TINY FENNIMORE Following the success of the first national music tour we announced the Reds Laugh Louder comedy tour: seventeen dates with four of the country’s best young acts – Mark Miwurdz, Sensible Footwear, Skint Video and Craig Charles – plus an array of special guests. Comedy was another vehicle to get your ideas across.
ALEX DALLAS The message was always very political and we were very strong, unified, loud, hilarious and assertive. We were deliberately putting ourselves into places where the context would be really challenging. We did shows about rape and stereotyping gender and sexism, but we tried to present them in palatable comedic sketches. We ended every set singing a parody of ‘Que Sera, Sera’: You’re a girl, you can’t, and people thought we were singing You’re a girl you cunt. We were creating what we considered to be a new cabaret, so for us Red Wedge was a natural extension. Every time I went to a Billy Bragg gig I felt better because someone on the stage was saying all the things I thought. Where else would I get that?
TINY FENNIMORE I was the press officer and it was much more anarchic than the music tour. The comedians weren’t quite as committed to the cause and they were doing a lot more nodding than they wanted to. The tour was a great success. We combined comedy and politics and we were reaching out to new audiences.
HILARY CROSS It was vital that we expanded Red Wedge because it was fronted by male pop stars. But the people that ran the office were all women.
BILLY BRAGG There were a lot of women at the heart of Red Wedge and the office became important because they were the poor bastards after everyone went home who were left answering the phones. People like Tiny and Annajoy and Juliet and Belinda Braggins and Sally Johnson and Annie Weekes were all doing the day-to-day and getting it together. In the front row it was a bunch of lads but behind the scenes they were driving us to make decisions and articulating what we were singing about.
ANNAJOY DAVID I was very gender-conscious. Belinda and Annie were both university graduates who came and helped on the political side of things and Karen Walter from the NME was absolutely amazing doing loads of back-up stuff. It didn’t feel like a blokey culture until you went on a tour bus.
NEIL KINNOCK You come across people in politics occasionally who are like benign nuclear reactors: there’s very little noise, there’s no smell, but the energy they’re pumping out could light up a town. Annajoy was one of those people. The way in which she grabbed the role of organizing was a real bloody blessing. You can have any number of creative people around who turn up for the gigs and are committed but then when it came to organizing committees or fixing the Day Events or resolving problems; that was Annajoy. It couldn’t have been done without her.
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS She just burnt through it. She’d get really passionate and angry but she never let anything get personal. She didn’t fall out with people in that way. Problems were something to blast through with an avalanche of words, and if that didn’t work, with hugs and smiles. It was all about the politics, and the music was just a means to an end. She had to remind herself sometimes that without the music she didn’t have that leverage. She was a total force of nature.
ASHTAR ALKHIRSAN Annajoy really defined the philosophy and the purpose of Red Wedge. She was driven by an ideology and a real passion and she knew where she wanted to go. I was more amorphous and probably more typical of young people at the time. I didn’t have a fucking clue; most of us didn’t.
TOM WATSON You could hear Annajoy at the end of the corridor. ‘No’ wasn’t a word she understood. She would face anyone down no matter what their status and have a cogent argument for everything. People either withered on the vine or just lay down like puppies and gave her what she wanted. I really admired her. I don’t think she quite knows what part she played in changing the Labour Party.
TOM SAWYER Annajoy established herself as a mover and shaker. She was trying to hold a musical and a political side together and, as nature has it, people drift in different directions. No one stays focused for long and time moves on.
BILLY BRAGG It was quite frustrating working with the Labour Party on a day-to-day basis so she’d run up against Mandelson and the forces of resistance within the Party. Annajoy was in that invidious position that women often find themselves in, in the music industry, of people not taking them seriously. Without Weller’s or my authority it was difficult for her. That was my sense of it.
RHODA DAKAR We had a fringe meeting at the Labour Party conference at Blackpool and later that night we went to the Imperial Hotel, where we were staying, for drinks, and the Tory press were on us like flies – they thought we would let something slip – and buying us drinks. It was hilarious. I thought, ‘You’re gonna buy musicians drinks and hope they’re going to say something stupid. It’s going to cost you a fortune, mate.’ I got absolutely arseholed. The guy who’d decided to go for me used to write a column for the Daily Express. He said, ‘I’ll introduce you to people,’ and took me round. You could see the horror on their faces: ‘Oh my God, they’ve got one of those musicians.’ His opening gambit was, ‘I’m going to introduce you to the first sitting member of Parliament who’s going to die of AIDS.’ I thought, ‘You bastard.’
