BILLY BRAGG The night after the general election I was on After Dark on Channel 4 and as it went to the adverts Teresa Gorman, who had just won the Conservative seat in Billericay, leaned across the table and said, sotto voce, ‘You and your kind are finished. We are the future.’ She was so smug. And because she was Essex I took it personally. Then she accused me of being a fine example of Thatcherism. I said: ‘I am a fine example of Thatcherism but I still chose to vote Labour because I realize I have a responsibility to other people in society and to take some of my wealth and redistribute it. I believe that individualism is essential to socialism but from a collective base. I had the opportunity to be an individual because I was educated collectively, not because my parents had privilege and sent me to be educated. And that individualism came out because of the opportunities I got from the welfare state; because my health care was free; because I got free meals at school. I believe that most people in this country will not have the opportunity to express the individualism I believe is central to socialism.’
KAREN WALTER I don’t know how Billy managed to do it. The wind had been knocked out of our sails.
HILARY CROSS ’87 was a massive disappointment for Red Wedge because the election had been such a focus. But despite the feeling of abject misery there was still so much anti-Thatcher feeling and there were still so many battles to be fought on so many fronts. And we were young. We still wanted to defeat this feeling that Britain was all about Thatcherism. All those issues in the sixties: CND, women’s rights, gay rights, abortion rights, were still relevant twenty years later. Some of those battles had been won but they were being undermined again and eroded as part of Thatcher’s right-wing agenda. It was a continual battle about civil rights and justice and equality and the voice of the common people.
RHODA DAKAR Just because you don’t achieve what you’re after immediately it doesn’t mean you stop trying: ‘Oh, I pushed the door, but it won’t open.’ You have to keep at it. We didn’t lose the election. They lost it. Kinnock was out of ideas. We got Keith Vaz elected. And Diane Abbott, Paul Boateng and Bernie Grant all got in. It was a significant move forward. So it was like, ‘What are you going to do?’
HILARY CROSS So a lot of the post-election momentum went into Well Red. I became the editor but felt it was important that it was not just seen as Red Wedge’s mouthpiece – in fact, more people read a copy than ever went to a Red Wedge concert. Well Red had to be a popular youth magazine that was thought-provoking and encouraged debate. There was no point preaching to the converted because the converted were such a small group. We said, ‘We’ve got to broaden this culturally to talk about a wider diversity of issues – music, art, fashion, sport, film, history, internationalism – which might not be on Labour’s agenda.’ We made sure the politics was always there above the surface but not overbearingly. But the Labour Party was still really important because it was the only possible chance of getting rid of Thatcherism.
RHODA DAKAR They invested in us more after that. Before, it was all big meetings at Labour Party headquarters, and after there were a lot of smaller meetings, more focus groups, and side meetings. People like Giles Radice, who was writing policy, would be presented to us, or the shadow ministers of Trade and Industry and Youth and Culture. And that’s when we started going into the Shadow Cabinet Office. That was quite significant. Our status was being elevated. Although you couldn’t sit in Neil Kinnock’s chair, the one with two arms. ‘I’m sorry, that’s Neil’s chair.’ ‘Oh, OK. Shall I sit on one of these, then?’ ‘Yes, please.’ I sat opposite and Neil talked about football: ‘Did you see the match last night, lads?’ And then Dr Robert, who was the biggest fan of all of us, said, ‘We haven’t come here to talk about football.’ It was so funny.
NEIL KINNOCK We were able to illustrate our policy commitment by reference to these youngsters, but accusations I never got. I expected it. I would make a presentation and then say, ‘What do you make of that? If you’ve got particular questions I’m more than happy to respond?’ Nobody said anything like, ‘If only you’d stuck with the miners,’ or, ‘You used to be a unilateralist and now you’re not.’
PAUL BOWER The day after the defeat Kinnock went straight back on the campaign trail, which was very smart of him: ‘We edge forward. Now is not the time to be downhearted.’
JOHN NEWBEGIN For Neil, the engagement with Red Wedge was because it said something about our politics. It said something about our values. It said something about what we believed. We worked with them before the election and we continued to work with them after the election. It wasn’t window-dressing.
