JOHN DENNIS RAR got bigger than anyone ever expected, with a level of responsibility for making it work and moving on. Red had put a lot of time and energy into the first Carnival and he was knackered. Roger was knackered. After a few meetings I got really pissed off – I was working as a play leader. I’d done a master’s degree – I said, ‘Enough of this. I’ll come in and work full-time.’ A deal was done with the Anti-Nazi League to pay me £30 a week to work on the second Carnival with Jerry Fitzpatrick.
RED SAUNDERS There was too much shit piling up and we were all part-timers. John was a brilliant organizer, very patient guy, but quite opposite to a lot of us. He came into the office with Wayne and joined Kate. And that was phase two of RAR with a new group of younger people. I was like, ‘Hallelujah.’
KATE WEBB We hired a small office at 265a Seven Sisters Road in Finsbury Park, above the Socialist Workers Bookshop. It was cold and had a horrible stinky gas heater. We didn’t have a lot of money and the room was chaotic. It was kind of like a half-slum but underneath the mess there was quite a lot of organization. There were badges, leaflets, T-shirts, and all these things had to be organized, designed, made, ordered, brought in, shipped out. Then there was all the stuff about organizing any gig: book the hall, persuade people that you were credible. People were constantly coming in and out and dumping their stuff.
WAYNE MINTER We would sit in there pumping out all this stuff, being paid a meagre amount a week but enough to be off the dole. It was nearly all phone calls and postcards and people saying, ‘We want to put on a gig.’ It was basically, ‘Just go and do it yourself: hire a local hall, sort out a music licence, find bands . . . blah, blah, blah.’ We had a huge list of bands, some absolute troupers, who would go and play anywhere for Rock Against Racism.
KATE WEBB Increasingly people just took the name of Rock Against Racism. Brent Council was run by Harriet Harman’s husband Jack Dromey and they just thought, ‘Let’s put on a Carnival. They’ve done it in Victoria Park. The kids come along. It makes a nice anti-racist atmosphere and it brings the community together.’ There was a band, I think it was Ultravox or maybe Another Pretty Face, and I realized they were pumping applause through the PA system. It said a lot about where pop music was heading, and was the antithesis of what RAR was about. There were small carnivals like that all over the place. It then became a question: how do we control what people are doing in RAR’s name?
DAVE RUFFY We all got a little bit tired of the slogans at every gig: ‘Anti-vegans’, ‘Anti-hunting’, ‘Battered Wives Against the Nazis.’. There were so many people hanging onto your show: ‘Can we put this up? Can we put that up?’ ‘Yeah, but we’re trying to do a show for the people here.’
JOHN JENNINGS If you’ve got a bill: the Ruts, Misty In Roots, and the Rasta drummers, it’s pretty obvious it’s black and white. In the end we said, ‘D’you know what? Let’s just do some gigs.’ There was equal billing and then we’d jam at the end but the essence of Rock Against Racism was still there. You didn’t need a banner. Like everything, RAR had its time.
SYD SHELTON Thatcher getting in, in May, had been an absolute disaster. That was the beginning of the end of Rock Against Racism. Red wrote, ‘Suddenly there was a frightening new set of cherries come up on the great fruit machine of life . . . now the real gangsters have come . . .’
RED SAUNDERS Then you’re taking on the Tory Party and the government. I mean, fucking hell. It was a different question. It was another campaign. And Thatcher represented everything that we were against. I wrote, ‘Get out your dancing shoes, get your glad rags on, turn that volume right up loud, tell them RAR’s coming; we’re gonna blow this fucking lot right out of town. Rinse out the Blue Scum.’
TOM ROBINSON The National Front had been trounced at the general election and destroyed as a political force, but we couldn’t have carried on as we were. If Callaghan had got another term I don’t think the world would have become a better place as a result.
ROGER HUDDLE Thatcher won, not because people supported her but because they were disillusioned with Labour. Remember the poster campaign ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ with a long queue of unemployed people outside the dole office.
RED SAUNDERS There’s a long discussion about Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League and Thatcher and the National Front decline. You can see the National Front were already well on the decline before Thatcher had started her ‘alien culture’ speech. She was clever. And Norman Tebbit’s cricket analysis: which team would you back if you were black – the West Indies or England?