ALEX DALLAS When the boys’ tour happened I remember thinking, ‘Why is everybody male and white?’ So Annajoy and I got together and said, ‘We’ve got to do a women’s tour.’ It was a big deal because women never got space in music and comedy; they just got left out. At the beginning it was hard to find women to commit who were political. The question was, did women want to affiliate themselves and risk alienating their male fan-base and be accused of being feminists?
ANGELA BARTON There weren’t many female big names in the music industry. Off the top of my head, it was Bananarama and Sade.
KAREN WALTER We had a wish list of people that included Kate Bush, Liz Fraser, Alison Moyet and Cait O’Riordan from the Pogues.
ALEX DALLAS It was about promoting women to the point where they would think women’s votes counted. When you canvassed doorsteps you’d say, ‘I’m from the Labour Party. Would you consider voting for our candidate?’ And the answer would be, ‘I don’t know, I’ll ask my husband.’
JOOLZ DENBY You have to examine the place of women in the music industry. It’s very disheartening. You get immune to having to prove over and over that you’re not a groupie. If you start a project and some guy gets involved he will take it over. It’s to do with male privilege and natural assumption.
ALEX DALLAS If you play in a working-men’s club in Worksop the first instinct is to shout, ‘Get your knickers off. Show us your tits.’ Gender politics are not easy because it requires one gender to pull back a bit and do a bit of self-analysis. Men always used to say to us, ‘Where’s your woman Picasso?’ ‘Where’s your woman Beethoven?’ ‘Where’s your woman Dickens?’ It was to prove that we were therefore inferior because we were not the most famous artist or writer or playwright. ‘Where’s your woman Shakespeare? See, women are no good. You’ve never produced a Shakespeare, have you?’ We used to wear these horrible masks and tell mother-in-law jokes like, ‘What does a woman put behind her ears to make her more attractive to men? Her legs.’
JOOLZ DENBY I used to be in the NME as a style icon, a bit of an ‘It Girl’, partly because in the ranting poetry scene there weren’t any girls. I was the only one that had the neck to stand up in a venue full of drunken arseholes who would chuck lighted cigarettes at me. I stood on stage, a lone woman, and said the things that nobody wanted to talk about, dealing with subjects like violence against women and grooming. It was like having a hypodermic stuck in your neck instead of gently in your arm. I’ve been bricked in the head, beaten, threatened with rape, ostracized and had abuse screamed at me. If people bottled me my stock response was, ‘I was only booked for fifteen minutes and I’m going to do half an hour now, you bastards.’ So the Red Wedge Women’s Tour was a chance to say, ‘Can we just be free to do this?’
ASHTAR ALKHIRSAN We called it Cooking Up Trouble and it started in the Shaw Theatre in London during International Women’s Week in March 1987. It was a big event and I was producing the film shoot. It was the biggest thing I’d ever done, with four or five cameras and an all-woman crew.
ALEX DALLAS About four days before our opening show Sandie Shaw phoned up and said, ‘I’m pulling out,’ saying she didn’t want to be branded as ‘the man-hating Sandie Shaw’. I can remember sitting on the floor for two hours persuading her not to. She said something like, ‘I’ve been to my Buddhist women’s group and they don’t think it’s a good idea. It’s too affiliated to the Labour Party.’ I was trying to explain to her that it wasn’t a Labour Party thing and she wasn’t telling women to do anything apart from have a voice. I knew she had a daughter and I was saying things like, ‘What would you say to your daughter if she had to face this issue?’ It was like talking her down from the edge. On the day of the gig, I wasn’t sure if she would turn up. And then she arrived with Johnny Marr. He was the only man allowed on stage. There was an immediate standing ovation and I stood in the wings and cried because we’d done it.
RHODA DAKAR Sandie Shaw didn’t talk to anyone. I said ‘hello’ she said ‘hello’.