NEIL SPENCER There was a ‘Red Wedge / Kinnock Meeting’ three months after the election in the Shadow Cabinet Office, and looking now at the agenda it reflects very well on Kinnock: ‘Regions and local government’, ‘The appointment of a parliamentary spokesperson on youth affairs’, ‘The reorganization of the youth service’, ‘Arts policy: the blank tape levy, community radio’. Kinnock knew who his friends were and realized that he was being offered a chance to get through to young people and the possibility of building a new consensus against Thatcherism. Thatcher won the election but she was beginning to lose her gloss. She was a victim of her own hubris and thought she was untouchable.
ANNAJOY DAVID I met Margaret Thatcher once, in the House of Commons. I sat in the Strangers’ Gallery during Prime Minister’s Question Time. I knew she represented everything that I disagreed with. What she believed to be important she absolutely believed with exactly the same conviction as me; that was the one thing we had in common apart from being Librans, as Neil Spencer kept reminding me, rather embarrassingly. There was a tuck shop that sold cigarettes and Bernie Grant, who was by then the MP for Tottenham, said, ‘I’ll take you to get some.’ Mrs Thatcher was coming out with a bag of alcohol and Bernie made some sort of joke to her about it and she replied something quite shrill to him. We came face to face – I remember her handbag folded very neatly over her arm – and she said, ‘Do I know you?’ And I said, ‘No, but I know exactly who you are.’ She looked at me and then walked off with her bodyguards and her husband, Dennis. It was just a little silent second: two different generations of people both believing totally in what we believed in, but opposite. It was a quite a moment.
RHODA DAKAR We were always trying to refresh Red Wedge with new blood and initiatives because inevitably it ends up being the same old same old. We had artist meetings at Solid Bond with people like Paul and Billy and Tracey still, but also newer artists like The Men They Couldn’t Hang and Attacco Decente.
ANNAJOY DAVID It was quite difficult to keep the momentum. Movements have to evolve. Everybody had other lives. They were musicians and comedians making albums and going on tours and writing shows. You’ve got to be clear about what you expect from other people.
BILLY BRAGG Winning the election was the focus, and would have been a vindication, but it wasn’t the whole purpose. But after, I was out on the road a lot in China, Mexico, Australia, Japan, everywhere, so a lot passed me by without me realizing it.
PETER JENNER Politicians are control freaks, and a bunch of crazy musicians running around was dangerous. The artists were not in the system. You couldn’t discipline them and that was why in the end Red Wedge collapsed. It wasn’t two-way. Pop music people like winners. You had to be number one and we didn’t win. Pop music is all about fashion. It’s all this year’s thing. In ’86, ’87 Red Wedge was groovy; ’88, ’89, ’90 it wasn’t groovy.
TRACEY THORN Pop music tries to regenerate itself all the time and stay fresh, and things do start to sound stale. Music goes in cycles. There is a sense that you’re constantly reacting to what was done just a few years before. The Red Wedge generation were a very forward-looking group of people. Paul Weller had said, ‘I don’t just want to be in the Jam forever,’ and that sat quite happily with his political outlook which was looking forward: ‘How can we change things? How can we progress?’
RICHARD COLES Once you get geared into pop music you become part of the thing you decried. Red Wedge was a career-enhancing thing for us in a funny kind of a way and gave us more of a profile. And of course people were buying our records and coming to our gigs and before long that changes who you are and what you do. We were in New York and we had to go to Paris to do an SOS Racisme gig with Bruce Springsteen in the Château de Vincennes. We did a political discussion programme on the same evening and I was asked why we were there. I did this rousing reply about how important it was to express our solidarity with the oppressed people and the working class and the French immigrant population. There was a right-wing commentator there and he said, ‘Richard, I sat behind you on Concorde yesterday from New York. What the hell are you doing talking about your solidarity with the working class?’ Pop stars have to be inaccessible because it’s unmanageable, the degree of interest, and that goes against the grain of solidarity.
