100. Robert Howard aka Dr Robert of the Blow Monkeys, Red Wedge tour, March 1986.
BILLY BRAGG The Labour Party represented a form of democratic socialism so anybody who wanted to abolish capitalism wasn’t going to be involved in Red Wedge. And as a consequence people saw me as a sell-out. It’s very hard to get in the mud with the politicians and not get some of it on you. We used to have anarchists leafleting the gigs and revolutionary socialists handing out little bits of paper attacking Red Wedge. There was an anarchist initiative called Black Wedge which Joe Strummer did a gig for. Joe said, ‘I would play for Red Wedge but I’d rather play for Green Wedge.’ He didn’t care if it was Thatcher or Kinnock who implemented it.
NEIL KINNOCK The only thing I’d give Maggie Thatcher credit for is that either through arrogance or through dogma or through stupidity she used to frequently announce that she was there to crush out socialism.
PHILL JUPITUS Socialism is about passion whereas I think Conservatism is about pragmatism and duty and doing as you’re told and not questioning things. That’s what always appealed to me about Red Wedge: at its best it questioned the status quo, the way youth were treated, the way wealth was apportioned throughout the country.
PAUL WELLER I [was] a socialist not only by my thoughts, but by my actions as well, and what I [did] with my money and how I rechannelled it. I can see there are contradictions, but we [had] to start somewhere.80 I don’t believe that a human being’s responsibility is to keep up his payments on his television, or that he cleans his car once a week. I’m sure there’s got to be more to it than that. I’m not saying that everybody should come to a concert and attend it like it was a political rally. But there’s no reason why you can’t do both things at the same time. I can’t see the dichotomy between entertainment and serious messages. Look at Billy, probably 80 per cent of his material [was] love songs. But he [led] by his actions and his example.81
CATHAL SMYTH Once one’s privileged one has a responsibility of privilege to do the right thing. You have to be giving something back, even if it’s respect for someone’s opinion or their space.
NEIL SPENCER Thatcher had defined Britishness. She flew the Union Jack. So people who didn’t want to be part of Thatcher didn’t want to be part of the flag. Suddenly nobody was English. Everybody said, ‘Actually, my cultural identity is more complicated than that; my parents were Jewish immigrants . . .’, ‘Well, I’m not really English because I’m black . . .’, ‘I’m not really English because I’m Irish . . .’ But some of us had nowhere to go. I was the last Englishman standing. ‘We’re English. Sorry.’ Belonging to this nation had to be redefined so one wasn’t ‘the enemy within’. I thought there was a way to make socialism sexy again but the historical weight of the USSR and the Socialist Workers Party and all those ABC alphabet soup factions rendered socialism toxic. For me, socialism was about going to a great club and meeting different kinds of people and not being tribal. Not saying, ‘We don’t have anything to do with gay people or black people,’ which was Thatcher’s attitude.
PAUL WELLER I’d read The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists early on and coming from a reactionary working-class background it opened up my mind to politics.82 There was a blinkered view of socialism that [came] from the right wing that says that socialism is going to drag everyone down to the sewer level. But the idea of socialism to me is to raise people up to a comfortable level, where the necessities are provided for. If we sat around debating whether people will vote Labour, and whether Neil Kinnock [would] just sell us short, nothing would ever get done. I [wanted] to do something about it.83
CATHAL SMYTH The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists made me see the value of unions. Pre-unions, if you fell off the ladder and broke your ankle the whole family was destitute and in the poorhouse. There was no backup system. Nothing. The unions gave the average man a voice, without which he was lost; out there in a vast ocean of vested interest that couldn’t give a frigging monkey’s about him. If the focus of society is to generate growth and if everybody is not sharing in that growth, then why are we all involved in it? If profit isn’t giving something to everyone then something is inherently wrong. When the Athenians came of age they had to take an oath that they would leave Athens better than they found it. We all know when we’re taking the piss and taking what we shouldn’t and more than we should. It was not a question of politics. It was becoming aware of one’s right to life and one’s right to be treated with dignity and respect. It was as simple as that.
PAVE WAKELING The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists confirmed everything I believed in. I was somebody who was young enough to believe that everybody else is going to act with their best intentions at all times.
ANNAJOY DAVID William Blake was a massive influence on the spiritual politics of the time and the sort of Robert Owen utopian socialist collective, using all the skills of all the people. It was the emotional side of socialism, about how creative people could be if they had the opportunity to develop to their full potential through culture. I was sending Paul books on Blake. And Billy and Neil were both big fans.
PAUL BOWER Generally, left-wing equals humourless and wearing shit clothes. When people said, ‘Oh, you’re all fancy in designer clothes’, I would say, ‘Do you think my father’s generation left the factory and hung around in jeans? No, they wore sharp suits.’
KAREN WALTER Chris Dean, who was the lead singer of the Redskins and wrote for NME as X. Moore, came in one day and he’d just bought a pair of new Lonsdale boots round the corner from Carnaby Street, and I said, ‘You’re a member of the Socialist Workers Party: how do you justify that amount on a pair of boots?’ He said, ‘Karen, we’re not against people buying Chanel coats; we just think everybody should be able to afford to buy Chanel coats.’