SARAH JANE MORRIS Somebody backstage made a sexist comment and Sandie walked off and slammed the door.
ALEX DALLAS And then Sarah Jane led the finale, ‘Ain’t No Stopping Us Now’.
JOOLZ DENBY They had this dreadful thing where they wanted everybody to get up at the end and sing W-O-M-A-N, I’ll say it again. The idea was mortifying. I’m ashamed to confess that I ran and hid in the ladies’ toilets. Being a notorious school absconder, you crouch on the toilet so they can’t look under and see your feet, and I was sitting there thinking, ‘Fuck, what shall I do? You’ve fucked it now. They’ll think you’re a complete weirdo.’ I was sat there sweating and I suddenly became aware there was somebody in the next cubicle. I got down and looked under the gap but couldn’t see any feet. I thought, ‘Fuck, they’re doing what I’m doing.’ So I said, ‘Are you crouched on the toilet seat to avoid the song?’ And this voice went, ‘I am.’ I said, ‘Who are you?’ And she went, ‘I’m Sandi Toksvig, the short one.’ I’m very tall, so it was funny – Sandi did a skit about the Virgin Mary and Shake ’n’ Vac – but for some reason we didn’t come out of the cubicles and just had this conversation about the Frank Chickens who were on the tour. Sandi and I were just, ‘I don’t know what to say to them. They don’t listen.’ The tour was quite bitchy. You get a load of women together and they jostle for hierarchy. I went to an all-girls school and it was a bit like, who wants to be head girl?
ALEX DALLAS Joolz was this amazing person with flaming red hair and piercings and tattoos everywhere. She was a raconteur and told brilliant stories. And Sandi was the MC. She loved it. I shared a room with her and she told me lots of naughty lesbian stories from her boarding school days. I was shocked and excited and it was very illuminating because I didn’t really know any lesbians. Frank Chickens were absolutely hilarious and did Japanese pop music: I’m a Fujiyama mamma / I’m just about to blow my top. They were managed by Pete Jenner and he said to me as we drove off, ‘You know what happens when you’re a tour manager, Alex? You tell them that the minibus arrives at ten o’clock and if nobody’s there you get in that bus and you drive to the gig and if anybody’s late they will find their own way and they will never be late again.’ I was like, ‘OK, in that case I will stick to it.’ And we did. Hope Augustus was late and then she went to the wrong place. She totally cocked it up and was never late again.
ASHTAR ALKHIRSAN Hope was from Birmingham and was the big smash find. She sang ‘A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square’ and the slave song ‘Peaches’ a cappella. It was amazing. She had such a powerful voice.
ALEX DALLAS I was thrilled Rhoda did it. And Tracey Thorn came, without Ben, from Everything But The Girl, which we thought was amazing.
JOOLZ DENBY There was a feeling amongst us that we were under the shadow of the boys. Simply because we stood on the stage and did it we actually changed the perceptions of a lot of young women. It showed a lot of young girls that they don’t have to just concentrate on hair and nails.
ALEX DALLAS Coming Up Roses came, who were a fabulous punky, feisty band, with Deborah and Hester from Dolly Mixture. And We’ve Got a Fuzzbox And We’re Gonna Use It!! were special guests in Birmingham. On the tour poster I remember we had to put ‘funny’ because feminists can’t be funny. I had lots of meetings with Bill Gilby, and NUPE paid for all the printing and the food for the rider.
BILL GILBY The Women’s Tour seemed an obvious thing for NUPE to sponsor because 60 per cent of our members were women. We were always looking for ways to promote the rights of women, and the cover image for the programme was one of Caroline della Porta’s.
TOM WATSON You’d look at some of Caroline’s illustrations and think, ‘Fuck me. Is this something political?’ Mixing fonts like that and using woodcuts to present imagery. It was amazing and quite sophisticated. I’d never seen anything like it before. Labour had one guy doing graphic design, called Jack Stallard, and he used to tell me stories of parties at Downing Street with Harold Wilson and long conversations he used to have with Clement Attlee. He was that old. The Labour Party still did political documents with Letraset.
