GEOFF BROWN It was very carefully thought out whether there should be a second Carnival in London, but after the Northern Carnival in July the tide was turning our way. We felt supremely confident. So Brockwell Park was booked for 24 September ’78 and timed carefully to fit the possibility of an October general election, because Labour was ahead in the polls and I remember sitting in a pub two weeks before and somebody comes into the room and says, ‘Haven’t you heard, Callaghan has just announced on television he’s going to leave it until next year.’ It was a disastrous decision.
PAUL HOLBOROW Callaghan ducked it. But even so, where it had been an anxious time leading up to the first Carnival in April, second time round we knew Brockwell Park was going to be massive. The only risk was, it was getting cold and wet and we were on tenterhooks as to whether we’d called it too late. But it was massive. We claimed 150,000. I remember walking into Hyde Park for the beginning of the march and people were streaming in. The atmosphere was fantastic. Tony Benn was a key speaker, which was unprecedented for a cabinet minister to talk to a demonstration and clearly outside of the traditional parameters of British politics. Then we marched down to Brockwell Park and there were a lot of motorized floats with bands playing. It was joyous. I had a team of runners who kept me informed about what was happening on the march and in the park. Ted Knight, the left-wing leader of Lambeth Council, provided us with lots of facilities and built the stage at the council’s expense.
SYD SHELTON We saw the second Carnival as a celebration: a victory parade. We had a better PA. The weather was great. We knew what we were doing. We organized a lot more food and toilets. At Victoria Park, we’d prepared for 20,000 people and got 80,000; this time we expected 100,000 and we got 150,000. It was huge.
PAUL FURNESS We went up Railton Road which had a big gay commune and they had a huge banner across the street that said, ‘BRIXTON GAYS WELCOME ALL ANTI-FASCISTS’. When you saw things like that you knew you were getting somewhere. Brockwell Park was on a slope and when we got there you could see all these people in trees and on the roofs of the flats and on the lido wall.
PETER HAIN Brixton was carefully chosen because it had its own solidarity message where the black community was very strong and had its own history of trouble.
RHODA DAKAR That many white people in the park didn’t feel normal. I saw my mates march down Brixton Road and waved to them: ‘I’ll see you up there for Elvis Costello.’
JOHN DENNIS There were presentational issues about the banners on the stage. At Victoria Park, the Rock Against Racism banner was at the back and the Anti-Nazi League banner was at the front of the stage. Brockwell Park was a victory because we got the RAR star so big on the poster and on the stage we got a bigger billing. That reflects the kind of antagonism that was developing.
PETER HAIN Paul Holborow was keen that I tried getting Paul McCartney. I was in touch with his people and he was interested. That would have been into a whole different league.
RED SAUNDERS ‘Fuckin’ Paul McCartney, no!’ He was too much of a good boy. I remember saying to NME, ‘There’s no point us putting on Queen or Judas Priest when they strut around the stage with their bollocks hanging out and all dressed up in leather, giving the whole sexist thing.’ We were strictly roots! We used to say the ultimatum RAR concert would be John Lennon and Bob Marley. Funny enough, a couple of years later I went to Marley’s studio in Jamaica to do a series of photographic portraits of his wife, Rita, for the Sunday Times and on the wall was the letter I’d written to Melody Maker about Eric Clapton.
PETER HAIN RAR were right. It was more grass roots: challenging and alternative; more street bands and therefore you could appeal to precisely those groups who were vulnerable. For punks and skinheads, their bands were rebellions against the established rock and pop order.
RUTH GREGORY Stiff Little Fingers got in touch and said, ‘We want to play,’ and people were arguing because nobody had really heard of them. This was before their first album. But because they came from Ulster and they had a song called ‘Alternative Ulster’ we thought they’d probably be good, so we put them on first. They should have headlined it, man. They absolutely blew the audience away. They had that raw energy that the Ruts had. Relentless. You can hear it in their records: An alternative Ulster / Grab it and change it, it’s yours . . . ignore the bores and their laws. I loved that. Everybody was like, ‘Who’s this?’ It was like when Jerry Dammers put on the huge anti-apartheid Nelson Mandela birthday celebration at Wembley Stadium in 1988 and nobody had heard of Tracy Chapman. She just came on and blew the whole audience away.