ANNAJOY DAVID I was always interested in fashion: in fact, more than music because my father was really into clothes. He did all the stalls at Petticoat Lane Market and took me around a lot of the buyers. I got my first pair of Levi’s when I was eleven, just before he died.
PAUL WELLER We were made to feel guilty for talking about each other’s shoes. It was like, ‘How dare you? Clothes are a bourgeois trapping.’ I love clothes.84
ANNAJOY DAVID Paul is a very humble, private guy and one of the most decent and thoughtful people I’ve ever met. And I think he quite liked the way I looked. I was very slender and my hair was quite long and I dressed very Jackie Onassis in style. Paul would get me some of the most fantastic clothes, like little late-Sixties Miss Levi trousers and tops. I loved scooters and got a Lambretta and Paul and his mate Paolo Hewitt would tease me about music because I wasn’t really into it. Later, I certainly had one of the best record collections in the country, thanks to them.
ROBERT HOWARD When I joined Red Wedge the artists used to take the piss out of me and say, ‘You think Red Wedge is about a haircut.’ I was very skinny, dyed hair. I was like a cross between a mod and a goth with make-up. I said, ‘I represent the Oscar Wilde School of Socialism.’ Paul was of a similar mind: flamboyance and being extrovert; there was no clash between that and your beliefs. You didn’t have to wear the clothes of rebellion or dress down to be a rebel. My belief in socialism was giving everybody the same opportunity to express themselves and be whatever they were. The Soul of Man Under Socialism was one of the greatest essays on socialism that you’re ever going to read. Are you going to slag off Oscar Wilde because of the way he presented himself? He was an aesthetic genius.
RHODA DAKAR Robert was really interesting. He was going places other people weren’t going. I was clearly from the same Oscar Wilde School of Socialism because the Blow Monkeys I got, but I wouldn’t play Billy Bragg. ‘Digging Your Scene’ was blue-eyed soul. ‘Days Like These’ was folk music.
TOM WATSON I would sing ‘Days Like These’ at the end of political events: Peace, bread, work and freedom is the best we can achieve / And wearing badges is not enough in days like these. There are a lot of blokes in the Labour Party in their forties now who could tell you that song word for word.
BILLY BRAGG ‘Days Like These’ was my key song on the Red Wedge tour. We were in a time when songs still had a crucial role to play in communicating ideas. And another key text I wrote was ‘I Don’t Need This Pressure Ron’: Neither in the name of conscience nor the name of charity / Money is put where mouths are in the name of solidarity. I was trying to articulate the contradictions and complexities of being on stage and talking down to the audience. We sing of freedom / We speak of liberation / But such chances come but once a generation. You can’t just put out a fucking record and do a gig and expect the world to change. So I’ll ignore what I am sure are the best of your intentions. Good intentions are positive but it’s actions that make a difference.
ROBERT HOWARD We can’t all be Billy Bragg but we’re all on the same side with the same message. I loved Eddie Cochrane as much as I loved Woody Guthrie. Music is about the heart as much as it is about the head. One of the most emotional concerts I’ve been to was Fela Kuti where there were no lyrics for half an hour. It was just the feeling. It’s about the intention behind the song, not specifically the lyrics, and transmitting a joyous message about humanity and human nature. That’s the job of a musician.
BILLY BRAGG All through 1979 when I was being a punk rocker in Oundle in East Northamptonshire I had a badge that said, ‘I am an enemy of the state.’ What the fuck did that mean? I was an enemy of the state getting £25 a week from the state to be an enemy of the state. I was a true believer in the Clash and I thought by buying their records and cutting my hair and wearing drainpipe trousers I was going to change the world. The Clash were naive to suggest it but I was naive to believe it. During Red Wedge I was trying to move beyond the consumerist end of the pop culture experience and get into the real activist end of it. And having been at the sharp end of the deal I now realized that wasn’t how the whole thing worked, but there was something going on because I’d felt it at Rock Against Racism. And if I could engender that feeling in the audience then that was a much better thing than just trying to get records in the charts.
ANNAJOY DAVID I went out to Italy to speak at a conference and really for the first time I saw the cross-pollination between clothes and fashion and music and socialism, and out of that they invited Red Wedge in the summer of 1986 to take part in a benefit concert for Southern African movements.
NEIL SPENCER Italian socialism clearly meant something rather nice and going to Naples, and then Reggio Emilia – ‘Red Reggio’ as it was called – was amazing because it was loads of people with really nice BMWs and fantastic food and very middle-class. As far as the Italians were concerned the tradition of socialism was not austerity and antithetical to people wearing nice clothes; everything was la dolce vita.