NEIL SPENCER Red Wedge had some great illustrators, painters and designers who got involved and formed the Visual Arts Group. And then we had Well Red. You had to have a magazine. That was important. It was an outlet for a lot of talent.
TINY FENNIMORE I wrote articles in Well Red about politics in popular culture like nuclear disarmament and South Africa. I would have great fun reading Peregrine Worsthorne and Woodrow Wyatt’s columns in the Sunday papers because they were both so right-wing. You could reprint it in our world and everybody would go, ‘Oh, how terrible.’ Things like ‘. . . expect changes in apartheid but don’t expect one man one vote: after all, if you were a white South African would you like that?’
RHODA DAKAR Well Red was selling a different idea to anything else. We had journalists and designers, people who could make the magazine and people who could be in the magazine. It was like, ‘Are we good at writing political policy?’ ‘Nah.’ ‘How about doing a magazine?’ ‘Oh yeah, we can do that.’ Music glossies were on the rise. It was a good call.
HILARY CROSS Neil Spencer was our guru. He was a proper journalist and the rest of us were a bit amateur who had done fanzines. There was a discussion at one of the editorial meetings where we’d done South Africa and the Sandinistas and Ireland and he said, ‘Enough of this foreign stuff. We need to do one about Britain and money.’ So we had interviews with the comedian Harry Enfield and the Labour backbencher Dennis Skinner and articles on the privatization of the welfare state.
ASHTAR ALKHIRSAN There was a series of campaign posters that came out, and one with Margaret Thatcher on a TV screen and next to it, it said, ‘THERE IS ONLY ONE LOONY LEFT!’ and the word ‘loony’ caused the most controversy. It was a brilliant double-page poster.
ANGELA EAGLE The gigs started you thinking and the work that Well Red did was enormously important for developing new ways. It got ideas across to people who might not have been able to read between the lines of the bile that was coming out of the Daily Mail.
TOM WATSON Red Wedge was curious and newsworthy but then it became powerful and a threat, so they started this narrative about mixing pop and politics and trendy lefties and mouthy Ben Elton. The media did not want a mass movement of youth moving to Labour. We were at war with the Sun. They were trying to traduce Neil Kinnock as a character and devalue his politics. But if you’ve got the designer Neville Brody or Robert Elms or Capital Radio DJs or gigging artists who are talking to their audience by the thousand every night . . . and then the football terraces started getting involved with Red Wedge stuff in the programmes. Robert Elms went on The Tube holding up a Red Wedge T-shirt, saying, ‘This is what cool is.’ I used to wear mine like it was a uniform.
NEIL SPENCER We had some right shits at the press calls. The Mail and the Express and all that would be there to have a pop. I worked for the Labour Party press office and then I found out just how toxic the tabloid press can be; absolutely unbelievable. When someone rings you up and says, ‘I hear such-and-such a council have banned black bin bags because they’re not politically correct,’ you go, ‘You’ve invented this story and now whatever I say is going to be part of your story.’ Peter Mandelson was unbelievably effective with dealing with the media. He understood completely what Red Wedge was trying to do, but would have thought it was a bit of a sideshow, especially once the election was over.
COLIN BYRNE There was in the press office paranoia principally about the Sun but largely about every newspaper bar the Daily Mirror. Everything would be scrutinized by, ‘What is the Sun, the Mail, the Express going to say about this? Is this going to be turned into an anti-Labour story?’ The regime that Peter ran was ‘project’: project the modern image of Labour beyond our traditional core vote. And at the same time ‘protect’, because we were literally at war with the tabloid media. It was a constant tension.
NEIL KINNOCK The media attacks were bloody awful and incessant. OK, you’re a politician, you understand the terrain in which you’re fighting: if you kowtow they’re going to kick you in the face, or you say, ‘Fuck you,’ and carry on being normal. Occasionally, grudgingly, they had to say what I’d done with Militant or the economic policy, or the speech he made last week was incomparable. The rest of the time – in diaries, in little bits of columns, in any embarrassing photograph, eating a sandwich: Jesus Christ, the last time I ate in public was in 1984 – anything they could use, they would use it. There was a telling example at the Eurofest in Manchester. I was outside with Clive Dunn and Bill Owen and it started to rain. There was a guy with a top hat on so I said, ‘Can I borrow that for a second?’ I put it on and started to sing I’m singing in the rain on the pavement with my arms round Clive and Bill, and all the old-age pensioners around thought it was bloody terrific and joined in. That was just me being bloody natural. The Daily Mail and the Telegraph cut me to bloody shreds. Jesus! It was much worse than appearing in a Tracey Ullman video. This was evidence of me lacking gravitas: ‘Can you envisage this man as prime minister?’