SYD SHELTON Stiff Little Fingers slept on the living-room floor in my council flat in Stamford Hill because they didn’t have two halfpennies to rub together. I got on really well with Jake, who was vehemently anti-racist.
JAKE BURNS Brockwell Park was a chance to show willing and we just grabbed it. We were first on and borrowed amplifiers because we were supporting the Tom Robinson Band that night in Cardiff. Straight after our set we raced to Paddington Station carrying our own guitars, hot and sweaty from the gig, with a journalist in tow from Sounds. And we got on the wrong fucking train. We ended up in Slough. Eventually we made it to Cardiff with half an hour to spare.
DAVE WIDGERY When Jake Burns took off his specs and donned his leathers he transmogrified himself into one of the most stinging vocalists and fiery guitarists punk ever possessed. The Stiffs’ incendiary songs brought in the Irish dimension so important to any movement against racism in Britain, even though Burns denounced Troops Out. But better, they did punk homage to Bob Marley’s classic ‘Johnny Was’.
GORDON OGILVIE I suggested to Jake that they do ‘Johnny Was’. I said, ‘It’s about a kid in Jamaica being shot down and that’s happening in Belfast.’ In Marley’s original it was about three minutes flat; in Stiff Little Fingers’ set it grew and grew until it became one of the centrepieces of the show.
JAKE BURNS ‘Johnny Was’ was a mournful ballad for the loss of a young man’s life. Gordon loaned me the record and I was listening, thinking, ‘This is beautiful, but how the hell are we going to play that?’ Also we were a punk rock band and I thought our audience would kill us if we did it. Gordon said, ‘Live with it.’ I took the Clash’s version of ‘Police And Thieves’ as a template, making the bassline the guitar part, and that toughened it up. And when Brian put the military drums on the front it all clicked into place and I threw in some Belfast references: A single shot rings out in a Belfast night.
RUTH GREGORY We had got Stiff Little Fingers in at the last minute to replace Sham 69 who had pulled out because Jimmy Pursey got death threats from their own fans. Jimmy was incredibly brave to turn up there and speak to the audience like he did. There’s that brilliant photo of Syd’s where Jimmy’s just turning away.
SYD SHELTON They said they would kill Jimmy Pursey if he played the Carnival so we said, ‘You can’t do it.’ We knew it would ruin it and there would be a punch-up. Up to that stage Jimmy had never openly come out and said he opposed the National Front. Misty had just finished their set and I was on the stage reloading film in the camera. I saw Jimmy come through these massive gates and he charged straight to the front of the stage and made this fantastically impassioned speech: ‘I decided in bed last night that I wasn’t gonna come today. But this morning I met this kid who said, “You ain’t doing it ’cos all your fans are National Front.” And I thought, “That’s just what everyone’ll think if I don’t turn up.” WELL, I’M HERE! I’m here because I support Rock Against Racism.’ It was a seminal moment.
KATE WEBB Becoming involved with an organization like RAR some bands would have seen as a betrayal of who they were and their fans. So there was a big rumour about the National Front coming to attack the Carnival.
RED SAUNDERS The NF did a clever thing and organized a march in Brick Lane. We were fucking stuck between two horses and it wasn’t handled well. At the last minute we organized some coaches to counterdemonstrate against them but we also got attacked by other anti-racists; a purely sectarian attack because they didn’t like us and didn’t take into consideration what was going on.
RUTH GREGORY It nearly split the Carnival because people were being encouraged to go and join the march in Brick Lane. They would have loved that if we had called it off.
