackney. People laughed at us when we said we expected youngsters to march seven miles. And there had been some tension with RAR whether we would march or not. They wanted just the Carnival, which would have diluted the politics.
SYD SHELTON We all had different jobs. I was in charge of Trafalgar Square because it was easy to get there early. Roger was in charge of the stage and the park, and Red was in charge of the procession and getting the trucks with the bands on and the PA running at the right intervals. There was some sort of veterans’ event going on at the same time in Whitehall, so the Telegraph reporter saw the marchers leaving Trafalgar Square hour after hour: ‘This is the most despicable ragbag group of miscreants from every lowest dregs of society that you’ve ever seen.’ It was wonderful in its condemnation.
PAUL FURNESS And then we just marched this endless march and there were floats with bands on like the Ruts and Misty.
TOM ROBINSON The march was amazing. We were tens of thousands strong; this incredible feeling of solidarity and strength. I was blown away by the sheer fucking numbers.
COLIN BARKER The deputy chief constable told Paul Holborow, ‘Thank God everybody wanted to march off in a hurry because we couldn’t have contained the situation.’ They were outnumbered but it was not a crowd that was in the mood for a confrontation.
RED SAUNDERS The most extraordinary thing was, it was a seven-mile march and all the coppers were going, ‘No, no, they’re never going to go all the way. No, mate . . .’ Roger Law was an old friend of mine from the Sunday Times and I said to him, ‘Why don’t you make some models for us?’ So they made giant papier mâché heads of John Tyndall, Martin Webster and Adolf Hitler, and they were on a float.
RUTH GREGORY I made a compilation tape of reggae and punk for a lorry and that was blaring out on a little sound system. I remember I put ‘Police And Thieves’ by Junior Murvin and ‘Police And Thieves’ by the Clash next to each other, and when it came on I was really thrilled because I thought people who liked the Clash wouldn’t know there was another version. How silly is that!
WAYNE MINTER I drove one of the flatbed trucks from Trafalgar Square with the Gang of Four and the Mekons on the back. We’d never seen anything like it. It was just an incredible turnout. There was so much going on everywhere.
TRACEY THORN I had to wheedle around my parents to be allowed to go because I was only fifteen and just a little suburban schoolgirl from near Hatfield who’d got madly into punk. We were huge fans of TRB and we’d been writing fan letters to them and actually got replies from the guitar player, Danny Kustow. So we were fired up because they were playing and we actually bumped into him on the march and were a bit screamy-schoolgirl. ‘This is like . . . somebody from a real band . . . AAARGGH . . . !’
RED SAUNDERS A couple of weeks before, Tom Robinson had said to me, ‘I’m meeting the head of EMI. What can I do? I can’t ask him for money?’ It popped into my head. ‘Get him to give us 10,000 whistles.’ He said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Whistles. If we get fucking hundreds of whistles it will be brilliant.’ And he did. So the noise was just deafening.
SYD SHELTON It was joyous; people marching and singing. We had stilt men and clowns and all sorts of entertainers on the way, with the Ruts and the Mekons and the Piranhas and Misty all playing on floats. And we were throwing out plastic whistles and everybody was blowing them and making a huge noise. It was a rowdy, mad affair. In those days I would buy my cigarettes from this wonderful Jewish lady, Mrs Grier. She had fought against Mosley in the thirties. She stood outside her shop on Cambridge Heath Road and clapped for three hours. I saw her the next day and she said it made her incredibly proud.
NEIL SPENCER That was the first time I ever saw loads of Asian people on a march all mixed up with black and white people.
JANE MUNRO I went with friends. It was amazing. I’d never seen anything like it. You were carried along by the whole atmosphere.
TRACEY THORN I was young and naive and excited and a bit out of my element and the whole march was overwhelming because I hadn’t had much experience, even of being up in London, and people were chanting, The National Front is a Nazi Front. Smash the National Front. There’d been lots of publicity beforehand questioning if was there going to be violence, so I was looking out of the corner of my eye all the time, thinking, ‘This is great. Beat the Nazis. Aaaarrrgghh skinheads!’