NEIL SPENCER Neil appearing in the Tracey Ullman video doing a Madness song was funny but probably ill-advised. It’s hard to be around pop stars. It’s hard to do pop music. There’s a skill to it. You’re never going to come out of it looking funky.
ANGELA EAGLE Most people in the Labour Party were fazed by Neil appearing in the ‘My Guy’ video. He was trying to go to places that politicians hadn’t been. It was mass appeal that didn’t quite work.
NEIL KINNOCK The record got to number five in the charts. But on reflection, Tracey and I would agree that it was probably not a good idea. Tracey was a very strong Labour Party supporter but she said after, ‘It was fun, but as the leader of the Labour Party you’re not supposed to have fun.’ I should have realized what take the enemy would have on it.
ROBERT HOWARD Hats off to Kinnock! He was an inspiring, passionate, eloquent public speaker. He was also a human being with humour and if that takes doing a Tracey Ullman video . . . But the Murdoch press was massacring them. The Sun could crucify you. The power they had was beyond words.
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JUNE MILES-KINGSTON AIDS was a taboo subject and we lost friends because nobody wanted to do anything about it. The gay situation was where politics had to move on more than anywhere. People in government were gay, people in royalty were gay, people in industry were gay yet there were still laws against it. You didn’t talk about it.
RICHARD COLES As the Communards, Jimmy and I had a clear brief to fight for gay rights with Red Wedge. If you were gay growing up in the 1970s it was a pretty brutal experience. It was a time of constant discrimination, constant prejudice and violence. I remember coming back from Gay Pride one year and walking down Upper Street in Islington at ten o’clock at night and two guys were holding hands and got attacked and then at the Tube station these skinheads pushed us onto the tracks. It was a different world.
JUNE MILES-KINGSTON I had to save Jimmy once when were in Dijon. We’d gone out to find something to eat and this car full of boys stopped – they obviously knew who Jimmy was – and they all got out. I thought they were fans but they started pushing him about, going, ‘You’re gay, la, la, la,’ in French. I thought, ‘Fuck,’ so I piled in and jumped on this guy’s back and held onto him. He twisted round and turned me off and punched me on the chin. I was knocked out. Jimmy said they sped off in the car. It was a big thing to ‘come out’.
ANNAJOY DAVID Jimmy and Richard sent us some great volunteers from an emerging gay community which was beginning to get itself really organized for the first time with the onslaught of the AIDS virus.
ASHTAR ALKHIRSAN One of my first jobs at Walworth Road was to pick up a gay rights leaflet that Red Wedge was going to produce. I was sent down to the lobby to meet a friend of Jimmy’s called Mark Ashton. He was wearing cut-off denims and pink ankle socks and open-toed sandals. I was completely naive and thinking he wouldn’t want everyone to know that he was gay so I just whispered, ‘I’m here for the gay leaflets.’ He just laughed at me and we ended up becoming really good friends.
RICHARD COLES Mark was the first of our friends to die of AIDS. We had been to Paris with him to Père Lachaise and saw Mur des Fédérés [The Communards’ Wall] where they were all shot in 1871, and Mark told us the story of the Paris Commune and we were full of romance for that. We liked the idea of the first experiment in communist living so that’s how we became the Communards.
ASHTAR ALKHIRSAN Mark was an amazing person. He came to work as a volunteer. He had been a founder member of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners and was the general secretary of the Communist Party, but he was more about socialism in action: how do you practise your political philosophy on a day-to-day level?
KAREN WALTER Everyone loved him. He was one of those people who knew everyone and everyone just warmed to. And then he was ill and it was all very quick. It was the only awful thing that ever happened at Red Wedge because most of it was upbeat.