STEVE WHITE Most career arcs in the music business are very short. I measure everything by the fact the Beatles had seven years. So from the time that Red Wedge exploded onto the scene and the trail that it blazed, it did very well. It was like a punk band that put out a couple of great singles and then they’re gone. It would have cost Paul money to do that first tour, but once that went you’re not going to be able to sell out Birmingham Odeon. Paul and Billy were a massive energy. Billy had the vision and Paul had the name, and when they stopped seeing a way forward that’s when it lost its impetus. I remember Paul saying, ‘It’s like “rent-a-politic”.’ We could have been doing political events every night of the year.
PHILL JUPITUS Fuck it: off the back of Red Wedge the Style Council took me on the road. I was doing political stuff still and there was still that sense that Paul had his heart in the right place. But that said, within two years Paul found himself without a record deal for the first time since he was seventeen and didn’t make records again until the nineties.
TINY FENNIMORE Paul came away with a bitter taste in his mouth. He was always very hostile and suspicious of the MPs and the whole political world. I don’t think Red Wedge was exploited. We knew what we were doing. We all went in with our eyes wide open.
ANNAJOY DAVID My understanding was, Paul was peed off with the politicians, not with the Red Wedge model. There is a distinction there. Paul had a lot of doubts. He questioned a lot of things. He didn’t ask to be the spokesperson of a generation. He’s very modest. He’ll always praise somebody else before himself, which is the mark of a great human being. He had a skill of pulling people behind him to produce interesting things around his music: creating a platform for other people to do things. It’s not a skill that’s easy. You wanted to get behind him but he didn’t want to be used by anyone. They were valid doubts. But at the end of the day Red Wedge was bigger than that.
PAUL WELLER I would like to do something like Red Wedge again, but not for the Labour Party. I became disheartened with it all. I still have the same views, but how do you go about it?85 Whatever misgivings I had about being involved in the Labour Party or becoming that partisan were overshadowed by the fact we should get people out thinking about politics and maybe change the way we were going in the country; naive or not.86 But I think we were used and it put me off politics. I’m not really one for joining clubs.87 I was doing a lot more before that, benefits and different projects we were involved in. And that kind of soured it all for me getting involved in the Wedge. Billy was a very amiable and very persuasive person and he kind of talked me round to that so I blame him.88
BILLY BRAGG ‘Waiting For The Great Leap Forward’ was my post-election Red Wedge song to let people know that I’ve not got all the answers and I now realize that music can’t change the world. It was a direct reference to Maoism, as a metaphor rather than an endorsement: Here comes the future you can’t run from it / If you’ve got a blacklist I want to be on it. I’d been talking about mixing pop and politics by that point for five years and what was the outcome? I was still waiting for the Great Leap Forward. Remember, I was still just a bloke doing gigs: Jumble sales are organized and pamphlets have been posted, it’s what we’d been doing. Even after closing time there’s still parties to be hosted: political parties but also piss-ups and the escape from it all. You can be active with the activists or sleep in with the sleepers: I’m not the guy that says, ‘It’s all shit. It doesn’t work. Politics is pointless.’ Our biggest enemy is cynicism. It’s cancer to the soul. Cynicism is what people turn to when they’ve given up. And I’m not talking about doubt. Never trust anybody that doesn’t have doubts because they’ll probably try and sell you a copy of Socialist Worker.
LARRY WHITTY They all felt used to some extent and they all were, to some extent. They volunteered to do something in support of Labour so the Party used it. Paul Weller was naturally suspicious of formal politics. He was one of the bigger names involved and one of the ones that people who didn’t know about the music scene would have mentioned. They were part of a cultural friendship much of which they dreamt up themselves.
COLIN BYRNE: If you’re Paul Weller or Billy Bragg you already had an artistic platform but they also wanted an impact on Britain. Politics was a useful platform for them to talk about more than just whatever they were singing about. They both gained. Paul puts too grim a face on it.
RHODA DAKAR Paul was disaffected with where the Party was going. It’s fair enough if he thought they were just pulling his chain. He admired Annajoy and she kept him on board if anyone did. And he was still coming to meetings a year after the election.
KAREN WALTER Red Wedge didn’t let anyone down. Labour did. It was frustrating that we weren’t being listened to and then new people were coming in that I didn’t trust. It was almost like the time had passed and we were treading water.
