RICHARD BOON Manchester has a very proud tradition. There have been black people there for hundreds of years, as there have across most of the northern cities. There is a statue of Abraham Lincoln in the middle of the town with around the base a transcript of a letter he wrote to the workers of Manchester thanking them for their support during the American Civil War. The first line reads, ‘I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the working people of Manchester and in all Europe are called to endure in this crisis.’ On a Friday night you always ended up at the Afro-Caribbean Cultural Centre dancing to ska. Punks would go and old hippies and some blacks, who would dress up because that was their Friday night. There was never any bother because everybody just wanted to drink Red Stripe and listen to bluebeat.
BERNIE WILCOX I was twenty-one and had a full-time job as a structural design engineer for Shell. I had a council flat on the overspill Partington Estate and I had two accents because I’d got some support from the Buttle Trust who sent me to a posh boarding school, so I used to be able to switch instantly between the two. There were very few working-class people on the far left in the Socialist Workers Party in general. Rock Against Racism connected because that was through music. It’s like Lennon said in ‘Revolution’: If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao you ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow. RAR and the Anti-Nazi League got over that middle-class barrier and got through to the working-class kids.
I went on this local TV programme called Granada Reports. Tony Wilson was a reporter on it and after that a guy called Dick Witts approached me who ran the Manchester Musicians Collective.
RICHARD BOON The Manchester Musicians Collective is really quite interesting in terms of local musicians making a platform for themselves because there was hardly anywhere to play. There was a very small village of people who met like-minded people.
BERNIE WILCOX Dick knew loads of up-and-coming bands so with his contacts and my drive we got together to put on nights. We’d rent community or leisure centres and take it to council estates to reach out to the kids there. We said, ‘We need to go where the kids who are racist live.’ We’d put on bands like the Fall, Joy Division and John Cooper Clarke. The Frantic Elevators did quite a lot of gigs for us with Mick Hucknall years before he formed Simply Red. And we always had a stall and sold Temporary Hoarding. A lot of these places it was the only time there’d ever been a gig on, but we kept getting hassle from the local council so I had this idea that there must be some dirty club in the centre of Manchester that does nothing on a Thursday night and would like a hundred punters in there. A mate introduced me to this guy, who was definitely part of the underworld, and he said, ‘I can do that.’ I said, ‘I need a stage.’ ‘No problem.’ Turned up on the Thursday: no stage. Joy Division turn up, and the manager says, ‘There isn’t a stage.’ Peter Hook, the bass player, says, ‘We’ll get one.’ So he went with the drummer, brought back a collapsible stage, and erected it. I thought, ‘Fuckin’ hell!’
GEOFF BROWN The joke was always that I would only see Bernie when we changed shifts. I would be going to bed as Bernie was getting going. He went into these very seedy clubs where he organized local bands in various rotten cellars on Tuesday nights. And then after the success of the Victoria Park Carnival we pressed ahead with our plan to do one in Manchester.
BERNIE WILCOX People think we planned the Northern Rock Against Racism Carnival for 13 July 1978 to coincide with the Moss Side by-election, but we didn’t know that was on at that point.
GEOFF BROWN The Moss Side by-election was very significant. The National Front put up this candidate, Herbert Andrew, and we used the opportunity to build the Anti-Nazi League. It was a clear challenge to us in the lead-up to the Manchester Carnival.
BERNIE WILCOX We had to get permission from the town hall and all I had was a white suit. Geoff said, ‘Fucking hell, Bernie. How are we going to get permission to do this if you’re in a white suit?’ Geoff knew somebody who was very influential in those circles and he smoothed our way.
GEOFF BROWN Colin Barnett, who was a Methodist lay preacher and the secretary of the North-West Trade Union Centre and quite an ego, caused all kinds of difficulties because things could only be done his way.
COLIN BARKER Colin Barnett was very cross that the Anti-Nazi League had been started without his permission and involvement. We got summoned to his office and had to bargain to get the site for the Carnival. Initially, me and Roger Huddle went up to Heaton Park, which is right out of town, but when we got to Alexandra Park, Roger saw a bunch of black and white kids all kicking a football and said, ‘This is it.’ It cost £3,000 to put the stage up with all its gear, which was a lot of money.