DAVID WIDGERY Margaret Thatcher caught the mood perfectly by accosting a black mother in the streets of South London and inquiring querulously, ‘Now, which part of Africa do you come from?’ ‘Tooting,’ she was told.30
JOHN DENNIS The racists didn’t vote for the National Front, they voted for Thatcher. They weren’t going to be Nazi but they were going to be Tory. How right-wing Thatcher was going to be nobody really knew.
PETER HAIN You could feel the National Front receding as we dominated the scene. They were becoming demoralized and you could feel their confidence draining away. They weren’t able to march. They weren’t able to organize. And that disillusioned group of working-class youngsters found another identity under RAR and the ANL. I later sued Martin Webster for libel and he admitted in the court case that the Anti-Nazi League had been responsible for shutting down the National Front. He said, ‘Wherever we were the ANL was. Whatever numbers we had, they had more, and that destroyed us, both in physical opposition and through propaganda.’
RED SAUNDERS Webster said, ‘Whenever we did anything these red thugs were there. They disrupted us, they messed us up, they broke our cars, they smashed our vans, we’d try to have a peaceful British march and they’d be there demonstrating.’ The reason that we took off was that most of what you would call the RAR crew in the early days were people who were all like me: products of the Sixties. So they’d been through counterculture, the underground, political activity; they’d had some experience in all these areas, so they weren’t completely naive about the daunting task of maybe trying to change the world in a tiny way by stopping the rise of fascism amongst youth with the power of music. Our job was to strip the Union Jack to reveal the swastika, and the NF was defeated.
KATE WEBB After the Tory victory we did a leaflet which quoted the Clash lyric, What are we gonna do now? and asked local groups for their opinions, which we discussed at the national conference in Birmingham. Two things that came out of that were the Dance And Defend tour and Rock Against Thatcher.
JOHN DENNIS Dance and Defend was a pet project of Wayne’s in September ’79 after the Southall Kids Are Innocent benefit gig.
WAYNE MINTER As a response to the police riots, not only in Southall, but also in Leicester and West Bromwich, twenty-plus small-scale gigs took place with bands like Scritti Politti, Delta 5, the Mekons, Misty, Gang of Four and the Au Pairs to draw attention and raise money for the defence campaigns where eighty-seven people had been charged and four jailed. And then Kate organized Rock Against Thatcher.
KATE WEBB Rock Against Thatcher was a fresh initiative trying to get local groups to do gigs under a new regional framework. We strung a few gigs together and called it a tour. The Jam did one and I did UB40 at the Ritzy in Brixton. It was setting out the new mood abroad in the country. And asking what kind of figure Thatcher was: that she was something new, a grocer’s daughter, and not like the old patrician Tories. It was about RAR shifting gears and moving into the new decade.
RED SAUNDERS All through this I was still working as a freelance photographer, and the Sunday Times commissioned me to do a photo story about Richard Branson. I spent several days with him doing ‘Richard Branson learning to fly’, ‘Richard Branson cooking in the Manor House’, ‘Richard Branson’s houseboat’. We became quite friendly but Richard would say, ‘You’re really exaggerating about racism, Red.’ So I gave him books and I’d talk for a long time about racist attacks in Tower Hamlets. To cut a long story short, he got sympathetic and said, ‘I’ll do an RAR album on Virgin.’
SYD SHELTON We went to see Simon Draper at Virgin who ran the office in Notting Hill Gate: Branson’s number two. We were talking about the RAR record and how we wanted it to be celebratory. He was pointing out snags and problems with distribution and suddenly said, ‘The nigger in the woodpile on this one is . . .’ I said, ‘What? What did you just say?’ He said, ‘What did I say? What are you talking about?’ I said, ‘Are we just going to walk out of here or are we going to sort it out?’ He didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. He was going, ‘What? . . . what? . . . what have you got upset about? . . . Oh, it’s just an expression.’ I said, ‘We’re doing a Rock Against Racism album!’