ROBERT HOWARD There was underlying ignorance about the causes and effects of AIDS, and pointing the finger at the gay community. The government’s TV broadcast was like a horror movie. Although I wasn’t gay I was going to a lot of gay clubs – in London they were the only places open after hours and you’d meet people like Mark E. Smith and Boy George there – and then the fundamentalist Christians got on board and used AIDS as a weapon with which to attack homosexuality. It was all part of the right-wing agenda.
TOM ROBINSON Remember Thatcher’s response to AIDS? There wasn’t one. People were dying. The government didn’t start a health warning campaign until the ‘Don’t Die of Ignorance’ campaign in 1987. And then their response was to bring in Section 28 which stated that a local authority shall not ‘promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality’. My entire position was summed up in 1978 on the back of Power In The Darkness: ‘I got no illusions about the political left any more than the right: just a shrewd idea which of the two sides’ gonna stomp on us first. All of us – you, me, rock ’n’ rollers, punks, longhairs, dope smokers, squatters, students, unmarried mothers, prisoners, gays, the jobless, immigrants, gipsies . . . to stand aside is to take sides.’
RICHARD COLES When AIDS came along I stopped fearing the bomb and started fearing the virus. I remember we had a meeting at Red Wedge about the general election and somebody said to me, ‘But AIDS isn’t really a political issue.’ The first senior politician who did get it was the Health Secretary, Norman Fowler.
RHODA DAKAR The Labour Party would not come out in support of gay policies and there was a point at which they needed to sign with or against, and they sat on the fence. We were at a meeting at Solid Bond and the Communards left. They said, ‘We can’t support the Labour Party because they’re not supporting us.’
RICHARD COLES The Labour Party had passed a resolution at conference in 1985 committing them to supporting lesbian and gay rights. But they’d passed a lot of resolutions; it didn’t really mean anything.
JOHN NEWBEGIN Thatcher was very deliberately parading Victorian values. She was presenting such an extreme picture of a backward-looking, xenophobic, uptight Britain rather than celebrating all the progressive things that were going on. Neil Kinnock was saying, ‘We are going to be relevant to the realities of Britain in the future and particularly young people. We’ve got to listen to voices that are coming from outside and have an international outward-looking confidence.’ By encouraging dialogue with musicians like the Communards it helped to shift thinking within the Party and the way that lesbian and gay rights were dealt with by the Labour Party.
COLIN BYRNE Gay politics wasn’t really talked about because Labour was still a very male macho party. We were starting to pay more attention to the sexual politics of gender, although most of the trade unionists thought it was some whingeing lefty crap so there was a lot of questioning about, ‘OK, we have to pay lip service to this but how much do we actually have to . . .’
ANGELA EAGLE You could never fault Mrs Thatcher for not having an opinion. There was a big switch in attitudes to gay people but she was not sympathetic and the public moved far ahead of where the government was. The Conservatives used prejudice to entrench themselves in power. It was a very effective stick to beat us with. If you look at what they said in the newspapers about ‘loony lefties’ and ‘the blacks’ and ‘the queers’, they were scapegoating. But it’s quite hard to scapegoat somebody who’s at the top of the charts.
JUNIOR GISCOMBE Labour could see that we could bring in young votes: the black vote because of me; the gay vote because of Jimmy and Richard and Tom. But we were explaining to Kinnock that you can’t put the two together; that black people and homosexuals were not exactly the same. There was no way that any black guy was going to turn around and say that he was the same as a homosexual.
CLARE SHORT There were some left thinkers who were saying that the way to defeat Thatcher was to unite all the minorities and you’ve got a majority. Neil’s instinct would be to be inclusive and draw together black people and gay people and young people. He wasn’t seeing Red Wedge as a magical solution. It was part of a mobilization of all elements that would sweep Labour to power and enable us to change the country to a better place.