GEOFF BROWN On the same Saturday as the Carnival was set, Bob Dylan was doing a concert in the huge Blackbushe Aerodrome in Camberly, Surrey, and Graham Parker and the Rumour were to be his support. They’d never done an outside concert before and they heard we were setting ours up. Parker’s management got in contact and said, ‘If we come on the Thursday and do a little warm-up for an hour or so we’ll bung you a bit of money.’ The agreement was no publicity.
BERNIE WILCOX Tosh Ryan was a music entrepreneur who had taken control of the fly-posting scene and was a kind of socialist gangster. When we started putting up the Graham Parker posters – despite the ‘no publicity’ agreement – over his, he got annoyed. I went to see him and he said, ‘Let’s come to some arrangement, here. You give me the posters and we’ll put them up.’ And then he said, ‘Who’s doing your stage management at the Carnival?’ I said, ‘What the fuck’s stage management?’
COLIN BARKER Putting up the posters provoked a huge row. Paul Holborow had to come up from London in a hurry on the Wednesday because the official councillor said, ‘You’ve gone beyond the agreement. I’m cancelling the whole event.’ Paul had to hang around in the antechambers of the town hall because at first they refused to meet him. Eventually he got seen and Paul gave it the ‘there’ll be a riot if you call this off’ warning and refused to leave until he got something. Finally, a Mr Bee consented to ‘an open rehearsal’ on the Thursday on the condition he came to judge whether it was a ‘rehearsal’ or actually a ‘fake Graham Parker concert’. It was a beautiful summer evening. Two or three thousand people came. I saw Mr Bee sitting in a pair of grey flannel trousers and a white shirt like Buddha on the grass, and between every number Ernie Dalton, who was on the stage in full dress, would say, ‘DON’T-CLAP-TOO-HARD-THIS-IS-JUST-A-REHEARSAL. IT’S-JUST-A-REHEARSAL.’ Mr Bee smiled and reported back to the council, ‘Saturday can go ahead.’ At the end, some teenagers from Moss Side had gathered at the far end of the field. There were up to a hundred of them with really thick bamboo poles, and when the crowd dispersed they stayed. The stage crew were tidying up and all of a sudden the kids banged their sticks together and ran at the stage, split around it, and then ran off. They never said a word. It was a protest against an all-white line-up. That was our reading of it. And then later that evening we heard a group of young people smashed all the windows in the Tory Party offices in town during the by-election count.
BERNIE WILCOX Glen Matlock had started the Rich Kids with Midge Ure after Glen had been kicked out of the Sex Pistols – which Malcolm McLaren claimed was because, ‘he liked the Beatles’ – and they were on tour and said they wanted to get in on the Saturday gig. We said, ‘We’re full up, but you can do UMIST [University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology] on the Friday.’ The Fall supported, but Mark E. Smith was pissed off. He was saying, ‘We’ve done all these RAR gigs, why haven’t you put us on the big stage tomorrow?’ After we all slept over in tents in the park to protect the stage for Saturday’s gig, Trevor Hyatt from Granada TV came along with this guy called Bob Williamson who was a folk singer who told jokes. Somebody else brought loads of ‘Bob Hope’ and we had this fantastic sort of campfire-type impromptu concert, getting stoned. If the National Front had turned up they could have turned us over easily. We were all on cloud nine.
RICHARD BOON There was a press conference at the Piccadilly Hotel which was not very well managed. That was when Pete Shelley and I saw that that they lacked some organizational sense. There was a funny mix of professionals and amateurs trying to deliver a fun afternoon with a message.
PAUL HOLBOROW There was a creative tension between making a cultural impact and making a political impact. Jerry Fitzpatrick was central to all of this. He was my right-hand man and a brilliant negotiator and fixer. We would meet with Red and Roger and say, this is what we’ve got to do, and then Jerry would smooth any ruffled feathers that emerged out of those meetings.