WAYNE MINTER I never supported the album project, considering it at best a dangerous diversion of energy and resources from grass-roots activism and spreading the RAR anti-racist ethos, and at worst a gift to the growing number of anti-RAR pundits claiming commercial and political sell-out. The idea of an album with centrally selected bands and ‘greatest hits’ seemed contradictory to the spirit of RAR and an insult to all the stalwart bands not included. They were arguing and negotiating its release for over a year to do with rights and choosing tracks. It seemed to be moving further and further away from the do-it-yourself street-punk ethos. Elvis’s manager, Jake Riviera, got heavily involved. I suggested naming all the local groups and bands that had ever played an RAR gig on the inner sleeve. It didn’t happen.
KATE WEBB The album was mostly John’s thing. He compiled it with Red. I didn’t like the music much.
JOHN DENNIS There was Carol Grimes, Stiff Little Fingers, Gang of Four, the Piranhas, Barry Ford Band, X-Ray Spex, Matumbi, Steel Pulse, Aswad, TRB doing a live version of ‘Winter of ’79’, ‘Goon Squad’ from Elvis Costello, the Mekons, the Cimarons, the Members, and I had three different versions of the Clash’s ‘(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais’ to choose from.
CAROL GRIMES ‘You Won’t Let Me Down’ was on it. That was during a period of time where I couldn’t record. That track was already done and I just said, ‘Have it.’ It was written by Penny Wood, who was the sister of the comedienne Victoria Wood.
JOHN DENNIS It was a compilation of the best supporters from RAR so Carol’s track was Red saying, ‘We’ve got to pay dues.’ The Gang of Four track ‘Why Theory?’ was recorded specifically for the album. I spent a day in the studio with them. They wanted a shaker going through the whole track and Hugo the drummer could only do that for about thirty seconds and keep it in time. Half a day was spent on this fucking thing. Andy Gill was amazing. He just knocked it out. The real surprise was Jon King doing his vocal. He couldn’t get the sound. I got impatient and said, ‘Sing it like Andy.’ ‘Fucking shut up, man.’ We were there to the early hours of the morning and they kicked us out because it was in a house and they wanted to get to sleep. The advertisement was of a copper with a brick coming over and knocking his hat off. I got a call from Jake Riviera: ‘How the fuck did you do that, man? The posters are everywhere.’
RED SAUNDERS By that time the organization was starting to break into factions. It’s that old thing, ‘When the enemy’s gone the united front starts to fall apart.’ There were lots of different opinions and there was a split in the RAR camp.
RUTH GREGORY RAR’s Greatest Hits was due to be released in September 1980 and out of that came John Dennis’s idea that we could make masses of money. We went, ‘This isn’t what we signed up for.’ The end was all quite bitter really. In the beginning it was a whole assortment of people who were interested and would turn up at the meetings to plan what we were going to do next and how logistically we were going to raise funds for the next Temporary Hoarding. They were very informal but minutes were taken and we voted on some things. There was a lot of just general chitchat but further down the line it was all about business and what the next intervention ought to be.
KATE WEBB The difference between me and a bunch of Tom Robinson fans sitting up all night sending handwritten letters to people in Paisley or wherever, to the point where you’ve got up to 100 groups in the UK and active RAR groups across Canada, USA, Sweden, Norway, West Germany as it was, Belgium and Holland, and you’re doing big gigs and tours, all happened within a couple of years. It moved very quickly. People came and went. There was never really a single static centre other than the office. We were continually improvising. That’s why in the end it’s not surprising it fell apart. It wasn’t a rigid structure.
RUTH GREGORY In any organization you get personality conflicts. John Dennis went into the RAR office and proceeded to take it over from Kate by not telling anybody what he was doing, and Kate kept complaining that it was no longer a democratic situation. He wanted to make RAR into a limited company and go down that corporate route. There were big ructions over that. We didn’t see the point. It would have destroyed it.
KATE WEBB There was a clash of politics over where RAR should go, and involved in all that was the combustible emotion of individual relationships. People had their own jobs and their own lives, as well as all this stuff. I was the age of the bands. They were the age of the managers. John did not communicate in the same way and I don’t think he trusted me politically. He was different to us all. I felt that from the beginning. He was a more guarded person. The biggest problem was the secrecy. Things didn’t get talked about enough. We didn’t have cool discussions about what was happening to RAR and where we wanted to go. What kind of organization were we? Was the money leading us or us leading the money? Having a cultural organization with a political slant – which is what John wanted it to be – is a perfectly valid idea but it wasn’t what RAR was. The lead towards becoming a limited company broke RAR but I can’t see how that could have happened without Red’s approval.
