PAUL HOLBOROW A week before the ’79 general election the Nazis booked Southall Town Hall and planned to march. The Home Secretary, Mervin Reece, had allowed the National Front to hold election meetings in town halls across England. It was a gross provocation in an Asian area so we called for a massive demonstration. And it was huge. But the police, in defending the status quo, behaved in an utterly disproportionate way and they attacked the demonstration to clear the way for the Nazis. And in trying to disperse the crowd a teacher, Blair Peach, got a fatal blow in the side of his head.
KATE WEBB Five years earlier Idi Amin had ordered the expulsion of his country’s Asian minority and the United Kingdom accepted 27,200 refugees. Southall already had an Asian population numbering almost 18,000 who had come to work in the area during the fifties and sixties. The Borough of Ealing informed the Home Office that an influx of any more Asians would cause serious difficulties, but these were families with British passports who naturally would want to be in their own communities.
JUNIOR GISCOMBE We were hearing that Idi Amin would cut people’s heads off and eat it. All this stupidness, but being beloved Britain it was, ‘We don’t want them. They’ve come to take our jobs.’ Ted Heath’s government was saying, ‘Put your money into our country and you can bring your families over.’ So here’s all these people coming over and everybody’s going, ‘What the hell’s going on?’
RUTH GREGORY The Asian population was targeted. But where black people would fight back, the Asian community was set apart because they hadn’t been here that long. I went to an all-girls’ grammar school and all the black kids went to the secondary modern down the road. I was really friendly with this one girl who was Asian. It was at the time that they all got thrown out of Kenya. But I didn’t know any of that then. We just thought she was a bit weird because she oiled her hair. We had this discussion about the riots in Notting Hill and a friend started talking about black people and how they should all go home. I was so angry with her. She wasn’t my friend after that.
JOHN JENNINGS You go either way when you’re young. For a young white kid it only takes a couple of West Indian people to become friends with you and your whole outlook changes: ‘Oh, this is cool.’ But in the first skinhead days when I was fourteen, fifteen, listening to Prince Buster, I couldn’t quite understand when the skinheads went out Paki-bashing. They didn’t even know where the kids were from. That was an insult in itself.
DAVE RUFFY I heard the term ‘Paki-bashing’ when I was about fourteen from the West Indian immigrants. I know it’s true because I’ve spoken to some of my spars from back in the day and they’ve said, ‘Yeah, there were some boys who did that.’ They saw shopkeepers maybe doing a bit better than some of them, and then of course the skinheads go, ‘Yeah, fuck . . . let’s do it.’ It was the same as it ever was because young men are full of testosterone and easy to manipulate. Ignorance is ignorance and it ain’t exclusive to any race. It’s about people uniting together for a common cause against stupidity. We played with black groups and we had black people in our firm. But also there’d be black people in the NF groups of skinheads: ‘Oh, he’s all right because he’s with us.’ I met a grown-up, a successful chap, who said, ‘I came down from Scotland and I was a little Paki-hater. I met you guys and I saw that you had people around you and it completely changed my life because I didn’t know fuck all.’ You can only make judgements on what you experience. Another guy, he was an adopted black kid from Sunderland who suffered from depression, he said, ‘I heard “In A Rut” on John Peel. I was just about to give up and that record saved my bacon.’
JOHN JENNINGS I remember him. He said, ‘I really wanted to meet you because for a white band to be on label called People Unite: a black people’s label . . .’ He said, ‘I started to meet people that had similar thinking to myself and we thought, “Fuck, we’re going to fight back,” instead of being kicked down and abused.’
ROGER HUDDLE We were never able to build the bridges between Rock Against Racism and the Asian community. There wasn’t Asian youth music in the same way as reggae came out of black youth, because it was much more difficult for them to break from their community leaders.
RUTH GREGORY: It has been asserted that RAR was racist towards Asian people. It’s a bit silly when you look at the history of it. ‘Black’, to us, meant ‘not-white’. A lot of Asian people came to the gigs. Alien Kulture did lots of gigs. They were like an Asian punk band.
JOHN BAINE Alien Kulture were a punk band from Paddington. They had songs like ‘Asian Youth’ and ‘Culture Crossover’, which had the chorus, first generation, illegal immigrants / Second generation juvenile delinquents, and then ended, I want to play my records . . . I want to read my NME. They weren’t technically very good but they were the only band from that scene. There was a Pakistani punk who had ‘Zaki the Paki’ on the back of his leather jacket.
