ANNAJOY DAVID I absolutely insisted that Red Wedge would not just be about the concerts and the music. There had to be interaction between the musicians, politicians and disenfranchised young people. So I organized all the Day Events with a whole team of brilliant unsung heroes who helped to get local people on the ground active. This is the really interesting bit of the Red Wedge model because it set up a parallel network around the country.
ASHTAR ALKHIRSAN The Day Events gave expression to the frustration and desire for a Labour government and an emergence of socialist principles and it gave young people more of a profile and an opportunity to have their voice taken seriously and make a contribution to the development of ideas.
BILLY BRAGG Annajoy knew the tour had to offer a programme rather than just a load of gigs. She had a vision and understood how all the bits fitted together. She was crucial in pulling focus and taking charge of the Day Events.
ANNAJOY DAVID They took months of planning. I’d get on the phone and ask unions to help find people, and get in touch with Labour councils and say, ‘Who leads on youth services in your area? I want to talk to them.’ And then I’d go to somewhere like Wolverhampton and find youth organizations and record shops and theatre groups and local rehearsal studios and pirate radio stations and we’d talk about what was important to them. Then on the day of the gig we’d have local bands and theatre groups and anti-apartheid organizations and people against the Youth Training Scheme and local clubs that needed money or people trying to raise money for rehearsal space or selling fanzines or T-shirts. Then round about teatime or during the soundcheck I would grab some artists to come down together with some local or national politicians and there’d be this great big Q&A. They were packed. I mean, can you imagine getting 1,000 young people just turning up at a hall to hear politicians and artists and local bands now?
PAUL WELLER It wasn’t just a few pop stars going out on the road.71 One of the best things was getting out and talking to youth about political issues. Young people [were] generally beginning to realize that it [was] in [our] hands to do something. It was very positive.72
ANNAJOY DAVID They were hugely successful. It was all part of the Red Wedge Regional Development programme supporting and resourcing youth initiatives. And if Paul [Weller] had specific projects he and I would go off and have meetings with them and give them a really big push, like the Cultural Club in Liverpool with young people from working-class estates doing theatre, or the Leigh Cooperative, which was a resource centre to help young unemployed people with skills and training, and other similar youth organizations across the country in places like Gateshead and Stirling.
PHILL JUPITUS Annajoy was a real powerhouse and getting out to the people who wouldn’t normally do things. They’d see where a local council wasn’t addressing a real need for a youth cultural base and help in practical terms. I did a day of gigs reading poetry for the Norwich Venue Campaign, and Weller and Dee C. Lee did a little acoustic set. Then in the evening we DJ’ed at Henry’s Night Club. The apoliticals came to see Weller, and the Red Wedge politicos would be trying to give leaflets out to all these ageing mods. We were lighting fires.
NEIL SPENCER Annajoy was very big on helping young people build their lives. We had a propaganda brochure called Fact Not Fiction about housing, youth training, unemployment, allowances for the low-paid, gay rights. Annajoy was a fantastic bridge between the parliamentary people and us.
RHODA DAKAR The music was to get them in and chuck them a few leaflets but the Day Events is where the political discussions took place and for people to discover who we were. It was them saying, ‘You’ve all landed here from Top of the Pops: what difference are you going to make to my life?’
SARAH JANE MORRIS We were doing a lot of defending and being bombarded by right-wing views but we believed that popular music had a power; that things could change because of music.
LUCY HOOBERMAN Red Wedge was obviously a Labour Party-blessed entity but when asked direct political questions the artists would answer the questions according to their own points of view. Paul was quite often attacked for being famous and wealthy. Somebody shouted out, ‘What are you going to do for me?’ And Paul said, ‘What am I going to do for you? I ain’t gonna do nothing for you. What are you going to do for yourself?’
ANNAJOY DAVID It’s a really important question if the attraction of the Day Events was Paul Weller and Billy Bragg or the politics. The answer is, it was people realizing that they could be part of something as a collective voice. That’s what took over in the end. Jerry was very outspoken. I remember him saying, ‘The worst possible Labour Party is better than the best Tory government.’
BILLY BRAGG There was undoubtedly an element of people wanting to meet Paul or me or Jerry. We were all aware of the contradictions. None of us believed that electing a Labour government would solve everybody’s problems, far from it, but we were committed to doing whatever we could do.