BILLY BRAGG Reggio Emilia was a fucking great trip. The Italians do these wonderful celebrations of socialism called Festa de l’Unità which are put on by the Communist Party to extend political ideas through culture. They were simpatico with what we were doing and the same kind of vibe as what the GLC had been doing on the South Bank. We stayed in a castle. Heaton was knocking around and he was most dismissive, and Junior wouldn’t stay in the top of the turret because he said it was haunted so they made me stay there.
LUCY HOOBERMAN We went with Working Week, the Communards, Madness and the Style Council, and there were all sorts of Italian journalists who were very dishy. Paolo Hewitt, Neil Spencer and I ran a workshop and we showed the Artists Against Apartheid [AAA] film of the Clapham Common concert.
JERRY DAMMERS The Communist Party leaders pulled up in these big flash cars with screeching brakes, all the bodyguards jumped out, and they were all wearing shades and immaculate suits. It was brilliant. The Party’s two official songs were ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon and the Special AKA ‘(Free) Nelson Mandela’ which they played over the tannoy. They were all clapping along on every beat!
NEIL SPENCER Napoli was fascinating but also shocking because it was so poverty-stricken and criminal. We’d done the gig on Saturday night and then there was a fantastic meal at this wonderful old-school restaurant. People stayed up to the small hours and then Sunday morning, get on the fucking coach; get to the fucking airport or else. And then someone realizes Paolo’s not out of bed. We go back into the hotel and he’s completely gone to the world; one of Working Week’s roadies went WHOOSH and pulled everything into the bag. The room was cleared in sixty seconds and Paolo was dragooned onto the coach. We were a whisker away from missing the flight.
PAUL BOWER I was floating around somewhere in the middle by the summer of 1986, drinking too much and increasingly feeling it was all getting on top of me. I went away for a few weeks to Spain where there was an attempt by some socialist musicians to get something similar going to Red Wedge called ‘Dinero Rojo’ which means ‘Red Money’. They understood ‘wedge’ not through El Lissitzky but ‘wedge’ as in the cockney for cash. It lasted for three months and then everybody fell out.
PAUL HEATON It’s really important for people to know that if there ever was ‘our system’ we’d have a laugh. It’s not going to be Stalinist. I was from a working-class background where you’re supposed to go on stage and be an entertainer and make people laugh, smile, and grin. The Housemartins, lyrically, were in your face, but the songs were very melodic and it fitted in with getting the message across because I thought, ‘Who’s going to listen to me if I’m just droning along?’ But with bands like the Redskins there was a lot of shouting and not much smiling to be done.
KAREN WALTER I was very close to Chris Dean and he was always telling me about his band, the Redskins. I remember going to see them for the first time and I thought they were amazing. We all loved Chris but he was quite suspicious of Red Wedge and suspicious of the Labour Party and their motives.
NEIL SPENCER Chris was a really good subeditor at NME. He understood language. He was a good bloke but obsessed with an absolute position. The moment he started doing the Redskins you weren’t having a discussion any more. The Trots were like a sect. They were never going to sign up for Red Wedge. They always hated the Labour Party more than the Conservatives.
JOHN BAINE The Redskins were a logical extension of Dexys Midnight Runners, only with great politics. They took the skinhead thing and it was focused and direct. Chris was strange and awkward but he wrote great songs. ‘Keep On Keeping On’ about the Miners’ Strike and ‘The Power Is Yours’, a love song to the working class. I’ve never known anybody more totally, obsessively political. He couldn’t switch off at all. Take no heroes only inspiration.
TINY FENNIMORE The Redskins dressed in Doc Martins, Harrington jackets and had shaved heads. It reflected back to the hard working-class original skinhead look and, thanks to bands on 2 Tone, had never really gone away. I was a fan but then they did a Redder Wedge night at the Mean Fiddler in Harlesden. It was disappointing – Chris and Billy had grown up together on stages during the Miners’ Strike and they had a fondness and respect for one another. Chris began to criticize Billy’s political position when I felt we should be working together. He would say things like, ‘Billy’s acting as Neil Kinnock’s publicity agent.’
BILLY BRAGG The Redskins were kicking us in the shins all the time. There was ‘The Great Debate’ in Melody Maker in the week of the first tour with Paul Weller, Jerry Dammers, Clare Short and me versus the Tory MP for Derby North, Greg Knight, Stewart Copeland of the Police, and Chris Dean who was sat on the same side of the table as the Tories. I was yelling at him, ‘Chris, look who you’re sitting with. Can you not see what you’re doing?’ He wasn’t having any of it. I said, ‘If Red Wedge was as controlled by the Labour Party as you are by the SWP I wouldn’t even join it. Where’s your independence? It’s the party line, party line.’ The SWP had a tight rein on the Redskins.
JOHN BAINE The tragedy was when Chris’s mentor, Tony Cliff from the Socialist Workers Party, told them that it was time to stop playing music and start selling newspapers outside factories because what they were doing wasn’t as important as directly contacting the organized working class.