RUTH GREGORY In Bethnal Green Road we marched past the NF pub and they were all out to heckle us.
RED SAUNDERS The Blade Bone was a well-known National Front pub. Inside the fascists were all getting tanked up and then coming outside with sixteen holes in their boots and shouting, ‘Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil, red scum.’ They’re doing this and the march is coming along with the police in front of them, and the march is coming and the march is coming and the march is coming, and it’s ten minutes and it’s twenty minutes: ‘Si-eg H-eil,’ and it’s thirty minutes and they’re really weary: ‘S-i-eg H-e-il . . . ,’ and it’s forty minutes and the march is still coming. And then finally there’s this group from Gay Liberation holding up a placard: ‘QUEER JEW-BOY SOCIALIST SEEKS A BETTER WORLD’ and waving it at the fascists, and they went, ‘Fucking cunts . . . oh, fuck off,’ and went back in the pub, overwhelmed.
PAUL HOLBOROW We filled the whole of the Bethnal Green Road and as we walked past they were dejected and silent. We knew by then that this was a stunning success.
BILLY BRAGG I saw this little old guy with a pint of beer and a fag on doing a Nazi salute and we were jeering at him. I remember thinking, ‘That’s him. He’s the last of Mosley’s Blackshirts.’
LUCY WHITMAN We were all taken aback by the numbers. We walked or danced or ran all the way to Victoria Park. There was a fantastic number of people, mainly young, but not all, and it really was a carnival atmosphere of incredible joy and excitement. There was a thrill of feeling that you were part of this massive thing with people of goodwill. Even though we were going right through the heartland of the National Front there was such incredible strength of numbers we didn’t feel frightened. We were just incredibly excited to see that it wasn’t just us but that there were thousands of people who were on the right side.
COLIN BARKER The march was the fastest march I’ve ever been on, because everybody wanted to get there before the music started. It pounded through the streets.
SYD SHELTON We’d hired some sort of radio telephone but it didn’t work so nobody knew what was going on in the park.
KATE WEBB I remember standing on the back of the stage at about twelve and a few people dribbling into the park and thinking, ‘Oh, fuck. Nobody’s coming.’ I don’t think anybody had looked at the mileage.
ROGER HUDDLE I had got to Victoria Park about six o’clock in the morning. It had been raining all week and the park was sodden. The chief of the park keepers turned up and we gave him a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label and the last time I saw him he was sitting with the Steel Pulse cooks with great bells of bloody smoke. We had to start at half past one dead or otherwise it wouldn’t have worked. The bloody rain stopped about half past twelve and round about one o’clock the clouds opened and the sun came out. There were only a few hundred people in the park and I had to say, ‘And now, X-Ray Spex.’
COLIN BARKER We got there just as Poly Styrene shouted into the mic, ‘Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard but I say, “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!”’ That was the opening of the Carnival. It was absolutely fantastic.
ROGER HUDDLE They finished the first number and just started the second and the demonstration came in. They saw Poly and ran. I was standing on the stage with nothing. And then, WHOOMPH! They got to the front and all started pogoing and our security fence collapsed and people started fainting. They were bringing them backstage – and then they were out again – young women, young blokes, punks, completely gone! We laid them on the wall around the back of the old swimming pool. There was this old guy, must have been about sixty or seventy with grey hair, St John Ambulance, with his little hat and his blue top and his little white bag with a red cross on it: ‘Do you need any help, here?’ He took a look and said, ‘It’s all right. It’s just heat exhaustion. Let them lie here for a few minutes.’ He stayed for the whole gig looking after anybody that got injured.
PETER HAIN The whole park just filled up as if people appeared from nowhere. I went on the stage to have a look. You looked down on it and it was huge and you saw all these different banners coming in. It was something very different culturally and politically to anything I’d experienced. It astounded me. It astounded everybody. Nobody expected it to be that big. And nobody expected it to be that broad in terms of working-class kids and just music lovers coming to see their bands; the message got imbibed somehow. They were wearing ANL badges and they were taking leaflets. There were buckets all over and we collected thousands and thousands of pounds in donations. It was a first in every sense and it had an incredible aura about it.