PAUL WELLER The grass-roots work was the real meat for me: working with drug rehabilitation centres and other local groups. But the real struggle was less campaigning to young people than campaigning to the Labour Party. We felt they were totally out of touch. We wanted to find a way of closing the gap between youth and the Party, but there were so many factions within the Wedge, and so much red tape to go through within the Party – it took ages to change anything.73
RHODA DAKAR I don’t think Paul’s political nous was the same as Billy’s but he had very definite ideas. He said, ‘The main thing is to politicize young people. If they don’t know why they’re in Shit Street we’ll give them facts and figures.’ He was small ‘p’ political. It was perfectly reasonable.
NEIL KINNOCK Paul never had Billy’s political sophistication, and I don’t mean that in a cerebral intellectual sense. They were different individuals who had in common their desire and willingness to use their fame on behalf of a very good cause and try to get a fair deal for youngsters. And they did it in a slightly different spirit from one another. Billy in his gut understood the nitty-gritty of politics. Paul knew right from wrong and had come to politics through discontent, which is perfectly reasonable. Bloody hell, if I’d been contented as a kid with what was going on around me I’d probably have never joined the Labour Party. We were delighted that he was around but he would only do what he wanted to do. I wouldn’t have it any other way. But there was an edge about Paul: a taste for the absolutism, or, if you like, the Militant Tendency.
CLARE SHORT I saw the Day Events as attempting political mobilization and inclusion. Using music and culture is normal when you’re trying to do that.
RICHARD COLES In Wales, these Labour people came and I got in a fight with one of them in a rare moment of anger. They basically said, ‘Make sure you tell people to vote for us.’ I said, ‘That’s not how it works.’ It was a moment of realization that we were not there simply to whip in the Labour vote.
JUNIOR GISCOMBE A lot of the people came not because we were pop stars but because they were genuinely concerned. We would sit in a line and ask people what they were going through.
CATHAL SMYTH A woman said, ‘Why do you have to be intellectual to be in politics?’ and Bedders, Madness’s bass player, said, ‘You don’t have to be. It’s just a gut feeling. You can start with, my granny’s ill and she can’t get a bed in hospital. Surely, there’s something wrong in that?’ It was as much a journey and a new adventure for us as for everyone who we were seeing. It was born of hope. As Bernard Schumacher says, ‘You’ve got to be part of the cure rather than part of the disease.’
BILLY BRAGG In Leicester there were two Day Events simultaneously: me and the Communards went to the Phoenix Arts Centre and Weller and Junior went to Highfield’s Workshop Centre behind the British Rail station.
ANNAJOY DAVID Paul got a huge cheer when he said, ‘People have become pessimistic because the media, big business and corporate power are all on the side of the right. Socialism must confront these things, but it must also remember that it is about movements, people coming together to bring about change. No matter how much the right increase the powers of the police or implement social order acts, that basic demand of people to organize themselves to effect change is quite simply unstoppable.’
NEIL SPENCER One of the ideas behind Red Wedge was of a rainbow coalition – a phrase the American congressman Jesse Jackson came up with – so you would have people whose principal interest was gay rights alongside CND or whatever. There was this sort of hysteria about gay people because of AIDS, the ‘Gay Plague’ as they called it, and because you had Jimmy Somerville and Richard Coles and Tom Robinson these young kids would come along specifically and say, ‘Thanks for sticking up for us.’
RICHARD COLES We met the excellent Keith Vaz, the local prospective candidate – who said, ‘I will take on board the issues raised and pass on your comments to Neil Kinnock’ – and spent the afternoon answering questions to an audience of about 300. I talked to some people from the Left Out Collective, an organization of socialist lesbians and gays. It was the first time they’d ever done something in tandem with the local Young Socialists and consequently the first time they’d had the opportunity to meet and talk to young people from all over Leicester. That, for me, was what Red Wedge was all about.
PAUL BOWER In ’83, Labour had lost Leicester West by about 1,700 votes, Leicester East by just over 900 and Leicester South by just seven votes; so they were keen to get young people registered. I remember Keith Vaz saying if he was elected he wouldn’t take his £18,000 MP’s salary but instead take a ‘worker’s wage’. Then he said, ‘Young people really don’t like Neil Kinnock.’ I said, ‘No, Keith, they don’t like politicians.’