JOHN NEWBEGIN History is littered with politicians demonstrating they are totally out of touch with popular culture. Red Wedge was not just seen as a series of gigs but was actually having a real sustainable input into the development of party politics.
ANNAJOY DAVID You can start to see some really detailed political policy thinking by Red Wedge after the election. We started doing a lot more work on the ground at a local level. I pinpointed fifty-two constituencies where projects could be established, encouraged and supported. In April 1988 we launched the initiative ‘Red Wedge and the Labour Party Get Busy’ which was an attempt by Labour to find out what young people thought before policy was decided.
RHODA DAKAR ‘Labour Listens: Red Wedge and the Labour Party Get Busy’ was a joint campaign initiative to listen to and learn from young people. It was about opening up the Labour movement at a local level. We were polishing their dodgy old ideas and making it shiny and new.
ROBERT HOWARD I ended up doing press conferences with David Blunkett, who was spokesman for local government, and Neil Kinnock. We had a photo shoot and Mandelson was circling in the background in his Machiavellian way. Kinnock said, ‘Don’t worry, they always make me look like a cunt.’ I was like, ‘Oh right. Yeah.’ Often I felt out of my depth, but I was learning and I had this anger that I was able to channel through politics and identify an enemy. I wasn’t a textbook lefty. I couldn’t have quoted Keir Hardie or The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists.
COLIN BYRNE There was major-league depression. ‘Fuck, we’ve just run the most professional campaign ever and we still lose against Thatcher.’ People were having a go at Neil. The knives were out. So from the Luddite tendency it was, ‘You’ve had your chance; all you did was change the style and not the substance and we still lost.’ So Labour Listens was an attempt to come out fighting and say we must learn from this defeat. And the lesson is, ‘We don’t go back to 1983. We go forward and engage people who should vote Labour but still don’t trust us.’ I remember Peter Mandelson waxing lyrical, ‘We’re going to go out . . . we’re going to listen . . . we’re going to invite ordinary people . . .’ It was certainly based on the Red Wedge Day Events model. We wanted to be seen by the media, who were invited along, as fearless. We would listen to people who might actually say, ‘You’re crap.’
ROBERT HOWARD I knew I would get asked some serious questions and I knew that I had to answer those, otherwise it was bullshit. I did a press conference and the Independent guy thought he was going to talk to Dr Robert Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and I, Dr Robert from the Blow Monkeys, turned up. But you’d be playing these gigs then doing Day Events, and you’d think, ‘My world and your world are very different.’ I was living in a little flat above a record shop in Brixton and the record company would send round a posh car for Top of the Pops and I’d say, ‘Send it away, for God’s sake. I don’t want this shit.’
RICHARD COLES We did Top of the Pops once and there was a strike by technicians and we crossed the picket line outside Television Centre. I huddled down in the back of the limousine embarrassed and thinking, ‘There’s some anomalies in this that perhaps need to be looked at,’ but you couldn’t turn down Top of the Pops.
COLIN BYRNE At the Manchester Opera House there was a woman sat in the front row with a Tesco bag on her head and we thought, ‘Whose fucking idea was this to go and listen to lunatics?’ The Day Events with the politicians were mostly god-awful and we were all grateful to get the hell out of there and back on the train to London.
ANNAJOY DAVID Red Wedge’s end of Labour Listens was significantly successful. There was real communication between the Labour movement and groups of young people who were active locally in their communities. We wanted to make sure young people had that access to get involved in that process of change. We linked up with over thirty new project initiatives, from theatre to housing to anti-racist to music. The reality was, a lot of Labour local authorities were without the imagination and the vision, the dynamism, to develop new socialist policies on the ground. That’s why we had to develop policy ideas to give the Labour Party a push. We stumbled across a political will and acted as a catalyst to bring it to the fore.
HILARY CROSS We were invited by both Catholic and Protestant community groups to go to Ireland, where the Belfast Musicians Collective was working across the divide. It was really important to us all that we didn’t go out there and represent a Republican view and that we met kids from both sides of the divide. It was very much about what role can culture and music play to engage young people in political issues, which is why the gigs in the evening were a key part because it wasn’t just sitting down and talking about politics; it was also about enjoying yourself. And after, Billy would always come back out and sit on the stage talking to people. There was always interaction.