BILLY BRAGG When we got to Victoria Park there were 100,000 people just like me. I remember getting hold of a megaphone and chanting, The National Front is a fascist front. Smash the National Front.
COLIN BARKER I remember seeing friends going round with this huge crowd of predominantly under-twenties wearing safety pins in their ears and looking amazing. I thought, ‘Thank God they’re on our side.’ Above all it was a youth demonstration. But there was a great toilet shortage because the women took over the seated accommodation in the gents.
TRACEY THORN You fondly imagine that everyone was a cool punk but it was a real mixture of people, some scruffy and wearing second-hand clothes, and still a few wearing flares and long hair.
RICHARD SWALES The most memorable thing was when Poly Styrene took her turban off and she’d shaved her head. She was taken off to a mental hospital after the gig. The band didn’t know she’d done it.
FRANCES SOKOLOV She did this strange thing with cutting her hair off. I think she suffered. It was the pressure, the feelings, knowing the heavy weight of what we were taking on.
DOTUN ADEBAYO It was a beautiful day and there were thousands of people that just kept on coming and coming. We were trying to chirp girls. I remember most clearly that there was a bunch of skinheads who wanted to disrupt it. I knew it was going to get rowdy. Patrik Fitzgerald came up and they bottled him off the stage. I thought, ‘Phew, it’s going to be tough for the Clash.’
ROGER HUDDLE Patrik Fitzgerald came out and all the punks started booing him because he was playing acoustic: Got a safety pin stuck in my heart. Red went out on the stage and was brilliant.
RED SAUNDERS There were bottles coming at him and I ran out: ‘Whoa! Stop all this; this geezer’s playing for us.’ I went into this rant, ‘There ain’t no police here.’ Then of course they all started going, ‘Fuck the police.’ I remember orchestrating that. Then I said something like, ‘If anybody throws any more bottles I’m going to come out there and fucking get you.’ And it stopped. Patrik was upset, and I said, ‘That’s life, mate.’
BOB HUMM I was in the mixing tent playing records between the bands. I remember Prince Jazzbo was there and he gave me a record to put on. Halfway through I thought, ‘This is going on a bit,’ and I took it off and he told me to put it back on. I remember reading in the NME that John Cooper Clarke played. He didn’t. It was a record I played.
JOHN JENNINGS We had set up to play on the back of a truck at the beginning of the march and our driver went the wrong way up a one-way and ended up going across the central reservation because we had to get out. Tom Robinson was running along behind us. When we got to the park we kept on playing.
DAVE RUFFY In the park we got called fascists because we were playing when the other bands were playing – the rabble didn’t get on the main stage.
CHRIS BOLTON We made dual bands with Misty and the Ruts with our own PA and this big crowd that had followed us there then stayed with us in the park. Someone tried to tell us to turn off but people just demanded we keep playing. I said, ‘The wind’s going this way so our music’s not even reaching them.’ People were being drawn off the main stage because they saw a whole fucking big party going on.
COLIN BARKER Red was on stage prancing about doing an absolute wonderful job as a compère. He’s a big man and was wearing a big top hat and red tails.
RED SAUNDERS I did this great screaming shout, ‘THIS AIN’T NO FUCKING WOODSTOCK. THIS IS THE CARNIVAL AGAINST THE FUCKING NAZIS.’ And the whole crowd went, ‘AARRGGHH!’ It just lifted me for the rest of the day.
SYD SHELTON It said in our publicity we wanted to see 20,000 people in the park. We had no idea it would be as big as it was. Red came backstage saying, ‘Syd, how many people do you reckon are here?’ I said, ‘Maybe 100,000?’ He said, ‘Let’s say 80,000,’ and went straight out to the front: ‘WE’VE JUST HAD THE OFFICIAL COUNT THAT THERE ARE 80,000 PEOPLE HERE.’ Red had that confidence. He knew what had to be done. The next day the press and the Ten O’Clock News quoted, ‘80,000 people . . . the largest anti-racist demonstration since the 1930s’.