CATHAL SMYTH A woman said: ‘I don’t know how to be political.’ So the concept of boycott was explained to her: simple, hit them in the fuckin’ pocket; direct action; stop shopping there; find out who owns it; go elsewhere. The reaction was hopeful. But then a bloke who was ex-British Telecom went, ‘You’re not bloody politicians.’ I said, ‘Hold on, mate. It’s a democracy. We have the right to express our voice.’ Some people were offended but they were the people who did nothing but moan. I was putting myself on view as taking a stance. If you can connect a good idea with the right group of people then you’ve got a chance to make a significant change.
PAUL BOWER As well as the Day Events, the other side of the Red Wedge story is the by-elections. In Newcastle-under-Lyme Llin Golding was elected by a few hundred votes. And somebody from the Labour Party said, ‘Red Wedge absolutely helped. It might have even won us the seat because they were registering people to vote and getting people to fill forms in. It was the first time anybody had thought about reaching out to young people.’
ANDY MCSMITH Red Wedge also got involved during the Fulham by-election campaign in April 1986. The Faith Brothers agreed to play in support of the Labour candidate, Nick Raynsford, and their main song was ‘Fulham Court’. Nick went on the stage and their fans were all shouting Fulham Court, Fulham Court. Nick thought they were talking about the council estate and said, ‘Fulham Court is disgraceful.’
NEIL SPENCER A letter was sent to out to all first-time voters in the Fulham constituency signed by Neil Kinnock and all the Red Wedge musicians. It was an astonishing document: seeing pop stars directly backing a party political candidate. There was also an afternoon event at the Brunswick Boys’ Club with Heaven 17 and Ken Livingstone but Rhoda described it as a ‘miserable failure’ after there was a problem with attendance due to a lack of leaflet distribution.
RHODA DAKAR I was dubious about us having a part in the event. The idea of famous faces, both political and musical, being bussed in to do some rather unwholesome baby-kissing and backslapping and to say, ‘Vote Labour,’ despite having no knowledge of either the local politics or the candidate, was unpleasant in the extreme. And we were not welcomed by the by-election office; they were interested in being ‘respectable’ and appealing to the middle classes. We were spitting in the wind.
RICHARD COLES MPs would come over all, ‘Lovely music, my daughter’s got all your records, what a splendid show,’ and patting us on the head; but we were more often than not surrounded by local young people wanting to know why they didn’t have jobs and houses and chances.
PAUL BOWER We took the politicians to places to listen to people they otherwise wouldn’t have met. For some it was a welcome break from leaf-leting in the pissing rain but often the debates could be quite tense: ‘You’re all sell-outs,’ ‘You’re all bastards,’ ‘You’ve come up from London, you don’t realize our struggles here.’ We’d listen to people patiently but unfortunately it got a bit like the Monty Python ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch, ‘Aye, you were lucky . . .’
STEVE WHITE MPs wore tweed jackets with patches on the arm, one up from a geography teacher. They were always in awe of Paul.
PAUL WELLER There was a great camaraderie amongst the musicians. But meeting the politicians reinforced what I already believed; that they were just out for themselves.74 There were so many careerists among them. Once we started meeting these MPs it was just like, ‘Oh God, we don’t want to be part of this.’75 They were more showbiz than the groups. It was an eye-opener, it brought me full circle in how I feel about organized politics. It’s a game.76 It’s not what we were about. It got to the stage where every interview was politics, politics. You think, ‘Whatever happened to the music?’77 If I was an author I wouldn’t get questioned so much about, ‘Is this the right thing to do; should politics be in music?’78
TINY FENNIMORE The MPs looked very uncomfortable but I admired them for coming. They were out of their comfort zones, and people were angry. There was a lot of pointing of fingers and shouting in frustration that they couldn’t get jobs, and a lack of trust in politicians that anything could change. There was shock at how Red Wedge had tapped into the strength of feeling amongst young people. The main thrust of the Day Events was getting young people to register to vote, but they didn’t feel like anybody was talking to them. There were very few places to read about politics and about why we didn’t like Mrs Thatcher.
KAREN WALTER It seemed like the Tories had been in for so long that people had become apathetic.