SYD SHELTON It was a very clever trick because all the militant anti-racists were going to be at Brockwell Park. Jim Nichol managed to organize at short notice some Empress Coaches and we asked for heavyweight volunteers to go down and see off the Front.
DAVID WIDGERY The counterplan was to divert a sizeable section of the march to tackle the Front, but as Paul Holborow put it, ‘We collectively bungled it.’ The transport logistics were not worked out and the antifascists who did attempt to block off the Front were demoralized and easily pushed about by the belligerent police pressure.26
JOHN DENNIS When you organize these events you don’t enjoy them too much on the day. You’re stressed out. We were paranoid about security and who was going to turn up and whether they were going to attack us. We weren’t tooled up but we were ready and there were some fairly heavy characters on our side: ‘OK, let’s get prepared for this. Let’s not ignore what Jimmy’s saying. They’ll know he’s coming.’
ROGER HUDDLE I couldn’t go to the park because we were instructed to stay and protect the SWP print shop, because the National Front had threatened to burn it down. There was all us lot sitting on the roof with baseball bats and binoculars to see if there’s any Nazis coming: complete Toytown stuff. So I missed Brinsley from Aswad holding his newly born baby up in the air. He did that African thing and held the child up to the sun.
BRINSLEY FORDE We got to the park late. We were driving round trying to find how to get in. It was a massive gig. We were playing to an audience that probably for the first time was hearing a live reggae band in the way it should be heard, because normally the PAs were not that fantastic in smaller venues. That was important because it opened up the views of lots of people going, ‘Oh, wow! I like this. Let me find out a little bit more about it.’
RUTH GREGORY Aswad were almost like classical musicians in their professionalism. They were like gods on the musical scene and we were all a bit in awe of them. They made the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. Brinsley said to the crowd during ‘Natural Progression’, ‘This is ire, ire that’s there’s so many people here today.’
BOB HUMM Aswad were the best of all the British reggae bands. They were classy. You had confidence in them you’d be entertained and see something special. You know how you can rely on some people: like watching ice-skating on the television and you know they’re not going to fall over. But I missed it because I was told not to go by the print shop in case I got arrested. I got on the bus and the conductor came along and saw my RAR badge and said, ‘That’s a free pass.’
DAVID WIDGERY Misty were joyous that day, lilting and weaving into the rhythms so evocatively that for a half hour Brockwell Park was transferred to the Jamaican mountains by their open, rural, spiritual magic.
PAUL HOLBOROW On the stage, I was trying to get something done and I brushed past somebody and he said, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ I apologized and said, ‘I’ve got to get on.’ It was Elvis Costello. I didn’t recognize him.
JOHN DENNIS I ended up being in charge of security because nobody else would do it, and his manager Jake Riviera was like, ‘You can’t have any photographers there,’ and ‘Elvis doesn’t want this or that.’
DAVID WIDGERY Elvis Costello and the Attractions bounced on stage saying, ‘Welcome to the Black and White Minstrel Show, ’ow about jumping up and down against racism?’27
BERNIE WILCOX I lost all my mates and Kate Webb was on this stall and I saw this backstage pass. I thought, somebody’s gonna nick that if I don’t first. So I walked in and Jerry Fitzpatrick said, ‘How the fuck did you get in?’ I said, ‘Ah, well.’ Elvis was on and I was watching it from the side and he did ‘(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding’. Nick Lowe, his producer, was just to my left with tears in his eyes.
KATE WEBB Elvis Costello had written quite a lot of anti-fascist songs. He was an obvious person to be asked and he was part of the punk movement. There was a fight backstage and some sort of racial epithet was thrown at some point. The tension was combustible. You have the bands but then all the different people around them: the managers and roadies with their own ideas and ways of doing things.