BILLY BRAGG When they split up they had to write a mea culpa in the Socialist Worker. It was like a Stalinist show trial. The media were always trying to find people against Red Wedge. Poor old Gary Numan was always being put up against me to argue on the telly. I used to feel sorry for him. His idea to vote Tory was based on the idea of being a small business. It wasn’t ideological. If they threw all the Tory voters out of the charts back in those days there wouldn’t be many of us left.
PAUL HEATON I was asked to a Red Wedge meeting by Andy MacDonald and Juliet at Walworth Road. The room was set out with a series of tables going round in a square so everybody was facing the middle. But right from the start I wasn’t sure. There were people without any shoes or socks on and a lot of musicians I didn’t recognize. And there were a lot of very posh people, which was a real surprise coming off the back of the Miners’ Strike. I said, ‘Could I ask one question? Are we including nationalizing the record industry?’ And all the faces dropped: ‘Well, I’m not sure we can have that.’ I was told that was not something we were here to discuss, but was I interested in getting involved? ‘No,’ was the answer. I sat around for a bit and as soon as I could I got out. They weren’t going to accommodate my opinions on the country.
KAREN WALTER There were a few people who came and thought it was people messing around not quite knowing what they were doing. Unless you’d been to a few meetings and been to the smaller steering committees, groups as well and seen how things filtered through then you might feel like we weren’t actually getting anywhere.
ROBERT ELMS The minute you got sucked into it: people taking minutes and talking in this terminology, it was antithetical to musicians and writers and nightclub people. These are people who would have been very happy standing on picket lines or singing protest songs but you could just feel the will to live seeping into the walls of this rather old-fashioned committee-bound Labour Party with people nodding off in the corner of the room. There is an uneasy alliance always between the visceral politics of pop music and the perhaps inevitably organized rather stultifying politics of political parties.
PAUL HEATON I should have asked for the abolition of the monarchy but as soon as they said no to nationalization I realized I wasn’t in the right room, so to speak. There was something suspicious about it. I’m not saying they were, but I might have seen it as ‘worthy southerners’. But mainly I didn’t want to pin our flag to the mast. It was the same with Militant. You just wanted to tickle them under the chin and say, ‘Look, stop being so bloody serious and have a laugh.’ I’ve discussed nationalizing the record industry many times since: ‘Here are our songs. Take them if you want. They’re worth quite a bit of money to this country.’ It would be simply putting the state in charge and it would mean the income would go to us rather than private companies. And instead of us going over to places like Belgium alone and having some drugged-up record company idiot working for us, we’d be representing the country and be exported like you would British coal or British oil; the government would be trying to get people to buy its music.
CATHAL SMYTH Bollocks! Madness set Zarjazz up as a socialist label. All the artists were in a sense misfits and came from awkward, troublesome origins and we tried to give them a leg up. We gave out free demo time but were naive about contracts, naive about people doing the right thing, naive about what makes a good record. It didn’t work. We thought people were human and would follow the goodness for others. They didn’t. We were not record men. We were artists and we made mistakes. Principles are hard to enforce.
ANNAJOY DAVID Paul’s idea to nationalize the music industry was an interesting argument but what did I know about the music industry? That was for the artists to talk about. Three million unemployed was quite enough to be concerned about; and nuclear weapons; and the anti-apartheid movement.
BILLY BRAGG The Soviet Union had one record label called Melodiya. It wasn’t a good model. A nationalized industry would mean having a committee who decided who made records. Suppose it was a Tory government? Red Wedge had to meet the Labour Party halfway. Politics is all about the art of compromise.
JUNIOR GISCOMBE There was a TV Eye debate between Billy and Miles Copeland, who was Sting’s manager, and Miles was saying, ‘When you listen to these artists, when you listen to a Paul Weller song and he talks about the class conflict, he perpetuates the myth that people are divided according to class. They perpetuate the evils of the British system and create a climate that is negative.’
BILLY BRAGG I said to Miles, ‘These ideas are not compatible with sitting back, becoming rich and going on Top of the Pops every other week. If they’re going to have any meaning I’ve got to match the songs with action, and that’s what Red Wedge gives the opportunity to do.’
•
PHILL JUPITUS The general election was announced for 11 June 1987 so the Move On Up comedy and music tours felt they were towards a purpose because they were part of an actual campaign.
BILLY BRAGG The first tour is what defined us. It was our big splash. Who are we? We’re Red Wedge. BANG! And then ‘Move On Up – Go! For Labour’, the marginal constituencies tour in late spring 1987, represented our attempt to take that out to as many people and different places as possible. It was to get away from the idea that Red Wedge was just rock stars for Labour. We took in twenty-eight dates and over fifty parliamentary seats trying to bolster the youth vote in places like Bristol, Oxford, Wrexham, Merthyr Tydfil, Newport, Shepton Mallet and Southampton. We were trying to live up to Muriel Gray’s criticisms on The Tube.