JOHN DENNIS Kate was a teenager with no experience. She was swamped but she kept the office going. It was as good as she could make it but it wasn’t a campaign. My inclination is always to look at the organization. Strategically: ‘What are the issue involved here?’ ‘Where do we go from here?’ The disagreement focused on a misunderstanding about bureaucratic detail around RAR Ltd, but RAR was not a commercial company. I think people misunderstood that. There were other issues, personal things. And there was a genuine debate to be had about what kind of organization RAR was and could become. Frankly, there were no other ideas put forward. They were arguing against something that nobody was arguing for. Everybody was well pissed off. I’m not going to blame anyone. I disagreed with them. The misunderstandings were there to be resolved. There was a lot of tiredness in the organization, just genuine, ‘Fuck, this is getting really exhausting.’ The position I took was, ‘Look, we’re not selling RAR badges at the volume that we were. We were not getting rid of as many Temporary Hoardings as we did. The music scene is fragmenting.’
WAYNE MINTER John is good at playing his cards quite close to his chest. It’s a bit of a cliché but we were a victim of our own success. After the Front was completely blown out in the May ’79 elections there wasn’t that impetus anymore. I didn’t want to be a record company executive. I didn’t want to be even a gig promoter. I was a campaigner who loved music. I was disillusioned. I recall being suspicious of the idea that RAR Ltd could allow us to run the campaign with a defined membership without stopping the growth of grass-roots activity. I was bored. We debated everything at length until the early hours of the morning.
JOHN DENNIS We had a collective failure of imagination. The challenge was huge. And after Thatcher being elected, as far as I was concerned – and I don’t think this was wholly shared – the thing was that RAR was anti-racist and that battle wasn’t finished. It would go on. We had ‘brand recognition’. We had loyalty. We had this influence. It meant that the campaign would have longevity by consolidating what we had. We could have a record label. That’s what we used the album for, to launch the idea; Temporary Hoarding could have become a viable magazine. That was my position and that’s what I argued for.
PAUL FURNESS I’d been coaxed down to London by David Widgery to work nationally and I was in the office with Wayne and John and writing a lot for Temporary Hoarding. John always wore a suit, never a tie, and sat at a desk. The criticism of him at the time was that he was a careerist, and if you wanted to make RAR last longer then it had to be something else completely. I felt like an intruder. I had arrived pretty unaware of all these machinations going on so I entered into this cesspit which I couldn’t make head nor tail of. There were silences in the office.
RED SAUNDERS I was sympathetic to John. He worked so fucking hard. Widgery and Ruth put forward a little manifesto that RAR was going in the wrong direction. And that was aimed against John. I was in the middle, as I often found myself, trying to go, ‘Look, hold on.’ I was so disappointed.
SYD SHELTON We had this national conference to elect a committee. It was farcical because everybody knew who was doing the work. John and Red wanted to put the money that we had in the bank on one side so if we didn’t get elected we could still carry on, which would have left the prospective company unaccountable to RAR members. I thought that was totally undemocratic. Me, Ruth, and Widgery all resigned from the central committee on the spot. RAR was disintegrating by then anyway. We were all exhausted.
WAYNE MINTER Ruth and Syd and Dave walked out several times and nearly always walked back in at some point.
RUTH GREGORY RAR had run its course. We had done the things we’d set out to do. We were all burnt out. At the conference we issued a statement which said, ‘We have no confidence in John Dennis’s ability as the dominant figure in RAR’s day-to-day doings to bring together the cultural electricity we are going to need to generate to get Margaret to Stand Down. RAR is in danger of changing from a roots, anti-racist culture campaign into another hip capitalist company . . .’ It ended, ‘RAR means all power to the imagination, not all power to the pocket calculator.’
KATE WEBB The response of the committee to Ruth, Syd and Widgery’s resignation was a three-page document which ended with the line, ‘. . . We will use any weapon in the fight against racism, pocket calculators included.’ I refused to sign it. So that left the whole question of who or what the RAR central committee was by that point. It was John, Wayne and Red, which was not enough people for it to be a committee. When the biggest fights happened it felt like it was the men, and the women being ignored. RAR was a male-dominated organization.