•
DAVID WIDGERY By the end of the summer, a quarter of a million people had rocked against racism. The fascists didn’t know what had hit them. In London their local elections vote plummeted and in their so-called West Midlands strongholds their vote fell: in Leicester from 70 per cent to 5 per cent, and in Wolverhampton from 11 per cent to 3 per cent.28
RUTH GREGORY By 1979, Rock Against Racism had done 200 gigs and thirteen regional carnivals in places like Edinburgh, Cardiff and Southampton. We didn’t want RAR to be London-centric. By then there were more than sixty local groups around the country. So we came up with the Militant Entertainment tour which went all over the country. Just the fact that something was happening in their local area was enough, but something that was political and giving an anti-racist message was quite incredible really.
ROGER HUDDLE One of the reasons for doing the Militant Entertainment tour was the general election. We finished on the last day of April 1979 and the election was three days later.
JOHN DENNIS We announced the tour just as Eric Clapton came out with another load of crap in Melody Maker: ‘Enoch was the only bloke telling the truth, for the good of the country.’ I responded, ‘The only difference between Powell and the Nazis is that Powell would ask the blacks to go back, and the National Front would tell them.’ It ended up on the front page. Big news!
KATE WEBB The Militant tour was the logical and obvious thing to do next. It was to do with helping and reinforcing and getting to know local groups better. There was so much work involved and we were just a few people in the office.
JOHN DENNIS Three of us organized the tour: Kate, me and Wayne. This was the strategy: if we were going to build an organization that was coherent as a national campaign we had to have a vehicle to pull together all the local RAR groups. Kate had developed this very useful network base of contacts so she became the conduit from the centre, communicating with people by phone or letter. I persuaded Wayne to come in full time and he had the job of going round the country and liaising with all the groups. That gave us the confidence to just throw ourselves into it.
RED SAUNDERS There was a Canadian surrealist called Mimi Parent who did a rhino and underneath it said, ‘Knock hard. Life is deaf.’ I thought, ‘That’s brilliant.’ By then Gered and I shared the Old Chapel Studios in Hampstead. It was a big old church hall and I got John and Wayne and a whole load of students from the Royal College of Art and said, ‘I want a fucking massive backdrop of a pink rhinoceros.’ We got a canvas and projected it up and we painted it in the studio. It was fantastic.
SYD SHELTON The rhinoceros was a huge unstoppable beast and we painted this big backdrop red and blue. ‘Militant’ was a bogey word and we wanted to turn it on its head. The idea was, ‘You’ve come to see us, now we’re coming to see you; the circus has come to town.’ RAR was our life. I was like, ‘I’m going. I’ll drive one of the vans, help put the PA up, take some pictures, whatever.’
DAVID WIDGERY The point of bringing the cultural circus into town was to have the political argument and take the anti-racist message to the parts the other political organizations didn’t reach.29
WAYNE MINTER I hired a little green Mini and travelled round the country sleeping on floors and meeting people for three weeks, charged with finding RAR groups and letting them know about the tour. It kicked off with a big list of bands wanting to do gigs, from Steel Pulse and the Clash right down to the Leyton Buzzards and XS Discharge in Glasgow.
PAUL FURNESS Wayne came up to Leeds for a recce. Whenever we knew that somebody from national RAR was coming it was a bit like, ‘The landlord’s coming round; put your best face on.’ The club was run on a shoestring but we broke even and sold loads of badges. We used to get ratty letters from central RAR demanding money, so we’d bung them a tenner every now and then.
WAYNE MINTER The point was to destroy the support for the National Front before the general election and have a really good time. We ended up with 22 gigs, 33 bands, 100,000 leaflets, 30,000 posters, 20,000 tour badges, 20,000 stickers, 15,000 copies of Temporary Hoarding and 4½ tons of PA and lighting to take around the UK. Each gig had two headliners and then we took on local support bands in each town. The first leg was Cambridge, Leicester and West Runton and we took the Ruts and Misty. The biggest trouble we had was booking everybody into hotels. We’d contact a Trusthouse Forte with a reservation for fifteen people, but two or three of them found out in advance we had Misty and they wouldn’t accept a black band. They’d say, ‘Rather strange names, sir . . .’