PHILL JUPITUS I was DJ’ing and MC’ing. One of the first dates was at Bay 63 in West London. It was a really big deal because it was the first time that Matt Johnson from The The had gigged in London in an age. He played three or four songs and was off really quickly; people were like, ‘Fuck!’ Lorna Gee did a set and her manager said to me, ‘You’ve got to play this track for her and then she will dub along, like a selector for a reggae singer.’ I played the wrong track and all the irate The The fans were going, ‘What are you doing?’ I remember looking across to Lorna’s crew and going, ‘Jah Porky play again?’ and they pissed themselves. All night her entire guest list was calling me Jah Porky.
PAUL HEATON Billy said to me, ‘Leeds is looking incredibly narrow. Any chance you’ll do the gig? It’s just about getting people out and voting against the Tories.’ I said, ‘Yeah, fair enough. We’ll do it.’ I went with Colin Burgon, the candidate for Elmet, to the Whinmoor Estate near where I was born, and walked around. I remember Billy was holding a baby. I realized then I better not do any more of this because I’d got too much of a big mouth. They didn’t want to destroy the monarchy and I did. They didn’t want revolution and I did. Red Wedge had good intentions but I thought, ‘Who on earth would want to listen to me telling them what to do?’
TOM ROBINSON There was a homophobic smear campaign against Chris Smith who was the first openly gay MP. He had a majority of 363 in Islington South and Finsbury, so we went to the town hall specifically with Lloyd Cole, Matt Johnson, the Communards and Glenda Jackson. If we had any effect on Chris’s election victory that would be worth the whole campaign for me: that we came together to support a beleaguered gay Labour MP; fantastic.
PHILL JUPITUS At Wolverhampton Civic Hall, I remember Captain Sensible from the Damned walking around with a brown-paper bag just eating sugar snap pods and then ending up shirtless lying on his back being groped by a woman. Annajoy wanted me to play ‘Move On Up’ but I didn’t have it. She was going, ‘Porky, we’ve got to play that. You’ve got to get a copy.’ Then when the house lights came up I put on ‘(Free) Nelson Mandela’ and nobody left the room. The whole crowd stood there and sang Free Nelson Mandela and danced to it. All the techies and the crew were shrugging at me. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen that at a gig. It was magical.
TRACEY THORN Everything But The Girl did Nottingham Royal Court with the Style Council, the Blow Monkeys, Billy Bragg, Junior, Lorna, Black Britain and Dave Wakeling. Glenys Kinnock was backstage and she gave me her little red rose badge to wear on stage. I had been admiring it on her and as I went on she said, ‘Go on. Wear it.’ I tried to keep it after but she wanted it back.
BILLY BRAGG They put on the poster at Nottingham ‘surprise guest’. Who the fucking hell could the surprise guest be? Prince!
PAVE WAKELING I was honoured beyond belief that Paul Weller invited me to play the show. When I asked Roger he said, ‘When people have got money they ought to vote Conservative,’ so Junior Giscombe played Ranking Roger. We did a roasting version of ‘Stand Down Margaret’: Billy was on my right, Glenys played the tambourine and Paul was smiling at me all night. On the train home the local Labour MP was absolutely hammered and was gargling political rhetoric and staggering around the train. We were like, ‘Oh my God, we thought pop groups were bad enough. What are we getting into bed with here?’
TRACEY THORN I’d absorbed a lot of slogans and ideals that I couldn’t always back up with actual facts and knowledge and I do remember worrying at the Day Event that we were all making ourselves very prominent, making a big fuss about politics and that I’d get caught out. I was sensitive to accusations that pop musicians shouldn’t be dabbling in stuff they don’t know; sometimes I’ll have an opinion and then I’ll read something and go, ‘Oh God, actually, no.’ So there are gaps in your knowledge or weaknesses in your argument and it’s unsettling to have that pointed out to you. And there were objections on grounds like, ‘How is pop music going to change anything?’ or, ‘You shouldn’t vote for a party just because Paul Weller tells you to,’ or, ‘Should young people be listening to people just because they like their records; should they not be finding out their political information through more reliable sources?’
RHODA DAKAR I had moved to Leicester so when the tour came to the university I hung out with the Blow Monkeys. We went to an Asian Neighbourhood Centre with Keith Vaz, where there was a problem with the guitarist, Brian Bethell. They were saying to him, ‘You’re NF.’ ‘Me? What makes you say that?’ ‘You’ve got red laces in your boots.’ We were trying to stifle our laughter: ‘What? Red laces in your boots mean you’re NF? Really? Well, not where we come from.’ They were finally convinced that he just wore red laces in his boots to be a little outré. And then Keith leaned over to me and behind his hand he said, ‘It’s all right, when we get elected we’re closing this place down anyway.’ I thought, ‘You bastard.’