BILLY BRAGG I learnt more about Ireland talking to two Republican women in Derry than I’d learnt watching telly in the last twenty years. Going to Ireland was Red Wedge taking the initiative, because the Labour Party was not organized there. It was exciting but also tough trying to find bands that didn’t somewhere deep down have some element of sectarianism.
ANNAJOY DAVID I met Gerry Adams. He put his hand out to mine and I said, ‘I’ll decide if I want to shake that at the end of the meeting.’ But I understood that Sinn Féin had a lot of respect on the ground in shared communities and represented an important body of people that would later form part of the peace process. The trip was very successful and showed the importance of popular culture going into really complicated political environments and talking to musicians and theatre groups and young people’s communities and church groups on both sides to make an intervention and say, ‘We support you in your efforts to try and break down this sectarian environment.’
TOM SAWYER I was one of the architects of Labour Listens but ultimately it was a failure because the Labour Party didn’t believe in it and it just collapsed. The Party just wasn’t very good at engaging with people. The idea might have been OK in my or Neil’s mind but for most MPs it was, ‘What am I doing going to Basingstoke tonight?’ It needed a proper programme of real listening but nobody knew how to do it. I talked a lot with Pete Jenner during 1988–9. The question was, what we could both do together? I had links in the unions and he had links in the music industry. ‘How can I learn more about your world and how can you learn more about mine?’ ‘Would it be good to try this?’
ANNAJOY DAVID I prepared a paper on youth provision and Pete prepared the document ‘A Policy for Youth Arts’ with Annie Weekes. It focused on the music industry and a National Arts Service which, it stated, ‘could do almost as much to enhance people’s pleasure in their lives as a National Health Service’.
JOHN NEWBEGIN Pete was a big guy in the music business: hugely respected and a radical left progressive Labour supporter to his core. We politically saw eye to eye and Neil spent a lot of time speaking to him. But Pete is a very impatient guy: ‘Why can’t we be more outspoken?’ And the answer was, if a party was going to come from a long way behind and win an election, it had to present itself with a measured agenda which would appeal to a broad cross-section of people, not just radical young people. ‘We’ve got four years to the next election. Let’s take the whole machine apart, have a look at it, stick it back together again, and make sure we’ve really got something that does what we want it to do.’ Red Wedge was very keen that there should be a coherent youth policy and a spokesperson for youth on the front bench. We had a series of exchanges and the pressure and desire for change began to filter through into a coherent set of policies.
NEIL KINNOCK I remember the argument and that was why John was emphasizing it so bloody strongly to Peter in their exchange of letters:
Neil is anxious, as you know, that an appointment is not just a tokenistic gesture which has no real relationship to the necessary realities of parliamentary life. What he is very willing to do is to find ways in which the Red Wedge agenda for highlighting youth concerns within the Party and in public politics, which as you know he welcomes, is adequately met.
We were never in dispute about ends. Politics is often about an argument over means. I could get a queue of politicians coming through my office for three hours. Pete and Annajoy were bringing more ideas in ten minutes. My office people were under terrible diary pressure. They used to say, ‘You’ve got to prioritize.’ And I’d say, ‘I am. Get me Pete Jenner.’ The point that I’m making is that Annajoy and Pete were policy feeders.
PETER JENNER The influence on policymaking was a problem because Labour didn’t want a bunch of drug-takers and poofs and rock ’n’ rollers coming in and telling them what policy should be: ‘You stick to playing your music.’ ‘What do you know about politics?’ Trying to breach that was always very difficult.
TOM WATSON You couldn’t have Red Wedge without the silver-haired Pete Jenner. His brain was the size of a planet. Any man that organized the free Rolling Stones concert in Hyde Park has got Access All Areas. He was so unbelievably cool but also he had been up against it and knew how the world worked. He seemed like the wise old man of the industry. He understood systems and how you get change and start seeding arguments early. Annajoy would have just rung up and said, ‘Look, Neil, if you fuck this up, right . . . you’ve got to do these three things, otherwise no young person will ever vote Labour again,’ whereas Pete would have written a twenty-page document and given it to ten people to submit in parts to the policy process and Annajoy’s three points would have been addressed eighteen months later. You needed both those kinds of people.