RED SAUNDERS RAR was an ad hoc group of people but there was a move to tighten up and get more organized and that led to faction fighting. I tended to be more central. I was trying to hold everybody together. But the disagreements very quickly erupted and RAR fell apart. It’s a reality of political campaigning. Within the rainbow of the coalition, can you imagine all the different opinions? You’d have hippy-dippy people in purple loon pants and fucking green hair going, ‘Yeah, man, this is great – let’s get stoned, man,’ next to hard-line fucking street-fighting organizers. It was such an extraordinary alliance. That’s why these things don’t last that long. They burn like a meteorite. Five years and it was all over. The alliance couldn’t hold together once the enemy was defeated.
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DAVID WIDGERY RAR had taken off because ordinary unfamous people had worn badges, won arguments, volunteered, raved, hustled and fly-posted. Most of all, musicians – of all waves – had come good.31 It was about how black and white people, outside conventional politics, inspired by a mixture of socialism, punk rock and common humanity, got together and organized to change things. It was temporary. We didn’t stop racial attacks, far less racism. Indeed, the gloomy political predictions made by RAR about the social consequences of Mrs Thatcher’s self-serving political philosophy, Britain’s deeply embedded involvement with the regime in South Africa and the remorseless militarization of our police force proved only too accurate. But the simple, electrifying idea that pop music can be about more than entertainment has endured and deepened.32 For a while we managed to create, in our noisy, messy, unconventional way, an emotional alternative to nationalism and patriotism, a celebration of a different kind of pride and solidarity.33
JOHN DENNIS Rock Against Racism had created a confidence in a community and a sense of belonging which wasn’t one of the boxes to tick on the campaign mission but was a consequence of it. Racism became identified with the state, institutional racism in the police, not racism person to person. Elections are quantitative, you can see the results, but the qualitative effect: I think we did achieve more than perhaps we thought. There were people around who were like, ‘What the fuck is RAR on about?’ ‘What are you trying to do?’ and misunderstanding who our audience was. We were not nice people. We were not anti-racist because we loved everybody. We were anti-racist because we hated fascists and we didn’t want those bastards in. It was not a moral thing. It was about class. It was about, whose side are you on?
KATE WEBB We were political from the beginning, trying to change hearts and minds. I had an argument with Melvyn Bragg, trying to get him to do a South Bank Show on Rock Against Racism. They wouldn’t do it. Can you imagine that today? An arts programme not reacting to something as big and powerful and political and cultural as RAR. We were so far off the radar. The incredible ambition and how much work we did: Temporary Hoarding, the Carnivals, the hundreds and hundreds of gigs, local groups across the country and around the world, the Militant Entertainment tour, the record, Rock Against Thatcher. There was always more stuff. It was the reach of people that RAR got and that we were able to speak to quite a wide variety of people without becoming anaemic and meaningless. It was an incredibly energetic, innovative group.
LUCY WHITMAN Popular music has an emotional power, whether it’s Beethoven or the Sex Pistols. Art of any kind can be inspiring and Rock Against Racism captured people’s imagination and excited them. You didn’t feel you had to go to a meeting and be bored to death while people went through the agenda. You could have fun but also be changing the world at the same time. Obviously a cultural movement is never going to change things completely, but it did have an influence, and actually most of the things which activists were arguing for have now come to pass, like equal rights for gay people or talking to the IRA as a way of moving things on in Ireland. The point is, there was an intellectual ferment going on from the late seventies into the eighties. It changed what was thought of as acceptable discourse. You only have to look at the so-called comedy shows of the 1970s to know that certain things then wouldn’t be allowed to be on TV now.