ROBERT HOWARD Keith Vaz seemed to be doing it through gritted teeth and there was some hostility from the audience. These were kids probably living on council estates looking at you going, ‘You’re just a pop star living in a nice house in London. What do you know about it?’ You’d have to justify it and say, ‘Three years ago I was on the dole. It doesn’t change what you believe in and what you think’s going on.’ The question was always, ‘How can you support a political movement like this, directly?’ And the answer was always, ‘Things are so bad that the first thing we need to do is get Thatcher out.’ I was a believer in first getting your hands on the levers of power and change from within. They were desperate times. I felt that Conservatism was contrary to human nature and at its core was this equation of the survival of the fittest: ‘There’s no such thing as society’, just individuals; winners and losers. You don’t inspire people through fear. I didn’t see that humanity could evolve that way. You do it through hope. I self-financed a four-page leaflet called Register to Vote which said on the front cover, ‘How can you complain about the state of the nation; your vote cast is your only salvation.’
TINY FENNIMORE There were some very angry young people out there and a lot of despair. We really did tap into the fact that people felt they were not being heard and they were losing their opportunity for a life.
BILLY BRAGG In Wrexham someone stood up and said, ‘We don’t need the Labour Party here, Billy. We need guns.’ I thought, ‘Fuckin’ hell.’ It was pretty rough in places where the de-industrialization had already started.
ANNAJOY DAVID I kept a diary of the tour: ‘Bristol – group of twenty on Youth Training Schemes with visibly crushed self-confidence. Forest of Dean – first large gig in three years . . . Labour coaches provided to bring people from the other villages and local Tories demanding we take the Red Wedge banner down! Leeds – parts of Whinmoor Estate really run down and inadequate community centre. Hackney – Africa Organization with Billy, Lorna and Diane Abbott – 250 people of all ages, predominantly black, crucifying Tory candidate on dealing with a racist police force, the housing crisis. Worcester – distrust of all politicians. Visit to Crypt Youth Club in Wolverhampton cancelled because management decided Red Wedge was too political. Students in Coventry really disappointed not to meet Billy since Labour Party had publicized the event using his name. Coalville – young people initially hostile and suspicious of a potential royal visit by right-on pop stars. Atmosphere altered when candidate Sue Waddington seen to be more interested in listening.’
PETER JENNER The tour was something radically different but it was really hard to make it work. There wasn’t a continuity of artists. It was all sorts of odds and ends and different people and the local parties didn’t know how to promote it or have connections with the young people. You’d go to Lydney Town Hall and there wouldn’t be many people because no one knew it was on. Trying to get into a local audience from the London music industry, it’s very hard to get some traction.
BILLY BRAGG As a thirteen-year-old white working-class schoolboy from Essex I listened to Marvin Gaye singing ‘Abraham, Martin And John’ and connected in some way with the civil rights struggle. So if Marvin Gaye had come to my town and said, ‘We’re having a meeting about the assassination of Martin Luther King,’ would I have gone? You’re sure as fuck I would have done. They were extraordinary events and some of the MPs got it and others were a little bit baffled. You got some real, great, local passion from people and local activists and we’d have to referee a debate between them and the local MPs.
NEIL KINNOCK If you’d just had a panel of three or four political speakers there would have been an audience of no more than ten. You’d be bloody daft to even try. But with Billy and Porky the Poet and Attila the Stockbroker it was full. ‘Bloody hell! They’re coming to our area. It’s free. Let’s go and see what they have to say.’ That defined it, really. A piece of music can say more in ten lines than a speech can in 1,000 words.
•
ANNAJOY DAVID Out of all of our ideas over two years – the tours, the Day Events, the alliances abroad, the meetings, all the subgroups – a twelve-page pamphlet, Move On Up: A Socialist Vision of the Future was written in the lead-up to the general election. It spelt out the consequences to young people of a third term of Tory government and described our ideas for a socialist vision for the twenty-first century.
BILLY BRAGG The Red Wedge manifesto was the final victory of us and our own ideas. And it was endorsed by Kinnock.
NEIL KINNOCK I wrote the introduction: ‘To be young should be very heaven. Too often for too many it’s very hell . . .’ The manifesto gave us a chance to emphasize this point about Red Wedge being very much two-way. We didn’t want them to hang party cards round their necks. If we were going to create a more liberal, tolerant, opportunity-filled, productive, efficient society and economy, it’s not going to be done because we’ve got five million members of the Labour Party. It was going to be done because twelve million people understood what we were doing and agreed enough to vote for us. I finished by saying, ‘I’m certain that when there’s a Labour government elected Red Wedge will go on pressing for the voice of young people to be heard loud and clear in the planning and policymaking of that government. And we’ll be listening and putting ideas to work.’
ANNAJOY DAVID Neil Spencer wrote up most of the manifesto and I wrote a lot of the policies – with the help of young writers like Paolo Hewitt and Marek Khan – about employment and jobs, housing, education, defence and human rights, and ‘getting fresh – fight for your right to party’. There wasn’t just one line. It was a group of artists all coming together so our policy emerged organically. I hadn’t been to university. My skills were very particular and I tried to pull that together and develop a political narrative. I could see what was happening in Britain and that we needed a counterculture that stood up and held a mirror for a generation. The artists would have long political discussions around popular culture, about CND, about the anti-apartheid movement, the riots, the Falklands War, youth unemployment and about what Labour should do when it came into government. We were asking, what country did we want to live in? What was Britain going to look like in the future?