JOHN NEWBEGIN MPs have a tendency to overpromise and artists ask too much. It’s always difficult for people outside the political machine to understand the constraints within which politicians have to work. So the fact that Red Wedge had an agenda and demands that were more radical than the mainstream agenda was no surprise. There was a balance to be struck. But there were lots of people that were suspicious and would say, ‘Who are all these pop stars? This is frivolous stuff; this is American-style politics; we don’t want it.’
LARRY WHITTY Some of the things that the Labour Party was saying, certainly on cultural issues, were very influenced by the people that Red Wedge brought forward. It was the high point of Labour being the outsiders, and after, we had to get more respectful. And that certainly cut across what the Red Wedge input was pushing us towards. Post-election, the image became more important than the respectability and the policies.
COLIN BYRNE We were starting to put the architecture in of what became New Labour.
ANDY MCSMITH Kinnock and Mandelson and the rest were focused on the ratings, not the youth vote, and the artists felt disillusioned.
PETER JENNER As the nineties loomed, Red Wedge got killed. They put Tony Blair in to be our man. I had one meeting with him and didn’t like him. There was something about him which was suspicious. He just seemed like a phoney. And he could see that we were not controllable. He was a bad guitar player and he never got it. Blair and Mandelson realized that people like me and Annajoy were not reliable, and in some sense we were tarred with all the reasons why Kinnock lost the election. Red Wedge was meant to win it. It didn’t. Therefore, let’s go on to a new agenda. It all became focus groups and polls.
CLARE SHORT Blair wouldn’t have liked it because it was dangerous. Pop music: people might swear or say something deeply radical; you’ve got to keep everything tidy and manicured.
JOHN NEWBEGIN As attention focused on the next election, Labour was beginning to develop serious thinking about the music and film and fashion industry. The new generation of MPs like Gordon Brown and Tony Blair recognized that culture had not only a social but an economic significance, and that was one of the things the Wedgies were keen to promote. Gordon issued a statement, ‘Music: Our Cultural Future’ in 1990. In the first paragraph it said,
. . . it represents the first time a major political party in Britain has published a serious, comprehensive policy for the music industry . . . there is still a widespread assumption that this is a marginal activity . . . treated by the Conservatives either as a hobby or simply a minority activity rather than as a major industry and employer . . . our document shows why that is wrong.
It was significant that it came from the Trade and Industry spokesman, not the shadow arts minister.
NEIL KINNOCK Gordon Brown’s ‘music paper’ position was a vindication in some ways of my belief in what began with Billy’s Jobs and Industry tour five years earlier. It was trying to install the idea that entertainment – creative industries, cultural industries, arts, music – were all significant contributors to the Gross Domestic Product. The idea that as a political party we should have a policy on housing or farming and not the creative industries was bloody lunatic. It was plain as a bloody pikestaff. The creative industries were employing five times as many people as the steel industry. It was daft. In 1992, four weeks before the general election, when we were in a relatively strong position in the polls, the civil service drew up papers in preparation for a Labour government, and a Minister for Youth was there, alongside revenue for the development of a youth arts. It was a vindication of Red Wedge.
NEIL SPENCER We weren’t civil servants or bureaucrats or elected councillors or elected MPs, but the very fact that Neil Kinnock thought that some of those ideas ended up in a Labour Party manifesto is vindication.
JOHN NEWBEGIN And in 1997, we set up a creative industries task force so Red Wedge was early strands of what eventually came together as a coherent policy for the creative industries.
PETER JENNER Red Wedge had an enormous amount to do with Tony Blair becoming prime minister three times running. We made that generation Labour supporters. The whole ’97 thing comes back to ’86. And a lot of the younger people who came into the Labour Party came in because of Red Wedge; people like Tom Watson and Andy Burnham. You could not be a Tory and be groovy for five or six years. Red Wedge made having a political view and being a lefty acceptable. It made people aware of how awful Thatcherism was and how we needed an alternative agenda. It shifted the whole youth thing so you couldn’t be anti-Labour.