DAVE RUFFY A lot of the girls would have to sneak out to come to the gigs because they came from very strict families and they weren’t meant to be out in male company. This was Rock Against Racism in action, for me, because it was youth from different cultures going out. It was a natural part of the punk ethic. It was about liberation and freedom to do what you really want to do.
JOHN JENNINGS The headline in NME was ‘Pogoing Pakistanis’. They weren’t from Pakistan at all but it was amazing for us to see these Asian girls who used to come to the gigs. We used to look after them and make sure they got home. It was the closest you get to community within music.
DAVE RUFFY The girls said they felt safe because there was a little community of fans and they’d look out for each other: ‘Hello, come in . . .’
CHRIS BOLTON No one noticed where people were coming from. That was the beautiful thing. You didn’t think, ‘Oh, there’s an Asian punk.’ It wasn’t seen that way. People were people. Everyone was on the same level. You left all those prejudices behind for that moment. Imagine the spiritual uplifting that would give to people. That’s why RAR was a very important part of musical history.
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KATE WEBB Tensions in Southall had been growing since Gurdip Singh Chaggar had been stabbed to death in June 1976 by a white gang of alleged racists. Galvanized by police and community leaders’ apathy, the Southall Youth Movement was formed ‘to give a voice to the aspirations and concerns of young people in Southall’ and ‘to fight and challenge racial discrimination, racism, and demand justice and equality’. On St George’s Day in April 1979, 3,000 protesters gathered outside Southall Town Hall, where the National Front had been bussed in to hold their meeting. The planned protest was to be peaceful but with the presence of over 2,500 police it soon became violent and more than forty people, including twenty-one police officers, were injured, and 300 people were arrested.
CHRIS BOLTON We knew the Southall Riot was going to happen because in the preceding weeks there’d been conflicts with the National Front marching in South London and Leicester, so we had decided to make the People Unite a medical hub in the forlorn hope that the police would respect the Red Cross. We were out of the country and we came back two days before the march. We’d left local community people running the project and there were faces I didn’t know in the house. I checked down in the basement and I saw this crate of Molotov cocktails. I said, ‘What the fuck is that doing there?’ ‘Oh, we made them with these guys last night.’ ‘Where are these guys now?’ ‘Upstairs.’ I emptied all the petrol out, smashed all the bottles, put them in a bag and then went upstairs to the main room and said, ‘I’m having a preventions check of everyone in this room. I want to know who you are and where you’re coming from.’ I put someone on the door and said, ‘Watch anyone who comes out.’ You could see these two guys starting to sort of back away. I thought, ‘There they are.’ They went downstairs and I followed them and they ran round to the police station: straight through the main door.
DAVE RUFFY Southall was multicultural. There wasn’t any trouble but it was always seen as a threat by the authorities. It was a whitewash. The police did exactly what they wanted.
CHRIS BOLTON On the day of the march there were thousands of police surrounding the place, all parked up in coaches. You couldn’t get into Southall because they had one outside barrier and another internal one around the town hall from the park up to the station. On that day murder was committed, not by the Metropolitan Police but by some anonymous force: a blacks ops thing of soldiers who didn’t wear any numbers. If you understand you’re in a trap, sometimes there’s not a lot you can do. We had ensured in publicity that this was to be a peaceful protest. Misty’s manager, Clarence, could be seen with a megaphone: ‘No violence. This is peaceful.’ There were women and children there. You don’t go in for a pitched battle with kids on the street. We knew this was a provocation because we’d seen exactly the same thing in Lewisham two years before. The National Front were ferried in and started taunting people.
WILLIAM SIMON Southall was locked down. People trying to go home from work ended up in police stations. I ran into the house and there’s some footage with a flare coming over. Everyone at the time thought it came from the house at Park View. It did not. It came from the back: near to the police station. It was at that point that they stormed the house.
CHRIS BOLTON We had made all these false phone calls saying we were going to assemble at Southall Park and suddenly we saw all these police vans pull up there so we knew they were listening to us. Then our phones were cut. I tried to get back to People Unite to warn them that they were coming but they had a whole snatch squad after me. I managed to drag them into the middle of the road and then they beat me up and dragged me around and I ended up in an SPG van. I could have well have been with the people that killed Blair Peach because they were just driving round, pulling up, jumping out, whack, whack, whack. And they were all armed with coshes. No numbers. I think it was because I was white and I was bleeding a lot, they said, ‘He’s had enough,’ and threw me to the floor. I was well fucked up. I was pissing blood for about three days and had kidney trouble after. That day they fractured so many skulls.