RED SAUNDERS In one town we’d called ahead to say, ‘We’ve got a band with us and they have special dietary requirements,’ and the hotel had gone, ‘Yeah, all right.’ We were cooking for twenty-eight people and there was Sinbar, Misty’s cook. He was a magnificent Rastafarian with a big stave and massive locks and full fucking gear. He was like the Angel Gabriel. We were trying to organize the food and there were all these fucking blokes in Seventies’ suits and moustaches and of course the office hadn’t told the kitchen and, as we were explaining, all of this the doors flew open and Sinbar walks in and says, ‘I, Sinbar. I tell chef.’ The guy went, ‘Fucking what? You’re not coming in my fucking kitchen.’
SYD SHELTON Sinbar was six foot eight. He came out of the kitchen with dozens of pots and pans and dreadlocks flowing and he just stood there. All the people turned round and went, ‘What!’ We were killing ourselves laughing. They didn’t know what had hit them; all these dreads from Southall turning up.
RED SAUNDERS One of the best gigs was West Runton Pavilion, right out on the Norfolk coast, miles away from anywhere. I met this guy who was a bus driver and a Transport and General Workers’ Trade Unionist. He goes, ‘I’ll get transport organized for you.’ I don’t know how he did it but he turned up with a double-decker bus and at two in the morning drove all these drunken punks home twenty miles along the coast back to Norwich.
JOHN JENNINGS There was no one there and then suddenly loads of coaches full of punks arrived. It was heaving. We did it with the Gang of Four and Misty and it broke down a lot of barriers. It’s very easy to say, ‘Let’s do it,’ but if more fans are there to see one band than the other . . . but it was very much a thing of unity.
WAYNE MINTER The Ruts were unstoppable. Segs played four numbers lying on his back. It was just dynamite. And then you’d see them sitting at the side of the stage watching Misty’s drummer who’d sit really low behind their kits and play up to the cymbals. The next week Ruffy had adjusted his kit and would be playing reggae paradigms and that hi-hat stuff.
SYD SHELTON West Runton was a long drive but we decided we would do it there and back in a day. There were about five of us and I had Red’s old Commer. On the way we stopped to take a photograph of a sign that said ‘Welcome to Rutland’, and then the Ruts turned up and then suddenly half of Misty, and I took photos of them all. After the gig we ran out of petrol at four in the morning and nobody had any money. It was seven o’clock in the morning when we got home.
JOHN DENNIS Punk was transforming, and all those second-wave punk bands like the Gang of Four, the Au Pairs, Delta 5, and the Mekons were very political: very active, and very supportive.
ANDY GILL Often with these gigs there isn’t that much to report. We would not typically speak out from the stage, but the political content is there because it’s underneath a banner, and people come because they are sympathetic to the cause or they just want to see the band. I remember trying to get the attention of somebody from Misty once and I touched his foot with mine and he went off on one: ‘Touch me with your hand. Don’t touch me with your foot.’
SYD SHELTON I had to share a room with Vince and Smell, the Ruts roadies. I didn’t get a wink of sleep. They’d have farting competitions. It was just ridiculous. And they set off fire extinguishers on stage. They were a bit wild. Red did the MC job and wore a dirty old man’s raincoat with his mutton-chop sideboards and Ray-Bans. When we went to Coventry he’d had a few beers and he’d got a takeaway and then came on stage drunk and was dropping curry down his front. It was hilarious.
RED SAUNDERS These kids started diving off the stage into the audience. I started throwing them: ‘Go on, get off,’ and they loved it. All night long, I was throwing punks off the stage.
JOHN DENNIS We had some kids glue-sniffing and had to physically kick them out. And then at Leicester Polytechnic, Wayne got beaten up by fascists. That was really upsetting.