ANGELA EAGLE The influence that Red Wedge and this cultural activity had during people’s formative years resonated through subsequent elections. There is no doubt about that.
ANNAJOY DAVID Red Wedge was an experiment. Some of it worked really well and some of it didn’t. That’s life. Artists are not politicians. They respond emotionally to listening to their fans, to have a sense of duty, a call to arms when something is failing. Anybody says to you that Red Wedge was just about a bunch of pop stars that came out for Labour, you can tell them to bugger off. The artist bit was the cherry on top of a very dense cake of important stuff. It was a platform and a funnel for a counterculture that was fundamentally against a really vicious government that essentially didn’t like people who weren’t like them.
ROBERT HOWARD What I do know is, the people that came along to those gigs, for them they were magic nights. And a few of them might have been inspired by that in the way I was inspired by Rock Against Racism.
PHILL JUPITUS It was almost like punk went that way and Red Wedge came back this way with a, ‘You need to engage with the wider world.’ That, for me, was the appeal. Labour was giving us such a visible platform. They were up for it. It was reassuring. And they were sending MPs to the gigs and seemed to be taking it seriously, but then as things went on you realized that you were becoming a cosmetic campaigning tool. It was upsetting, but the importance of what we were doing was never diminished. We had our own agenda.
ANNAJOY DAVID The central core of Red Wedge was all about young people taking a stand and saying something about how they felt about the government through culture. They had a forum to tell the Labour Party what they thought. And we helped to facilitate that. And people should not underestimate the powerful good that did. And for a while it refocused Labour and gave the Party its confidence back after the battering it had taken in ’83. It gave it a narrative and a voice again. We weren’t politicians; we were all pretty young and emotionally led, which was good. From doing the first CND Brockwell Park gig, to bands playing on the back of lorries, to DJs and having club nights, right through Red Wedge and the Miners’ Strike and the anti-apartheid concerts, there was a cultural community emerging that was very well organized and very united in purpose. If you only measure success by the result, i.e. that the left lost, then you will always be quite cynical about it.
TINY FENNIMORE When you go back to Rock Against Racism and 2 Tone, we were carrying on a tradition. We were getting our ideas into the smoke-filled corridors and they were using us to get votes. Labour culture policy changed. We influenced their green policy. There was conversation about their nuclear policy. We had managed to get onto Neil’s agenda. When I first got involved I thought we were going to change the world. We were impatient and ambitious. Now I realize that our role was to resist: the Tories push us and we push back and sometimes you manage to find a little way through and things change. It’s all influence. And even if we were just another view bringing pressure to bear on the Labour Party, that was part of the process.
ANNAJOY DAVID Red Wedge represented the counterculture conscience of a generation, and a whole generation was switched on to a view of life through a language and a culture that carries on to this day. Its impact on the Labour Party helped the Department for Culture, Media and Sport come into being in 1997, and we had helped to get Chris Smith elected, who became its first minister.
TINY FENNIMORE My husband was a special advisor at the Culture, Media and Sport Ministry during the Blair government, and his proudest moment was getting free museum entry through. Red Wedge raised that question.
LUCY HOOBERMAN The transaction of culture, of means, of knowledge is unquantifiable. I have always worked in that belief that there’s something in the live encounter that can change you as a person.
BILLY BRAGG Our highest aspiration as songwriters is to offer the audience a different perspective on politics, on relationships, on their environment, and Red Wedge was the apex of my attempts to try and see how far that could go into completely uncharted territory. We were right to try and do it and I’d definitely do it again.
PAUL BOWER Red Wedge raised morale in the Labour Party and it turned them outwards at a time of almost catatonic depression and internal warfare. But let’s not overestimate our influence. We were part of a longer story.