NEIL SPENCER It was time a few fundamental questions were raised about fairness and justice. It wasn’t a bunch of slogans or glib phrases. It was down to political and moral ethics. We wanted Red Wedge to introduce long-term socialist ideals – not this partisan, greedy society that Mrs Thatcher and the rest of the Tories had introduced – and build something from the disgrace we found ourselves in. It was proper politics. There was a launch at Ronnie Scott’s. I was quite nervous because you’re being held accountable and held up to scrutiny. When you’re the editor of NME, it’s armour because it’s a successful music paper, but being a press officer for Red Wedge and mixing it up with the big boys like the Daily Mail and the Daily Express was a different game. I certainly had pre-match nerves. There was some hostile questioning but the document wasn’t challenged.
TINY FENNIMORE As press officers, we would think we were doing brilliant things and every day we would look at the Murdoch press who would be saying something completely different. Neil Kinnock was a really nice guy but I thought it would be uphill to get a Labour government with him as leader; he was too working-class and most Mail readers in the south wouldn’t vote for him.
TOM ROBINSON I remember Kinnock being more physically impressive in the flesh than he appeared to be on television, but it was difficult to envisage him as prime minister. Thatcher had too much of a grip on the country. She was still in the post-Falklands invulnerability. She had changed the nature of what the country was and ground down those who opposed her so relentlessly that there wasn’t the stomach for risking a protest vote, for the majority of the population. It was only eight years on from the Callaghan government and that was nothing to think back on.
TOM SAWYER The Tories hated Neil. There was no way that the ruling class was ever going to have a Welsh working-class man with an accent as well. They were out to get him. And although he was a really clever man it did get to him. Neil knew what it was like to be poor and he wanted to help people from his class background.
BILL GILBY Neil provided a bridge between the old failed regime and a stable ground for the next leader, John Smith. He played a critical role in making Labour electable again. It was only four years after ’83 and there was so much work to do. I had a long-term view.
COLIN BYRNE In ’83 Thatcher had trotted out Kenny Everett at a Young Conservatives rally shouting, ‘Let’s bomb Russia’, and some other godawful comedians – Bob Monkhouse and Jimmy Tarbuck – and you just thought, ‘If that’s what they’re doing we’ve got to do something a lot cooler.’ So ’87 was the first time Labour actually campaigned with a bit of style. Red Wedge was focusing us on what gave us credibility with young people, like Neil Kinnock on the front page of NME. And the Party election broadcast was filmed by Hugh Hudson who had directed Chariots of Fire.
JOHN NEWBEGIN The election broadcast was all about Neil and his personal vision for the future of Britain. Everybody called it ‘Kinnock the Movie’. It was mocked by the Tory press but it was a complete game-changer: Neil and Glenys walking hand in hand along the cliffs of the Gower Peninsula with ‘Jerusalem’ pumping in the background. It was not some politician in an oak-panelled office sitting behind his desk telling you what his party was going to do. The whole campaign had a different energy and style about it. The image in the press was of a really dynamic, energetic organization full of ideas. The rallies were fantastic. We had good advance teams. We had a really good press operation. And Red Wedge was all part of that.
PHILL JUPITUS I was so sure we were going to win because I had spent six months with nobody but Labour activists. I read the Guardian and I had been completely and utterly sequestered away from the wider world. I was doing the gigs and living a fake sort of reality. This is how fired up I was: on the day before the election I went to the local Labour branch office in Shadwell in East London where I was living, and said, ‘Do you need any help? Is there anything I can do today?’ It was like the ‘who the fuck are you?’ face we got in Walworth Road when Red Wedge first arrived. They said, ‘You can go out door-knocking.’ So I went round to the mainly Bengali community saying, ‘Have you voted today?’
ASHTAR ALKHIRSAN I was living on Walworth Road on the Heygate Estate, just a bit further up from the Labour Party HQ, and campaigning and knocking on people’s doors trying to get them out to vote.
ANGELA EAGLE I was going round in Battersea and being told that Labour was ‘only for the blacks and the queers’.
TOM WATSON I was the youngest member of staff by about twenty years so they used me on Labour’s first-time voter leaflets, called ‘It’s your first vote. The Conservatives would rather you didn’t use it.’ Four million young people had the vote for the first time in the ’87 general election.
JOHN NEWBEGIN There was a fantastic buzz. If you’re on the inside of a campaign you’re surrounded by all the energy and you’re meeting people who are voting for you: ‘Yeah, we’re going to win.’ Nobody goes into an election without a partial belief that it’s winnable. And of course, there were many moments during that campaign of looking at the polls every day and thinking, ‘Maybe we will do it.’ But heart of hearts, most people recognized it would be a two-stage process to get a Labour government; that ’87 would repair the damage of ’83 and present a radical new image of the Labour Party but it would take a second election to win a majority.