SYD SHELTON The police turned everybody out of People Unite and as they came out the door they ran a gauntlet of batons and the police beat the shit out of them. They smashed Clarence’s skull. He had a blood clot on the brain and was in intensive care for a week. We were told it was touch and go. That photograph of John Sturrock’s on the front of Temporary Hoarding, with the police – and the bolts in the head, which we added – throwing the man into the gutter, tells you a whole story about Southall irrespective of reading a single word.
CHRIS BOLTON The police were looking for payback for the Notting Hill Carnival riot. They were shouting, ‘You’re the bastards from Ladbroke Grove.’ A lot of us got beaten badly and Clarence was repeatedly hit round the head. We ended up in Vauxhall police station and they brought Clarence out to take him for interrogation and put him on the seat and he flopped out. He was unconscious. I thought, ‘They’re gonna fuck me as well,’ so I made out to be more dead than I was. They took me in there and I saw this mixed-race fat copper there and another one. I saw them as Gestapo and I ran at the first one and squashed him with a table. He nearly popped. It was so nice. They didn’t ask me any questions and they beat me again. Clarence was in a bad way and was bleeding. They left him in the cell with me. Then they let me out and took him somewhere else. I was in a very bloody, torn state. I didn’t have any money. I walked to Vauxhall Tube station and told the guard I’d been in Southall and he let me on the Tube. My family thought I was dead.
DAVE RUFFY Vernon, Misty’s keyboard player, went down for two years on a trumped-up charge of rioting and assault and never came back to music. They really fucked him up.
CHRIS BOLTON Clarence suffered a subdural haematoma and ended up in Central Middlesex neurological unit. He was in a coma for ten days or so. And that’s when the people at Rough Trade were wonderful and got in a very good neurologist. People Unite was completely fucked. The SPG ruthlessly and needlessly damaged and destroyed £20,000 worth of sound and medical equipment. They wantonly destroyed records and other property, all of which was vital to the functioning of the Musicians’ Co-op, including Misty In Roots. Not only did they destroy our premises and our studio – they’d methodically poured battery acid over the mixing desk mixers – they destroyed our people; some people never played music after that.
TIM WELLS I saw the police as a part of the problem. Anti-fascism was approached as a policing problem. How many people were being killed in police stations? Who killed Blair Peach? What side was the law on?
COLIN BARKER My nephew, who was seven, was in primary school in Bristol and they had an officer come to explain to them how policemen are your friends. Young Garrick puts his hand up and says, ‘But I don’t understand. Why did you kill Blair Peach?’
JOHN JENNINGS The SPG thought they could do anything. Thirty-six barristers wrote a letter saying there’d been a miscarriage of justice in Southall. It was a complete travesty.
JOHN DENNIS Being down there every day was very immersive: sitting in court, and Blair Peach’s wife was there. There was a big deal around the coroner’s report and whether it was murder. We were all going, ‘This is very serious shit.’ A comrade had been killed; Clarence was nearly killed; People Unite had been trashed; Thatcher got elected with the largest electoral swing from Labour to the Conservative Party since the war; and the NF had been smashed, losing the deposit on all of their 303 candidates. We’d won the battle but lost the war. We were in collective shock.
RED SAUNDERS How did the Met get away with that murder? The downright lies. It was so utterly depressing.
DENNIS BOVELL When Linton recorded ‘Reggae Fi Peach’ I remember saying to him, ‘What’s Blair Peach got to do with this?’ He said, ‘Well, he was from New Zealand. He was a schoolteacher. It should be documented that that man lost his life in a struggle that he could well have not bothered himself. We should never forget that.’ When I heard the lyrics I said, ‘Linton, they’re going to lock you up.’ I really feared for him because he was accusing the paramilitary arm of the British police force of murder.
LINTON KWESI JOHNSON The police killed Blair Peach. I’m not accusing them of nothing. They did. It’s not, ‘Linton Kwesi Johnson says the police killed Blair Peach.’ The police killed Blair Peach. ‘Reggae Fi Peach’ was basically expressing the fact that a lot of people in the black and Asian communities were moved by the killing. It was an expression of solidarity with the family and comrades of Blair Peach because he was an important activist in the struggle against racism and fascism. Yes, he was a Trotskyite but ideology wasn’t a consideration. Blair Peach could easily have been a black or Asian man.