JOHNNY GREEN Fuck me, there were a lot of people . . . it was very egalitarian but you’re always going to fight for your fucking band. And here we are supporting Tom Robinson, well, nah, it ain’t supporting because we’re all in this together. But you know road crews are sneaky people. And they’ve got a guy up there pulling strokes on me and I’m pulling strokes on him and then suddenly, BOOF! The Clash are up there running.24
KATE WEBB When they came on it was heaving, massively exciting and exhilarating, and the energy was amazing. But there were a lot of skins towards the front because they knew Jimmy Pursey was going to be there and some NF kids were throwing bottles. It was threatening and I felt the stage was going to break and fall down underneath us.
RED SAUNDERS All the people from the Socialist Worker print shop were standing at the front of the stage holding the scaffolding because of the weight of the crowd and the enthusiasm.
TOM ROBINSON There was a curfew at six o’clock and the Clash deliberately carried on playing. They were starting their third song over their time, ignoring all gestures from the side of the stage. I was at my wits’ end. It was my favourite band stealing my set.
JOHNNY GREEN There’s these people going, ‘You’re overrunning. Come on, off.’ We were going, ‘Fuck off. Look. People are loving it.’ It was getting argy-bargy.
ROGER HUDDLE Red said, ‘They’ve got to get off the fucking stage. NOW. Pull the plug.’ I said, ‘We can’t.’ He said, ‘Pull it. It’s our fucking plug.’ They finished the song and I went ‘pff’ and that was it. Johnny Green called us long-haired hippies.
JOHNNY GREEN I ran onstage to Strummer saying, ‘They’ve pulled the plug.’ I dived down and got through the guys’ legs and whacked the mains plug back in and back comes the backline and on they go.
KATE WEBB The Clash were making a film called Rude Boy and their filmmakers had a different agenda. And then Jimmy Pursey ran on stage and joined them singing ‘White Riot’.
JOHNNY GREEN Then it came to blows. And then, dare we say, not I, somebody pushes Ray Gange out and says, ‘You love the Clash. Don’t you think they all love the Clash? Go and ask them.’
RED SAUNDERS There was shit from the film crew and their actor was fucking around, running onstage and shouting down the mic, ‘More Clash. More Clash.’ One of our guys went, ‘Get the fuck off.’
TOM ROBINSON So we got painted the bad guys. They were saying all these people had come to see the Clash and we got jealous. I don’t think Joe Strummer ever liked me. Perhaps it was because he saw me as a phoney or perhaps he had left his middle-class roots behind and simply concealed his a lot more successfully than I had.
JOHN DENNIS I read Paul Simonon saying ‘I’m glad we did the anti-Nazi rally because it was important, but it was a bit off-putting with all these hippies wandering about because we wanted to make the left-wing seem more glamorous’. But that was the biggest gig the Clash had ever done.
ROGER HUDDLE The Clash all left after their set except for Mick Jones, who stayed to the end.
HILARY CROSS After the Clash they got new equipment or something because the sound had been terrible. There was a break of about twenty minutes and speeches were made and then next were Steel Pulse.
DAVID HINDS Victoria Park was the biggest audience we’d been exposed to. I was being patted on the shoulder for being such a strong representation for reggae music.
RUTH GREGORY Steel Pulse came on in their Ku Klux Klan outfits. I don’t know what the sound is for shock but somehow there was shock in the crowd.
KATE WEBB ‘Ku Klux Klan’ moved me to tears.
SYD SHELTON You could have heard a pin drop. Nobody knew they were going to come out in these big pointed white hoods. That was one of the great moments. That and when the Clash did ‘White Riot’ and the whole place was pogoing. There was so much energy in that crowd. It was like alive.