WAYNE MINTER A load of Front turned up outside and I said, ‘Four or five of us won’t be threatening,’ so we went out and I got smashed in the head and spent the rest of the gig in A & E and had to have stitches.
JOHN DENNIS The big one was when we got to Edinburgh with Stiff Little Fingers. Inflammable Material had gone top twenty so the demand was massive. They were so bloody hot. We could have done five nights.
JAKE BURNS We did the Scottish leg with the Mekons and this massive pink rhinoceros behind us.
RED SAUNDERS Carol Grimes was meant to be on the bill but I had to break it to her that we couldn’t afford to get her and her band up to Scotland.
JAKE BURNS There was a huge fucking blizzard so we couldn’t get to Stirling and ended up doing a second night at Clouds in Edinburgh. Aberdeen was a disaster because the venue was made out of granite, so the acoustics were a nightmare.
WAYNE MINTER Aberdeen was incredible partly because we had to drive a day to get up there and had a puncture. It was a burgeoning oil town, so money was beginning to flow in and the local group had hired us a club that was frequented by American oil men. We didn’t get many people there but it was a storming gig. But the Stiffs got aggro: ‘Fuck off, Paddies.’
BERNIE WILCOX In Manchester we had the Cimarons playing with the Sunsets, who were Shakin’ Stevens’ backing band. There was a sort of Teds-versus-punks thing and we wanted to address that so it was old rock ’n’ roll Fifties-style playing with a reggae band. It went down really well.
KATE WEBB The Angelic Upstarts played Manchester and Liverpool and had a tough following but Aswad kept them in line.
PAUL FURNESS The Angelic Upstarts had this song ‘The Murder Of Liddle Towers’ about a building worker who was killed by the police and when they sang it they kicked a pig’s head into the audience. This punk girl caught it and took it home. I asked her what happened to it and she said the dog got it. After, we had to account for ourselves with the venue owner. He was this West Indian fellow called Lee and he had a cane with a crown on the top of it and a gold tooth and an amazing accent. He was always threatening to boot us out and right at the end he said, ‘. . . and no more pigs’ heads’.
RED SAUNDERS In Wales we arranged to meet the organizers for the last leg of the tour at a motorway station. They said, ‘These are the lads doing the security.’ I was talking to them and suddenly realized one of them had a swastika amongst his badges. ‘Oh shit!’ I thought, ‘I’ve got to confront this. But this guy’s here for Rock Against Racism. He’s obviously not a Nazi.’ I said, ‘Mate, why have you got that badge on?’ He said, ‘It don’t mean nothing. It’s just a biker badge.’ ‘Is there any way you could take it off for me?’ ‘That’s no problem.’
WAYNE MINTER Llanelli was incredible. It’s a little town right out past Cardiff in West Wales. They had this beautiful venue, the Glen Ballroom, with fountains and palm trees. We had Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets but they had a lot of support from racists. About an hour before the gig all these motorbikes roared into town from the valleys. They got off and said, ‘We’re here to stop the fascists.’ They all went in and rocked away to Shakin’ Stevens, who made anti-racist comments on stage. It was a storming gig.
KATE WEBB There were miners in the audience. I was brought to tears by the jam at the end; bringing all these people together. It seemed an incredible thing that we’d come there and done that.
WAYNE MINTER After, the local Socialist Workers Party person arranged for an Indian to stay open because his brother made naan bread for the restaurant. We all went down there and got pissed till three o’clock in the morning. It was a stunning tour but we’d just about had it by then and we ran out of steam a little. We did Exeter and Plymouth with John Cooper Clarke and the UK Subs and then we got back and started organizing for the finale at Alexandra Palace.
RUTH GREGORY Alexandra Palace is a massive place and it was completely full. I’d never been there before and it just seemed incredible perched on top of this hill in North London. And the fact that’s where the first BBC TV went out. The atmosphere was just electric. I remember Alex Harvey – of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band – doing ‘Small Axe’, which is one of my favourite Bob Marley songs: If you are a big tree we are a small axe sharpened to cut you down.