JOHN JENNINGS Whereas Linton recorded They killed Blair Peach the teacher, we wrote ‘Jah War’ about Clarence Baker: He got whacked over the head with a truncheon. And Malcolm wrote those brilliant lyrics. But most of the reviews were god-awful. They couldn’t deal with white blokes trying to be black. There was one from Julie Burchill: ‘Obviously, they’ve never been near this genre of music except listening to “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais”’.
DAVE RUFFY I thought, ‘You’ve no fucking idea.’ They accused us of being like Black and White Minstrels for doing reggae; it was a story about our friend who got fucking brain damage. We used to jam with Misty so we learnt how to do a lot of the roots. It wasn’t like, ‘We know how to play reggae.’ It’s really hard. When we jammed I was like, ‘Don’t take it for granted. Try and keep it fresh. Stay on top of it.’ We just did it the best we could, with enormous respect.
CHRIS BOLTON Malcolm was married to Rocky, who was originally from Antigua and one of the only black people in Hayes. She was his childhood sweetheart. It must have been one of the most influential driving forces in his life to experience racism first hand with someone he loved. Rocky sings on ‘Jah War’ with Poko and Bertie from Misty. I was married to a girl from Dominica and we had mixed-race children. My wife was taking my son, who was nine months old at the time, to the doctor’s, and on the way a car pulled over and attacked them with baseball bats. It nearly broke her heart. When you’re in a relationship like that you get hit by traffic going both ways because there’s also black people saying, ‘What are you doing with my sister?’ Southall was a hotspot of people coming in and attacking people.
DAVE RUFFY We had two black roadies, Mannah and Stacey. They were being pulled over all the time. We weren’t getting pulled because we were white and we had short hair and dressed sharp. The cops only pulled you over if you had long hair. They could pull you over for no reason except suspicion.
CHRIS BOLTON During this period, the Ruts had their first major hit with ‘Babylon’s Burning’. Malcolm was trying to explain the tremendous anxiety of the collapse of this system: this Babylon, this Roman Empire, this terrible system of oppression which is destroying the world as we see it right before our very eyes. You’ll burn in the street / You’ll burn in your houses with anxiety. It was a very revolutionary song, and referring to ‘Babylon’ put it to the reggae core.
GEOFF BROWN The same day as the Southall Riot, the National Front also called a demonstration in Leamington Spa. But then they arranged with the police to move the demonstration, so we spent the day trying to find them. We found them near Nuneaton. The police stopped us as we got to the outskirts of the town so we headed off on foot with no real idea of where we were going. We got to an inner ring road and suddenly there comes a coach full of Nazis and they see us. They were bragging and laughing at us through the windows. At which point, out of the pockets of about twenty people came rocks and half-bricks and whatever. The coach and the coach that followed it got all the left-side windows smashed. It was a wonderful moment. The Nazis were all cowering. But then we came home and heard of the death of Blair Peach.
PAUL HOLBOROW After the autopsy Blair lay in state at the Dominion Cinema overnight with a guard from the Asian youth. Ten thousand people turned out to accompany his coffin, which went very slowly through Southall and then on to Phoenix School in East London where he taught and where there was another 10,000 people. I spoke at the cemetery, as did Neil Kinnock; Ken Gill, the president of the TUC; and Tony Cliff for the SWP.
JOHN DENNIS Pete Townshend had been mentoring Misty and supporting them through this period and said he wanted to do a benefit. And then I got a call from Joe Strummer out of the blue. He was slightly drunk and was saying, ‘The punks are all falling apart. I want to put a gig together with all the big names in punk and record it for an LP to sell to support RAR. Can you book Hyde Park?’ That’s how the Southall Kids Are Innocent benefit gig came together, and later the idea for an RAR’s Greatest Hits record.
SYD SHELTON We hired the Rainbow in Finsbury Park for two nights and booked the Pop Group, the Ruts, the Clash, Misty, Aswad, Bongo Danny and the Enchanters, and the Members to raise money for all the legal fees for all those arrested in Southall and to buy new gear for People Unite. We approached Pete [Townshend] for the PA. He said, ‘I’ll play as long as there’s a bottle of Rémy Martin in the dressing room.’