RHODA DAKAR On the evening of the election we all went out to the Mean Fiddler in Harlesden. It was organized by Annajoy and Billy and we watched the results in horror.
NEIL SPENCER People were crying into their drinks as the results came through. A 3.2 per cent swing to Labour, but the Tories were still left with a 102-seat majority.
BILLY BRAGG The momentum had been with us. We believed we could beat the Tories. It was a real disappointment. I was walking home to my flat in Acton in the early hours looking at people in the streets and thinking, ‘How could you have done that?’
KAREN WALTER I was with friends at a flat in Westbourne Grove. We sat up all night watching it and just couldn’t believe it. I’ve never felt so completely gutted. It was demoralizing; and the next day just thinking, ‘What do you do now?’
TINY FENNIMORE I remember waking up the following morning and we had subsidence in our flat in Camden. The assessor was coming round and he was going to tell us whether we were going to get the insurance money or not. He saw how depressed we were and said, ‘What’s the matter?’ We were saying, ‘We lost the election. We’re heartbroken.’ I think he felt so sorry for us that he signed off the insurance.
STEVE WHITE We’d done a song called ‘Right To Go’ which I’d written some of the lyrics to: You know a third term’s going to cost the earth, but Thatcher had it sewn up at that point. The tide against Kinnock was so massive and Labour was still suffering massive divisions. Although we spurred a lot of youngsters to think about it, the election was being fought in the heartlands of Daily Mail readers. We reached out to our demographic but the outcome of the election was in the hands of people who probably didn’t even know what Red Wedge was.
CLARE SHORT It was always the minority who voted for Thatcher but that’s the British system. People didn’t believe that we knew what to do. So although people increasingly thought there was something wrong in the country, they couldn’t quite trust Labour. People say, ‘It’s governments who lose elections, not oppositions who win them.’ I think that’s broadly true.
TOM SAWYER At the end of the day the voters didn’t think Neil was a credible prime minister. The electorate did like the fact that he sorted Militant out and he was a tough leader, but we still had a non-nuclear defence policy and the Tories played that really hard: ‘Vote Labour and lose your defences.’ We were also anti Common Market. Those things went against us.
NEIL KINNOCK I was supposed to be a raging lefty from the valleys who went round smacking people in the gob. I got elected in October 1983 and the miners’ work-to-rule started in November. The strike came in March of 1984 and lasted for twelve months. It finished almost exactly two years before the 1987 election. It was such an understandable distraction for the whole movement and we got virtually no policy momentum going in that time. In those circumstances victory was out of sight. I had said to my team after ’83, ‘This is going to be a two-innings match.’ Wounding Thatcher’s majority was a possibility and in my view we did about half of what we needed to do. I said, ‘If we can gain forty-two seats it’s a bloody miracle.’ We actually gained twenty seats and then the next twenty-two Tory seats the total majority of votes was 4,000; that’s how bloody close we came. But never in my wildest dreams did I think we could win the election. The size of the task was too big and the Labour movement took so bloody long to get used to the idea that we had to change. It took another defeat for people to start really waking up to that.
LARRY WHITTY I don’t think there was any way we could have won the election, frankly. In the first election poll the SDP–Liberal Alliance was ahead of Labour. The commentators were infatuated by them. Three years earlier the future of politics was being written about as David Owen and Shirley Williams. The fact that the Labour Party were in with a shot in the election was a bit of a surprise.
ANNAJOY DAVID It’s a really hard question to answer why Labour lost the election. A lot of the people who were particularly badly affected by Thatcherism were not registered or didn’t vote. They were still completely disenfranchised and disconnected. There’s not just one answer. The country’s mindset was not ready enough to move on to something new. There was also a really hostile media. But the youth vote of Labour did go up drastically. That is a fact.
TINY FENNIMORE It was a bitter moment for us all but more young people voted, which was the main thing Annajoy and I were banging on about. And there was a 7 per cent swing amongst eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds to Labour which people like the press office and Larry Whitty credited to Red Wedge. We were getting closer to our goal. But even if Labour had got a 7 per cent swing everywhere we still wouldn’t have won the election. And after ’87 there was an incremental swing in the youth vote until Blair got in.
NEIL KINNOCK It may be true that more kids voted Tory but people who are made to feel insecure do not naturally or necessarily swing to the left. The whole of history will show you that those people cling onto Nurse and are naturally more Conservative for fear of something worse, unless they get really bloody angry. What appears to be the appealing stability of having people in charge who are ‘born to rule’, they learn, is a fallacy. The other factor is, whilst the youth element was very high it never affected the majority, so those who were in occupations felt that they had a vested interest in maintaining the existing order.
ANGELA EAGLE Labour had a good campaign and people thought we ought to have done better but the Party had been split by the SDP and our collective nervous breakdown at the beginning of the decade. We didn’t reform the Party enough and we were up against a very slick, very well-funded, sophisticated PR machine with huge propaganda outlets. The Conservatives got another huge working majority and after the election had carte blanche to indulge in all of their bigotries. And that’s what happened.