NEIL SPENCER It was very much about making the MPs accountable to the people whose votes they were counting on. Of course they were very often anxious and uncomfortable with that because they’d never met local youth, and then to be confronted in that very raw way. MPs were felt to be remote and part of a Westminster club and not accountable to the ordinary citizens. Keith Vaz was a box of tricks. I was very impressed by him but then his subsequent career made me question how authentic he was being. And Anne Clwyd, in Mid Glamorgan, was very composed. She thought it was all wonderful.
ANDY MCSMITH In Newcastle, a local councillor said to me, ‘This is the best thing the Labour Party has ever done.’
STEVE WHITE In Birmingham we were in this room fielding questions from the nationals and the Guardian asked Dee, ‘What are your thoughts about the government’s policy in Northern Ireland?’ She didn’t really know what to say. We were out of our depth. We were not politicians but we were being spoken to as if we were. It was a mark of the impact that Red Wedge had had in a very short amount of time. That’s when people’s individual agendas started to fractionalize a little bit: ‘Are we musicians or are we a political party?’
CATHAL SMYTH We were asked to comment on the news and we picked up on the train drivers’ strike, but they didn’t want us talking about that. They thought, ‘Madness: funny.’ They wanted wackiness: ‘Fred Bartham’s married his milkman; first man to marry his milkman,’ and comfortable stuff like that.
PAUL BOWER Birmingham was the same day that the Westland debate took place in the House of Commons over the future of the British helicopter industry. Two ministers had already resigned and there was speculation Thatcher might go – and the artists were so disappointed with Kinnock because he dropped the ball and didn’t score; open goal, Thatcher. He could have really devastated the government and he just wasn’t strong or sharp enough. The artists were looking for professionalism. They were saying, ‘I’m a shit-hot musician. I’m putting myself on the line for you. I’m expecting you to do that as well. If you let me down that makes me wobble.’
KEITH HARRIS Birmingham had some real aggression and hostility from the local youth towards the artists’ support for Arthur Scargill during the Miners’ Strike. But the success of the events was that it made it clear that they weren’t mindless pop stars doing something for publicity. They actually had ideas about society and how it should be, and they were extremely articulate and had some good points to make.
LORNA GAYLE A lot of the events I zoned out. It just wasn’t my world. I remember thinking, ‘I’ve never seen so many white people in one place. I didn’t know there were so many in the country.’ That is so rank and stupid but I was like, ‘Where are they all coming from?’ I was just a black girl growing up in Brixton, where there was so much negativity, and just MC’ing on sound systems and doing odd jobs in Pizzaland or as a chambermaid. But we were under a Tory government and we were falling under. Labour was for good people, poor people, working-class people, black people, people that felt like the underdog. I was more like, ‘If you want a better life get up and do something for yourself.’ I saw a lot of people fronting and I just couldn’t do that and take the chance of looking stupid. Junior was like, ‘Look around you. You need to have a voice. Your voice is as important as anyone else’s. We need to be heard. You’ve got as much right to be here as Paul Weller or Madness.’
JUNIOR GISCOMBE Lorna was very fresh. It was like, ‘Stick with me. I’ve got an angle on this.’ Politicians want votes: I was saying, ‘Let’s bargain those votes. You want us? You do what we want for a change.’ SDP, Labour, Conservative, it didn’t matter to me as long as you were getting the chance to say, ‘Well, actually, I don’t like that, but I do like this.’ I was saying, ‘If we don’t vote they don’t have a mandate. If they have no mandate they need us more than we need them.’ I’d never had that before. Billy and Paul thought I was too radical.
KEITH HARRIS Junior was from a working-class family from Jamaica. He was aware of the gap between the establishment and the workers. In some respects, I was surprised at how formed his opinions were.
JUNIOR GISCOMBE I never claimed to be part of the Labour Party but for once people had come together within the pop world to say things were wrong in our society. Politics was another world to these young people but what was going on in their areas was political. We were in a multiracial society but the Tories were playing working-class white against working-class black. I was showing through music you didn’t have to be white to have a radical view; you didn’t have to be white to say you disagreed with the Falklands War. I live here too. Tom Robinson said, ‘You can live in hope but don’t live in politicians’ hope.’