TOM ROBINSON It was all done on a shoestring. Nowadays you think of mass gigs having backstage hospitality, a press area, being covered by the news: this was our SWP friends ransacking the war chest. You came down these wooden planks and there was a concrete bit of ground open to the sky; nowhere to sit down, nowhere to change, no glamour whatsoever. There were these dodgy old generators to supply the power for these feeble lamps and a wobbling PA. It was barely adequate for 20,000 people and we had 80,000 and the generators weren’t supplying the full 250 volts, so when we went on, the Hammond organ, which finds its pitch from the voltage, went out of tune. It sounded awful. If you think how much PA you need to fill Wembley Stadium and then if you look at the photographs of how much PA we had. The faders were all pushed up to the very top so the sound was distorting.
HILARY CROSS Tom Robinson was totally amazing. He had everyone hanging onto every word. I kept a diary. He said, ‘You don’t have to be black to like reggae, don’t have to be a woman to like Joni Mitchell and don’t have to be gay to sing this – but it helps.’ Then I wrote: ‘Everyone in the whole crowd – hippies to punks to Teds to little kids, gay or not – joined in with “Glad to be Gay” and it was amazingly moving.’ I felt something had really been achieved and felt proud of having been there.
BILLY BRAGG We were standing under a banner that said ‘Gays Against the Nazis’ and when Tom sang Sing if you’re glad to be gay, all these blokes around us started kissing each other on the lips. I’d never seen an out gay man before. My immediate thought was, ‘What are they doing here? This is about black people.’ And literally in the course of that afternoon I came to realize that actually the fascists were against anybody who was in any way different and just liking black music and being a punk rocker was sufficiently different for the National Front to be the enemy. I realized this was how my generation were going to define themselves, in opposition to discrimination of all kinds. This was our Vietnam; our Ban the Bomb. It had a very powerful catalytic effect on me.
KATE WEBB There’s that great photograph of Tom from behind where he’s sort of embracing the crowd.
COLIN BARKER It was a fantastic moment. Questions of gay rights had not surfaced that much. This was a real jump into the unknown and Tom just took the crowd with him. The whole crowd were singing Sing if you’re glad to be gay with their fists in the air.
DAVID WIDGERY The concert ended with a jam round a white reggae riff which had Mick Jones and Danny Kustow from TRB dropping power chords into a chant by Steel Pulse, 90° Inclusive, and Jimmy Pursey.25
TOM ROBINSON We were all chanting, black and white together over a reggae rhythm.
SYD SHELTON The jam was absolutely magical. They performed ‘We Have Got To Get It Together’, which Tom had especially written.
COLIN BARKER At the end, Jimmy Pursey grabbed the microphone and said, ‘All the newspapers thought we were going to go like that but we went like this,’ and clutched his hands together. It was an amazing end to an astonishing event. It made the first item on the Ten o’Clock News that night and they had footage from the stage of everybody pogoing. Tariq Ali wrote an editorial with the headline, ‘Hats off to the SWP’. It raised our prestige enormously.
TRACEY THORN I’d pushed down the front when the Clash were on because I was mad about Joe Strummer and I got separated from all my friends. I remember mooching about feeling really lost and thinking, ‘I don’t know what to do,’ and I realized I didn’t even know where I was. I’d just been swept along like on a river and been washed up in this park so I just started walking, thinking, ‘I’ll find a Tube.’ I was walking down Mile End Road and then it hit my little head, ‘My God, they said there’s going to be violence and I’ve got all my punk badges on and maybe there’s going to be racist skinheads.’ I was the only white person: ‘God, what do I look like to all these people? Is it clear I’ve just been on an Anti-Nazi League march and so that’s good; or do I look like a nasty punk?’ But of course no one paid me any attention at all and I made my way back to a Tube and found my friends in Islington.
ROGER HUDDLE The Carnival changed the course of British history. It became a rallying point.
KATE WEBB Did the Carnival change people? It’s like the Clash’s question, ‘How many fascists will there be?’ It’s very hard to quantify how many people you’ve converted but you can see a process over time. It made the Front unacceptable and it made people think about who they were. There hadn’t been anything like that since the Isle of Wight Festival so it was a massive generational marker between the hippy movement and their creative revolt and our creative revolt. We were ecstatic. A fucking amazing thing had happened: one of those things when people say, ‘I was there,’ or, ‘It changed the way I thought.’ We felt massive exaltation like we’d arrived and what we were saying mattered. And that passion had been expressed in all these different ways. We pulled it off and the thing hadn’t descended into riot.