SYD SHELTON The story of RAR is fantastic because it’s an anomaly. It wasn’t part of a great plan. We couldn’t invent the Clash or the Au Pairs. We didn’t know when RAR started that we’d have bands like that appear. There were times when it was scary and there were times it was dangerous. And we had arguments. Red and I had times where we didn’t speak to each other for months but the great thing is that we thought we were unstoppable. I don’t mean that we were arrogant but we really believed that we could do what we wanted. But we can also say there was a great deal of luck involved in terms of UK reggae coming to prominence; before Bob Marley it was an obscure thing. It all came together at the right time: before Thatcher, before the real clampdown. It’s like in chemistry: sometimes you put all the ingredients together and you get putty and other times you end up with a fantastic firework display. We got the firework display.
BOB HUMM A lot of people wanted something where they could express their feelings against racism. They were at home seeing these horrible things on television and reading about them but then they could go to an RAR gig and feel like they were doing something different and being positive with other people who felt the same way as them. RAR was about those people. It couldn’t carry on forever.
COLIN BARKER RAR gave a dimension that no political campaign had ever had before. It offered cultural identification. It talked about freedom and liberation grounded in ordinary kids’ experience. There was a politicized generation that hated racism and was delighted to be able to say so. In the eighties you get the Live Aid concert. It borrowed the idea of a political music event from the Carnivals. We didn’t have a Saint Bob – and what Richard Boon said is true in one sense, that the rock scene couldn’t have organized it by itself – it had to be political people who were really boring to make it happen. It’s like a really successful manager of a rock band is not necessarily any good at music but he is good at wheeling and dealing. If there weren’t rock managers there wouldn’t be rock ’n’ roll either. The Anti-Nazi League didn’t create the fan base for Rock Against Racism but we did create the machinery for it to create itself. I’m quite happy to be seen as boring in all of this but we came with certain skills and a certain openness to be ready to deal with worlds we didn’t know anything about. It was a political activity as well as a cultural one. Music gave anti-racism a radical edge of a quite different character than 100 demonstrations could ever have done.
GEOFF BROWN I meet people for whom the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism was their first political experience. It wasn’t just music. It was people talking politics in relation to that music. You were into black music and you were white and you were aware of the National Front as a threat. And then something comes along and gives you a good time and fits with what you believe in. It was an incredibly powerful mix and nobody had done anything like it before.
PETER HAIN I remember meeting punks and skinheads who were becoming openly political and saying, ‘I was on the point of joining the National Front and then RAR and the ANL came along. I went along to see my band and I suddenly started thinking, “What am I doing? Do I hate black people? Why do I hate black people? No, I don’t, actually.”’ It was quite moving. The Clash and Stiff Little Fingers and others getting involved and supporting us brought the audience into contact with the political message. They performed on platforms under Anti-Nazi League banners and suddenly skinheads and punks were on our marches and joining up. And it was really important to have reggae bands like Steel Pulse and Aswad involved too, but we were most effective at mobilizing white working-class youth who were dangerously vulnerable to being brought under the arms of the National Front. That could never have been done without Rock Against Racism. If you called it an Anti-Nazi League concert you wouldn’t have got anybody there except the activists. Once you called it Rock Against Racism it was different.
PAUL HOLBOROW Darcus Howe, who was the editor of Race Today and was on the ANL steering committee, at David Widgery’s funeral told a brilliant story. He has four children. He said the first three grew up in racist Britain through the sixties and early seventies but his fourth child grew up in a totally different atmosphere and that was down to the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism.
ROGER HUDDLE Darcus said we had created a world that his children could live in because we stood up and we stood firm and we were a white organization by and large, and it showed that not everybody was racist. We understood that the alienation and the anger amongst black and white youth that expressed itself in reggae and punk was an important social manifestation of the deeper underlying anger and frustration within the system itself. It was not just an accident. Punk was not just an accident, even though people say it was just Malcolm McLaren or Bernie Rhodes. Not true. When we said ‘NF No Future’ we really meant it. If we hadn’t existed, the pessimism of punk would have taken the whole thing in a different direction. RAR was set up against the Nazis and when they were defeated RAR was no longer necessary.
DOTUN ADEBAYO Rock Against Racism caught the imagination: right place at the right time. It didn’t end racism – you would have been naive if you expected that as the outcome – but it certainly opened the way for young black men and, to a lesser extent, women, to be brought into the white musical firmament.