KEITH HARRIS We were both alarmed about what was going on in society. I moved to LA in 1978, the year before Thatcher came to power, and when I came back in 1982 the contrast was dramatic. It’s a small thing but it’s illustrative of the way things had changed: in LA, I was astonished how everybody was so security-conscious; everybody had a burglar alarm and bars on their windows. I thought, ‘This society is crazy.’ I was back in the UK less than three weeks before I got burgled. All the messaging coming out socially had changed from being a moral message that you shouldn’t steal from people, to ‘If you don’t have a burglar alarm and get burgled it’s your own fault; if you leave things on display in your car expect them to be stolen.’ Crime rates rose dramatically because of the rise of unemployment but it was also aligned to the central message of the Conservative government which was, we are a collective of individuals who are responsible for ourselves, not everybody. Community was a thing of the past. If you think of films like Wall Street and Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff, that was the mood of the times. I hoped Red Wedge would change the attitude of a lot of younger people who in their formative years had been fed this message and at least make them question whether there wasn’t another way for society. The artists were extremely brave because they were putting themselves up to be shot at and ridiculed because it was such an unfashionable thing to do.
TOM SAWYER This was a musical movement that was connecting with young people in a way that the Labour Party hadn’t been able to. But it wasn’t a new cultural phenomenon as such. Go back to Bertolt Brecht. Go back to the 1930s. Go back to Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop. But Red Wedge was the first generation of rock ’n’ rollers who were directly political.
PETER JENNER A lot of artists don’t want to be political. It was a balancing trick, ‘My art may reflect the world in which I live but I’m not going to be a hack for some bunch of political crooks.’ Politicians are like door-to-door salesmen; you may not want to buy double glazing from them; you might not want to buy their political message. So the official line was that it was cross-party. We would always invite the Tories and the Lib Dems but nobody responded because they knew it was a Labour Party fix. They weren’t stupid either.
ANGELA BARTON Ultimately, you wanted young people to vote Labour, so it was a form of propaganda. It was difficult for people to understand what was occurring within Parliament. When you looked at the make-up of government it was predominantly male and from a higher echelon of society. So the Day Events were a fantastic way, more on our level, to show people you can have an influence: ‘This is the Labour Party and this is what they want to do for you. Is that what you want?’ They gave the youth a mirror to say, ‘You can make a difference. Don’t just leave it to people who are in power.’ It was groundbreaking.
LARRY WHITTY It was quite a liberating way of getting more people to talk to the Labour Party. There is a cultural problem between most politicians and dealing with problems of youth.
TONY MANWARING When you talked to people within the Labour Party they knew they’d taken young people for granted. They genuinely understood that they had to talk about politics in a language that people understand. I was pleasantly surprised when I got off the National Express coach and went to a Day Event at how open-minded people were. These artists rolling up in town energized and inspired a lot of local organizers who had just come out of an absolutely gut-wrenching election defeat. But there was a tradition of Labour that just didn’t get it. It wasn’t hostile. It was more like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. But in many ways, the Day Events were pockets of invisible experience. That’s awful and tragic and really sad.
TOM SAWYER The Day Events weren’t understood properly or valued enough. Annajoy was a pioneer. She fought against the grain in a good way. She’d be very angry and she’d swear a lot but she knew she was up against a party that was out of touch.
COLIN BYRNE I remember talking to Labour backbenchers who’d been to some of the Red Wedge events and they’d come away (a) enthused because they were hanging out with the cool guys, but (b) it opened their eyes that there was more to politics than the smoke-filled rooms. They recognized that these were events that young people actually wanted to go to. It gave Labour a terrific shot in the arm.
NEIL KINNOCK The Day Events were really effective communicators with youth and the politicians. MPs would seriously try to answer the kids’ questions and show in very direct and sincere terms that they were listening and they were trying to respond. The feedback of the kids was repetitive: they wanted decent jobs, places to live that they could afford. The greatest challenge we had was convincing youngsters that their desire to extend education and to get better training or get a job was entirely feasible, and it was within the realms of political power and the right government to be able to do it. We put the whole political argument to them and when it worked it really was utterly bloody brilliant and when it didn’t, well, at least we were making the effort.
PAUL BOWER At a press conference I announced that we’d made a massive impact on the Labour Party’s communications because they would not be releasing a written manifesto at the next election. Instead, they were just going to do a cassette called Now That’s What I Call Socialism, Volume 3. Journalists were taking it down. I remember Neil Spencer snorting.