JOHN DENNIS I was such a stingy man, I thought, ‘What! Rémy Martin, £20 a bottle! You can’t be serious.’ The real idiot came out in me so I don’t think he got it. To get the Clash we went to see them somewhere south of the river and somebody suggested we had a game of football. It was in the middle of the summer so everybody was wearing light shoes, but Strummer was wearing fucking motorcycle boots and kicking the shit out of us. We still beat them 4–0. They were going through that period with Bernie Rhodes and maybe not having a manager, so sometime after I went to see them again in a pub in Soho. I was chatting with Mick Jones and about two hours later Strummer turned up, totally pissed off: ‘Who the fuck are you?’ Mick was going, ‘No, Joe. He’s fine.’ Then Simonon turned up. He was such a cool-looking guy but he was bored. He had this little penknife which he started throwing at the door and it wouldn’t stick. It was such a naff thing to do.
RED SAUNDERS There was talk that Townshend was going to bring Clapton. I was, ‘Fuck me! How on earth are we going to deal with this?’ I was going to be a right old hack and go, ‘Unless we have a clear written apology you ain’t coming, mate,’ but it never happened.
WAYNE MINTER The Rainbow was a beautiful art nouveau cinema – it’s now a Pentecostal church, which is ironic – and Pete paid £2,750 for us to take all the seats out. That was the first time that had been done. We expected trouble so we had the Southall Youth Movement, who were highly trained in martial arts, patrolling the outside of the building, and women in RAR T-shirts policing inside.
BRINSLEY FORDE I had seen Bob Marley perform at the Rainbow. We couldn’t get in and so a lot of people pushed through the door. It was a great memory because it was the gig they filmed for Bob Marley Live at the Rainbow, so having the opportunity to perform there was like, ‘Wow! I’m at the Rainbow.’
WILLIAM SIMON It was a brilliant gig. They came to see Pete and they were handing him roses at the stage door. Music is like a smile and everyone knows what a smile means. No matter what language you speak, everyone can relate to a musical smile. If people are smiling they’re not going to be firing guns. It brought people together.
CHRIS BOLTON I was still trying to formulate what to do, what’s got to be done; thinking of people who were in prison like Vernon, and Clarence who was still not well. But it was wonderful that people came forward to support us. It was a monumental gig and helped us keep going.
JOHN DENNIS The Enchanters were a bit of a pain because they were part of the People Unite Musicians’ Cooperative and thought they should headline the gig. There was a big argument about that. ‘This is about us. We should headline the gig.’ One of Misty said, ‘Fuck off. You’re not headlining this.’ And they shut up.
WAYNE MINTER It went like a dream. I was in the projection box. The Pop Group were quite unusual, quite strange: arty, powerful jazz sound, very radical. And Pete Townshend played solo with an acoustic guitar doing blues, with Peter Hope-Evans playing some great harmonica, John ‘Rabbit’ Bundrick behind the keyboards, Tony Butler on bass and Kenney Jones on drums.
LUCY WHITMAN It was important to have bands that were cool, which didn’t necessarily mean bands in the charts.
KATE WEBB This was all part of the move into whether or not we were becoming more mainstream. We could have put on bigger bands earlier on but that wasn’t what RAR was about. It was like the Clash sang: No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977. It was cultural cleansing: rejecting the past to say, ‘We are about now.’
JOHN DENNIS The Clash were fantastic but punk was moving on – tellingly, their expenses for the night were £230 compared to Aswad and the Ruts, who got £60 – and the audience was the blue-jean jacket brigade. It wasn’t the RAR audience that we knew. That began the conversation that we were having internally about the genre thing.
RED SAUNDERS The solidarity, the enthusiasm, the buzz: it was of those young people. It was their music, their three-chord stuff, their lyrics. These were extraordinary times. Members of the Clash and Steel Pulse had demonstrated outside the NF headquarters in South London with placards. You weren’t going to get Paul McCartney on the fucking picket line at Southall, d’you know what I mean? RAR was about the culture and energy of that moment. We were dedicated to the spirit of the time. It was a short window of punk and reggae. It was our policy to have black bands playing with white bands because we had black cultural friends, musicians, actors. It was so important not to use superstars – it would have diluted it – because we were so rolled up in punk and the whole working-class piss-take of punk and the beauty of God bless her fascist regime and all that stuff.