BERNIE WILCOX Jerry was the workhorse. He was from the centre in London. He was the guy who would do the nitty-gritty organization of things like sorting out Steel Pulse to come and play. But I really struggled with Richard Boon and booking the Buzzcocks. I collared him a few times leading up to the Carnival and he was very dismissive of the whole thing. Richard was more sussed than anybody else. He said, ‘This thing’s an SWP front so I’m having nothing to do with it.’ I was walking down Oxford Road, and out of this second-hand instrument shop comes Pete Shelley. I said, ‘Pete, too good an opportunity to miss, this’ – Mark E. Smith had already said he’d had a word with him but I didn’t know if he had. I said, ‘Look, we’ve got this gig. There’s going to be 50,000 people there. You’d be mad not to do it. Come on. Just do it. Tell Richard to do it.’ Richard phoned up a couple of days later and said, ‘Right, we’ll do it.’
LUCY WHITMAN Pete Shelley wrote incredibly witty and challenging lyrics: Ever fallen in love, in love with someone / You shouldn’t have fallen in love with. Buzzcocks had previously done a Rock Against Racism gig in Barking and afterwards I met Pete and gave him a questionnaire and he sent me a typed reply:
I’m against ignorance. I try to educate people and be educated by them. Racism can only be solved by education. People must be informed and it is up to YOU as much as it is up to me to show and tell others that racism does not bring about a better society, only hatred.
RICHARD BOON Buzzcocks were approached to take part in the Northern Carnival and of course we said yes. I don’t remember any deliberation. There might have been a thing about logistics and how the event was being put together and delivered, but there wasn’t any hesitation.
GEOFF BROWN I had an argument in the West Indian Community Centre in Moss Side with Gus John, who would later become a national figure. He made the point they weren’t going to encourage people to join our demonstration on the day of the Carnival because the concern was, when the police come to attack demonstrations, they go for the black kids first. On the day, we gathered outside Strangeways Prison at noon. Strangeways is a fabulously forbidding Victorian structure and has a large open space in front of it where you could get tens of thousands to line up, but Alexandra Park was a good four-mile walk so the speakers were under pressure to cut it short. The chief police officer said, ‘Could you just hold that lot,’ and he pointed to several thousand who were on the side road. I said, ‘You and I can agree that they should wait but I can tell you, looking at them, they ain’t going to.’ They were itching to get off.
PAUL FURNESS All the prisoners were banging cans outside the windows in solidarity. The atmosphere was totally anarchic; everybody was just running round being drunk and swearing and telling everybody to fuck off. I had a bucket of badges saying ‘Gays Against the Nazis’ and there were tons of coppers and one of them tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Give me one of them,’ and put it in his pocket.
GEOFF BROWN We had half a dozen flatbed trucks and we had local bands like the Mekons and the Gang of Four playing on them, with hundreds of people dancing around each truck. There was a huge snake of people all the way through the middle of Manchester and then into Hulme and Moss Side. It was quite an event; an incredible atmosphere. There was a sea of lollipops. My calculation was about 15,000 people marched and there were about 25,000 more at the concert itself. During the march, Paul Holborow turned to me and said, ‘We’ve just thrown away 1,000 quid; if we’d just had a row of people with buckets across the entrance of the park . . .’
COLIN BARKER We marched from the centre of town to Alexandra Park and Tony Wilson was waving to his fans. I thought, ‘You bastard,’ because it was the only time we’d ever seen him. People were going, ‘Ooh, look, there’s Tony Wilson!’
PAUL HOLBOROW The march was huge and more overtly working-class than London. I can remember a group of white cleaners saying how they worked with Afro-Caribbean workers. And Fluck and Law phoned up and said they could make a papier mâché cast of John Tyndall with an axe going through his head, and also one of the local Nazi candidate.
SUE COOPER It was our local park because we were living in Whalley Range. It had bloody rained all summer. I’d never lived in Manchester before and it rained every day for week after week after week. It was really depressing. But that day it didn’t rain.
RICHARD BOON There was a moment where the head of the march was just about to hit the park. We were just finishing soundchecking and someone said, ‘Why don’t you start playing when they come in?’ I said, ‘No, that’s not what’s supposed to be happening. We’re supposed to play when we’re supposed to play.’
BERNIE WILCOX Buzzcocks wanted to go on when the maximum of people were in the park. Richard was annoyed because we couldn’t tell him when this was going to happen because it was a fucking march. He’s going, ‘This is a shambles.’ It wasn’t a shambles at all.