JAKE BURNS We had the idea to put together a version of the Tom Robinson Band. Tony James from Generation X played bass and I played second guitar and sang on a few songs. We were sharing a dressing room with Aswad and suddenly Alex Harvey appeared: one of my all-time heroes. Alex was saying he wanted to play and did we know ‘Small Axe’. We’d been rehearsing for a week and nobody knew it. I said, ‘I know it. It’s dead easy. Three chords.’ So we ran through it. Tom said, ‘OK, I’ve got it.’ Then Alex said, ‘All right, I need a guitar.’ As an act of generosity, I said, ‘Take mine.’ He looked at me and said, ‘You’re the one that taught us the song, son.’
So I missed my chance to play with him, but later I went on and we did ‘Johnny Was’ and just before the solo I hit the guitar and managed to break three strings in one go so I had to bum it on one string.
RUTH GREGORY We had our own staff to man the gig and we had to search people for weapons when they came in the doors.
WAYNE MINTER In the early days, we just made sure we had enough people there to keep them out. Then we started thinking, ‘Nobody’s been seriously hurt. We’ll let them in and handle them in the gig. They’ll see how much bloody fun it is and feel excluded and go away and resign from the Front.’
RED SAUNDERS As RAR grew it attracted different elements, so you’d have people who were street fighters and who would know the enemy. The Anti-Fascist League would go, ‘That crew there, Red. The tall one. He’s East London NF. He’s a bit of a geezer. We’ll have to deal with him.’ I wouldn’t have a fucking clue who they were, but generally most people would get in.
CHRIS BOLTON They had a wonderful security system there by which as people came in they were taken one way, searched properly, and then interrogated. They vetted the Nazis. It was like having Simon Wiesenthal there in a fucking office, saying, ‘Come in.’
WAYNE MINTER There were three or four bands that attracted the NF because of the nature of their music and they’d interpreted the lyrics in ways that might be racist. Our job was to counter that with all the propaganda in Temporary Hoarding. Also the bands had a responsibility and we’d tell them that. We wouldn’t accept bands who wouldn’t actually take that responsibility on stage. But at Alexandra Palace we were worried about security and the Front turning up because the event was publicized all over London. I don’t think they came in the end. But what a line-up: Aswad, John Cooper Clarke, the Ruts, Alex Harvey, the Leyton Buzzards; whenever we couldn’t get another band within fifty miles of London we’d say, ‘Ring the Buzzards’, and they’d pile off and do it so we put them on as a thank you.
JOHN JENNINGS Malcolm went on with muslin round his head. He just found it and was mucking about doing some sort of burka thing.
JOHN DENNIS The Ruts were great but the venue was such a nightmare. We had all these conversations about acoustics. In the end it was like, ‘Fucking turn it up: beat the echo with volume.’ It didn’t work. It was just a fucking row.
BRINSLEY FORDE The Palace was so big, so when we were trying to use our echoes and stuff it was crazy and all over the place. I heard John Cooper Clarke for the first time that day, ‘Oh! He’s a poet.’
KATE WEBB Spoken word was part of the scene. It wasn’t unusual to mix up music with other forms.
JOHN BAINE When I saw Joe Strummer I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Then when I saw John Cooper Clarke I realized that the best way to do it was with poetry. He was bleakly political rather than directly confrontational but there was definitely the perspective of a working-class bloke from Salford talking about his life: Keith Joseph smiles and a baby dies in Beasley Street. That was brilliant.
BERNIE WILCOX I was going to this folk club in Manchester and Clarkey would get up and read poems, y’know, Never seen a nipple in the Daily Express, with blond hair tied back in a ponytail, like a hippy. I next saw him at a punk gig and he’d got this Blonde on Blonde Dylan-type hair.