There were two massive yellow dustbins full of pennies and money and somehow these ended up over at my mum and dad’s house. The money was on the floor and there was about twelve people counting it up. There was the odd note but it was nearly all pennies and a tiny bit of silver.
BILLY BRAGG I was working in an office in the East End where people made sexist and racist remarks or homophobic comments behind people’s backs. I had never said anything because I was the office junior and these guys were all ten, fifteen years older than me. When I went back to work on Monday morning I knew I was not alone. I knew I was different from those arseholes. Being in that audience and singing those songs together and that sense of belonging gave me the courage of my convictions to go back to work and stand up for what I believed in. It wasn’t the Clash – but they did a really important thing. They got me there.
PAUL FURNESS To be at the Carnival was confirmation that what we were doing was right, with the sheer amount of people that were there. My parents bought the News of the World religiously, and ironically they really helped because they had full-page headlines against the National Front.
COLIN BYRNE Rock Against Racism was my first involvement in politics and Victoria Park was the first political march I ever went on, where music, fashion, style and politics all converged for the first time. It was our political Woodstock. It was the first time that you felt that you were part of a mass populist movement. It wasn’t full of depressing-looking lefties and donkey jackets. It was fun and there were kids running around. Rock Against Racism was reaching out to people who didn’t see themselves as political. They were young and concerned but they didn’t have a party membership card. It got politics into the NME and it made it legitimate and cool to be involved in politics. If you were a student politician you were one of those miserable gits in a raincoat who went to weird meetings or would be flogging Socialist Worker in market squares; now suddenly there was a platform to talk about serious issues but in a cool way.
ROGER HUDDLE The row after the Carnival was between Dave Widgery and me because he said, ‘We don’t need the ANL anymore. We can go on without them.’ That would have been a disaster. What was above the stage? ‘ANL / Rock Against Racism Carnival’. Who booked the buses, the tickets, who were the organizers? Not RAR people, because they couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery.
RED SAUNDERS Here was a huge group of enthusiastic amateurs putting on what is now regarded as one of the top ten festivals of all time. The Socialist Worker said, ‘God had joined the ANL.’ I just knew it had taken it to another level and then RAR really took off around the country.
PAUL HOLBOROW It was an unprecedented departure from previous types of demonstrations, combining both the youth and the music in the park and the politics in Trafalgar Square. And the message going back from the Carnival was, ‘Build your own branches.’
GEOFF BROWN After the Carnival, me and Bernie Wilcox had a conversation and we decided wouldn’t it be a good idea if Manchester had a carnival.
BERNIE WILCOX There was a train going back and I was sat with Geoff. He said, ‘God, that was fantastic. We’ll have to do one.’ I said, ‘Yeah, we’ll do that.’ We got together two weeks later and said, ‘Right, when can we do it?’
COLIN BARKER Two weeks after the Carnival the SWP had a meeting in Birmingham. Everybody across the country was, ‘Yeah, look what we’ve achieved.’ One of our more enthusiastic members, Geoff Brown, stands up and says, ‘After Victoria Park, we can do anything,’ expressing what most of us felt. There were two people who disagreed. One was Jim Nichol, the man who had come up with the idea in the first place, and the other was Tony Cliff, who says, ‘So, Geoff Brown, how many factory branches of the Anti-Nazi League do you have in Manchester? Life is not a carnival. Come back down to earth.’ It was a brilliant intervention and they deflated us.
SYD SHELTON RAR were the rowdy neighbours of the Anti-Nazi League. They didn’t understand us at all. They were much more political and electioneering. We were this rabble of uncontrollable anarchic loonies to them. And we were. But we were also passionate about art, photography, fashion, clothes, music. And they weren’t.
JOHN DENNIS The Carnival was the point at which Rock Against Racism became a national campaign. The central committee collectively went, ‘Oh, my fucking God.’