KATE WEBB It was the question of how long RAR could have gone on. Once punk waned RAR had to become a very different organization. We were always at the front of the wave and often put on small bands before they’d done much else and became well known. New Romantics were never going to be a natural fit with RAR. Their whole aspirational Thatcherite style was a completely different thing to the political energy and anger and ferocity that there was in the music before. It was the difference between Duran Duran singing ‘Rio’ on a boat off the island of Antigua and the Clash playing in front of backdrops of World War II fighter planes. Once punk waned, RAR would have had to become a very different organization.
DENNIS BOVELL Seeing the Stranglers with Steel Pulse, Steel Pulse with the Police, Matumbi with Ian Dury and the Blockheads. People got to see bands that had different ethnic mixtures and they were then exposed to other beats. It was a tremendous bridge to have built. Rock Against Racism saw Linton Kwesi Johnson doing poetry with John Cooper Clarke and Roger McGough, going into different poetic spheres. It was a tremendous act of unifying England. It was a tremendous attempt at healing and fusing together people from all different walks of life and racial backgrounds. It was hugely successful. It came to the fact that – ‘Hallo!’ – England is now full of many different races. It’s like Noah’s Ark floating in the town; it’s got all the different species there. It led to integration and after that it felt that people were true reggae fans, irrespective of their racial background.
NEIL KINNOCK The fundamental significance of Rock Against Racism, like all cultural engagements in politics, was to do with three things: one, to manifest the freedom that you’re seeking to uphold and expand, and nothing does that better than music; secondly, to secure the interest and attendance of an audience that otherwise would almost automatically say they were not interested in politics; and thirdly, having done that, to convey to them you’ve got to be interested in politics because politics will otherwise control you.
•
PAUL FURNESS Leeds put on the second RAR gig ever and Leeds is where RAR finished. We’d been arguing for a Carnival for years. I’d come down to London and there was an obituary in Sounds that said, ‘The Club is dead, long live the Club.’ But Linda and Barry were determined to go out with a bang. In 1967, a bloke called Arthur France started the Leeds West Indian Carnival, and Potternewton Park is where it traditionally ends up: right in the heart of the black community. So that’s where it was held on 4 July 1981 with the Specials, Misty In Roots, Joolz the Poet and the Au Pairs.
KATE WEBB By this point 2 Tone music had swept the nation and the black and white ethos of bands like the Beat and the Specials culminated with Rock Against Racism’s final triumph: the Leeds Carnival.
CHRIS BOLTON It was all new people: a new generation and a new music. You come in at ground level and you go out on a high. What could be better? I felt like a respected elder. The whole thing had moved on and it felt like, job done. RAR had changed the face of music. It was a party and a great place to stop. You have to finish a book some time. It’s best not to finish the book ‘. . . and it petered out and died.’ RAR went out with a bang.
TOM ROBINSON Up to 2 Tone we were singing about Rock Against Racism and having black and white bands on the same stage but the Specials were black and white musicians together. Things had moved on. It needed a spring up from the grass roots of society. They were obviously the right people to headline the farewell Carnival.
RUTH GREGORY 2 Tone was like a dream. Suddenly there was energetic music that was neither black nor white. It was a mix. It came out of British reggae and punk. It was a fusion and that’s what we wanted. That’s what two-tone Britain was: people just getting on and creating, regardless of colour or sex or background or sexual orientation. The Fifties generation set up this comfortable world where everything was determined. It came from the war. And ever since then we’d been trying to break out of that. People are very scared of disruption in their lives. They think, ‘If only we could go back to having no foreigners here then life would be safe and I’d have a job and everything would be fine.’ But it’s not true. There’s always someone that’s the scapegoat.
SYD SHELTON RAR was so successful because it empowered people who felt powerless. 2 Tone had taken it over. The baton had been passed.
KATE WEBB We didn’t give birth to 2 Tone. Those kids were coming into their influences long before RAR. 2 Tone was more what we wanted to happen. This was the Britain we were talking about.
RED SAUNDERS When you saw 2 Tone you went, job done. The Farewell Carnival in Potternewton Park had a natural bowl. The stage was at the top and I looked down and went, ‘That’s it! This is what we dreamt of in 1976.’ 2 Tone music and their spirit and their story and everything Jerry Dammers went on to do for Nelson Mandela. It trumped the whole fucking lot of us.