RED SAUNDERS Richard Boon was screaming, ‘You couldn’t organize a piss-up in a fucking brewery. The organization is a shambles.’ And the SWP were going, ‘You’re a fucking shit.’ It was all little arguments.
RICHARD BOON I said, ‘They know a lot about propaganda but nothing about rock ’n’ roll. If the people who are organizing this are the revolution, then I’m emigrating.’
COLIN BARKER It was fair comment. We didn’t know anything about rock ’n’ roll.
ROGER HUDDLE We produced a fantastic Northern Carnival edition of Temporary Hoarding and Red found them in a tent at the back of the park in bundles, unopened. The last thing you wanted to say to some punk kids was, ‘Can you distribute these papers?’
RED SAUNDERS We worked really hard on a special edition for the Carnival and sent 10,000 of them up on the early British Rail. At the gig I saw a big ANL tent so I went in to say hi and saw them all sitting in the corner in bundles. That’s where the organization didn’t work.
GEOFF BROWN Red’s ability to shout and have a real argument is crucial. The fact that he could say, ‘You bunch of tossers; you can’t organize anything.’ You can’t build something without that ability to really let rip.
BERNIE WILCOX I was backstage making sure everything was working. People were coming to the gate and saying, ‘Can I get in here?’ ‘No, you can’t.’ When the Buzzers came on, then it was different. Pete Shelley said, ‘This wasn’t politics, it was fun. But the best kind of fun is with people, and being with people is politics.’ His mum turned up with a Tupperware container and some sandwiches for him. He was quite embarrassed.
RICHARD BOON During the song ‘Sixteen’, which has the refrain I hate modern music / Disco boogie and pop, Pete changed the lyrics to, I hate modern music and the National Front / They go on an’ on an’ on an’ on an’ on / How I wish they would stop.
PAUL FURNESS China Street did their single ‘Rock Against Racism’ and Steel Pulse were a joy to listen to. The hood over the head was a really strong image. There’s a mutation from Billie Holiday singing ‘Strange Fruit’ to ‘Ku Klux Klan’.
BERNIE WILCOX China Street were a white reggae band from Lancaster and Martin Pilkington, their leader, persuaded me to put them on. But like Exodus, they were great in small clubs but on stage in front of 40,000 people they didn’t cut it. Steel Pulse finished it and they were absolutely fantastic. Diggle, the Buzzcocks guitar player, came on at the end to jam with them: Black and white unite and fight.
RICHARD BOON Diggle fell off the back of the stage. He gets very excitable and runs around a lot and didn’t judge the distance properly and just fell off.
COLIN BARKER The black youth of Moss Side looked extremely happy; everybody looked happy. There were two black bands and there was a reggae sound tent. It was like imagining what socialism would be like; nobody gave a damn about what colour anybody was. It was an amazing atmosphere. You have to understand what a difference it made. Manchester was horrible in the 1970s. There was racial tension and graffiti on the walls.
RICHARD BOON Rock Against Racism was an attempt to focus these young kids out there who were almost a lost generation. There hadn’t been anything like it. There was an enthused atmosphere. You saw a big sea change where it was cool to be an anti-racist whereas before it was cool to be racist.
BERNIE WILCOX Manchester had such a buzz. You couldn’t walk down Market Street after without seeing loads and loads of young kids, sort of twelve, thirteen, fourteen, right up to twenty-odd, absolutely full with anti-Nazi badges. I think me and Geoff should be very proud of that because a lot of those people have got their own kids now and they brought them up as anti-racist.
GEOFF BROWN The Northern Carnival was a political event. Everybody was carrying these ‘No Front’ lollipops. It had a really sharp edge to it. It was the strength and ability to combine the politics and the music. And we were focused on our political objective which was to build a movement to overwhelm the National Front and break them as a political organization. They came fourth in the by-election, 229 votes ahead of the actress Vanessa Redgrave who stood for the Workers Revolutionary Party. The following Monday, every corner of Manchester had got kids who had been there. They’d bought their badges and their lollipops and they’d say to the local racist kids, ‘Where were you on Saturday?’ Manchester didn’t have a problem with Nazis after that.