NEIL KINNOCK We weren’t doing enough for gay rights. It was a civil rights issue as far as I was concerned but I wanted to ensure that we were in a position to actually change the bloody law, and in order to get that position we had to be careful with our coverage. That was all. I said to the gay rights charity organization, Stonewall, ‘Listen, do you want to wave a flag or do you want the law of the land changed? I’m the leader of the Labour Party, simply permit me the discretion to give an absolute solemn undertaking to you to find a language that isn’t going to frighten bloody people off. You help us become elected and we’ll do it.’ And, five years later than it should have been, we did. We also had a hell of a row over the Black Section, who were a group of black and Asian members within the Party arguing for greater minority representation. I saw it, like a lot of my black comrades, as an absolutely unacceptable way of defining people in the Labour movement. It was totally unacceptable for people who had been fighting apartheid for decades. This wasn’t just a spontaneous movement that would bring on young black people who lacked confidence. It was an effort by a few to get a new affiliated organization that could manipulate and dominate. To say the only way to ensure fair representation is to have a Black Section was not true. Then we found a third way, which was to establish an ethnic minorities office.
RHODA DAKAR Milton Dillon organized a Black Arts and Entertainment Working Group meeting at Liberty Hall in Hackney with Diane Abbott, who was the prospective parliamentary candidate for Hackney North, and Paul Boateng, the candidate for Brent. Paul dressed down but he should have worn his suit because he was completely uncomfortable. Stuart Cosgrove turned up. I was like, ‘Why is he here?’ ‘He writes for Blues and Soul.’ ‘OK, that makes as much sense as anything else now.’ The proposed motto for the group was, ‘Until the colour of a person’s skin is of no more significance than the colour of their eyes then there shall always be war,’ which had been adapted from a Haile Selassie speech and Bob Marley’s ‘War’. I thought Diane was a bit of an idiot. She made a presentation which began, ‘It seems that the Labour Party likes black people, the further away they are.’ I had a complete wobbler with Marc Wadsworth from the Labour Party and absolutely lost it. He was saying, ‘Yeah, but you can’t be this, if you think this.’ It was like, ‘Where do you get off?’ The Black Section had a very specific way of looking at the world. It was nonsense and very difficult.
ANGELA BARTON I’m not comfortable with separatism: ‘Right, let’s do our own thing because you’re not doing it for us.’ But equally, I can understand why people want that because they’re thinking, ‘You’re not representing me. I’m going to have to do it on my own.’ Historically, Gandhi springs to mind, and Martin Luther King. They did it so well, so things did change – is that what Diane Abbott and Paul Boateng were trying to say?
RHODA DAKAR Generally, in meetings, it was who had the most currency. My currency was I had some political nous – musically, I had been and gone – but I understood how it worked and how it operated and how to manipulate situations. Being black and a woman meant I could shout and unless someone had a really well-constructed argument I was right, because I had been wrong for centuries. I didn’t do it that often. One time a gauntlet had been laid down to say that I wouldn’t go to an Outrage meeting at the Lesbian and Gay Centre, so obviously I went. At the meeting this girl pulled out a letter from a guy who was part of a paedophile exchange and the motion was: should paedophiles be included in the room? I was already going, ‘What?’ And then the girl read out the letter from this guy talking about his eight-year-old lover. I went absolutely ballistic and totally demolished them. ‘Do you really not understand the basis of a relationship and power?’ I may well have been the only black woman in the room, in which case I had even more currency than usual. Peter Tatchell supported me and the motion was denied.
BILLY BRAGG Rhoda was a force because of what she’d done with 2 Tone. She was incredibly powerful and wouldn’t take any bullshit. When the Black Sections came to talk to us we listened to them politely and then Rhoda stood up and ripped them to shreds. We all stood up and clapped. Rhoda has an ability to see through a lot of the bullshit around politics and rock ’n’ roll. Chairing the Red Wedge steering committees is a credit to her commitment to trying to make music that says something and does something. It takes a lot of organization to continue to come up with ideas and move forward.
NEIL SPENCER Rhoda was a voice of sanity, very down-to-earth, very pragmatic: ‘This is what we can do.’ No ideological axe to grind but very sharp about cultural politics.
ANNAJOY DAVID We did a lot of work to get black and Asian MPs into the Commons, and talking about black British music and racism in the music industry. If you look at some of the positive aspects of the culture of the Labour Party – women, black people, gay rights – a lot of it started culturally in the Red Wedge base. Everybody was saying, ‘You’re mad. You can’t do this.’ And I said, ‘Of course we can. This is who we are.’