WAYNE MINTER John Cooper Clarke had a broken arm in a sling. We had a lot of trouble finding him. He was wandering round the back somewhere, out of it. I thought, ‘We’ll never get him on stage.’ He was sort of wheeled out and this woman who was looking after him propped him up on stage and he went CLICK! I was in a shithouse in Salford, straight into it. He didn’t stop for half an hour and the punks loved him: just the look of him. He was so thin and he had a great sharp suit and winkle-pickers and the black shades and the hair.
LUCY WHITMAN There was this big banner across the whole stage, ‘Hello, it’s all yer Alien Kulture.’ It was just after Thatcher had made her speech about people feeling ‘swamped by an alien culture’. And there were stalls around the outside and a lot of misogynist stuff against Thatcher, like an image of her being hanged. It was a good example of where people who thought themselves to be progressive didn’t have any qualms about portraying her as a witch. I wrote a piece about it in Temporary Hoarding: ‘We must challenge her not because she’s a woman but because of her policies.’ The concert was a little bit like the Carnivals: you weren’t concentrating on the music, you were drinking in the atmosphere.
RED SAUNDERS We didn’t do too much sloganizing on stage. I said, ‘Let’s just do our politics projecting slides round the room.’ We put linen up on the walls and projected the Queen with ‘sponger’ written across her face, or Martin Webster with shit on him. I had these overalls that I wore that we stencilled with all our slogans: ‘Love Music Hate Racism.’
ROGER HUDDLE The left before RAR was so amateurish. I used to do a DJ for the Trades Council where there was only strip lighting because it was in council premises. And Red did a gig where they had to put money into the meter to feed the PA. It was so Mickey Mouse. Our attitude was, we had to use sound and lighting and colour properly. You look at the Italian Communist Party in the sixties on their demonstrations: the flags; the whole cultural colour manifestation.
WAYNE MINTER We had some ambitious audio-visual there and hung sheets down from the ceiling and projected all this stuff. And we projected our Nazis Are No Fun film. But I have a suspicion we still owe Haringey Council for the hire of the venue!
KATE WEBB After everybody was gone the floor was strewn with stuff. The DIY ethos was fun but there was also the cleaning up. And we were in big debt from the tour.
JOHN DENNIS The coverage we got was huge. Everybody sat up and said, ‘Fuck. They’ve pulled this off.’
KATE WEBB That week the Labour Party put a full-page advert in Sounds and NME: ‘Don’t just rock against racism . . . Vote against it. Vote Labour.’ Red was furious and wrote to NME:
Rock Hard – Politicians are Deaf
Rock Against Racism is a little miffed that the Labour Party should suddenly leap on its already strained back with full-page adverts in the music press . . . ‘Don’t just rock against racism . . .’ Don’t just what? We’ve just rhinoed around the country, arguing, and playing our unmistakable anti-racist message and it’s left us knackered. And seven grand in debt. We weren’t voted in. We grew up because we were necessary. Necessary because of growing racism and fascism under a Labour government which was looking the other way so fast that its neck is still stiff. You don’t fight against racism or control your own lives by putting a cross on a piece of paper – that’s copping out. You stand up, speak out, and Rock Against it. OK, it seems like most of us will be putting our shaky little crosses in Labour’s box on May 4th. Rock Against Thatcher – we mean it! But no illusions. We’re looking forward to seeing Labour start to really Rock Against Racism – ending the racist immigration laws, abolishing Sus etc. Are you listening?
NEIL SPENCER Red led an invasion of our office and they made a lot of fucking noise and shouted and paraded around and pissed everybody off and stopped us doing our work and had to be kicked out.
RED SAUNDERS We were cross the music papers had printed it and people were saying, ‘We’ve got to do something,’ so I said, ‘All right, I’ll meet you all in Carnaby Street,’ and then we stormed the NME office and kicked up a fuss. I think we ended up in the pub arguing.