BILLY BRAGG You have to see Red Wedge as part of the end of the Sixties. It was the last time music took it upon itself to really try and make a difference on a big scale and change a government. Music doesn’t have that vanguard role in our culture anymore. But I’m not sure that you can look at how culture influences politics and see a scientifically measurable effect. I was at the wrong end. I was already politicized. I was driving the bus. You’ve got to ask the passengers what effect it had on them.
STEVE WHITE I still meet people that say, ‘I got into politics because I saw you at Birmingham Odeon or Newcastle City Hall. I didn’t agree with everything but it made me think.’ From that point of view it achieved quite a lot: more than some politicians did.
RICHARD COLES Pop music connects people. Songs touch people and articulate a pathos that others feel. Music performs a soundtrack of their lives at moments of intensity and meaning. The politics comes and goes but that feeling of being touched outlasts the political dynamics. Red Wedge meant more to me than having a number-one record because it was real. It was about touching people’s heart and mind and soul, and that’s what I was interested in music for.
CATHAL SMYTH Red Wedge was very healing and dignified and intelligent. I mean, fuck me, that’s amazing.
HILARY CROSS You can’t divide life from politics. It’s entwined. Life is about politics is about music is about culture is about work. The big political issues don’t just get debated in Parliament. They get debated in pubs and schools and at gigs. When you have compassion for the everyday, that journey takes you to politics. And Red Wedge recognized that the dry politics of Westminster – ‘There’s no such thing as society,’ and all the other stuff that Thatcher said – had an impact on every single thing that we did within our personal lives and brought it together in one place.
TOM WATSON For two or three years this amazing creativity gloriously exploded. Nobody quite knew where it was going to go but it was a cauldron of arts and ideas and politics. It reached people that would never have been touched by politics or culture. It was of its time but it’s a period that should be revered.
ALEX DALLAS It’s part of history: a political history, a women’s history, and an arts and culture history.
RICHARD COLES I honestly thought pop music and Red Wedge would bring down Margaret Thatcher. What I didn’t understand or see was that there was a far more profound restricting happening as a result of Thatcherism and Reaganism and neo-liberal economics. I was a middle-class boy but not exactly a pond skater on the meniscus of political ideology. I didn’t have that personal investment in class politics that Jimmy or Paul Weller did, who, to his credit, put his money back into things, and that began to be really challenging for me.
TOM SAWYER: Red Wedge lasted longer than I thought it would do. Musicians are not people who say, ‘I’ll join the Labour Party,’ and, ‘I’ll be with you for the next twenty years.’ They move on. When John Smith, and then Tony Blair, took over as leaders they didn’t have much to do with policy. It was all done.
LARRY WHITTY It’s fair comment to say Labour had learnt from what Red Wedge were doing; that you could mobilize people and use music to get people interested in politics: that’s the way you talk to the workers, that’s the way you talk to the churches, and this is the way you talk to the youth.
ANNA HEALY Politics and governing is a really hard and boring business in some ways and you can’t always deliver. Red Wedge opened us up to more creative influences and brought energy to our campaigning, together with the commitment to try and work with the local parties and engage with young people. We probably didn’t offer enough support but we recognized they were an asset.
COLIN BYRNE Red Wedge set a new precedent but it also had the birth pains of more open political engagement. It was an uneasy alliance between the cool rebellious kids and the Party establishment and exposed the natural tensions between creative forces and politics which want to control the message. Red Wedge made Labour politicians and policymakers aware that previous policies had been done in a vacuum and there had to be a way of listening and incorporating the views of young voters and getting them a real voice within the Party. They were doing pioneering work which was outside of the traditional party silo. No political party had done anything like it before. Music, where it had been political, was deemed as protest music; this was mainstream. It was bands who you could see on Top of the Pops.
TONY MANWARING There was a moment of crystallization of a new form of politics. It was brilliant and beautiful to see, and Red Wedge was reconfiguring the DNA. But I don’t think the Labour Party had the reflective learning capability to draw and learn and honour what was being done. The Party was bound to let it down in some way because there wasn’t a clear enough expectation and conversation about what ‘good’ would look like. It was much more fragmented, intuitive, responsive and reactive. That was the paradox but also the strength in the Labour movement. The answer isn’t what Red Wedge brought to the Labour Party, it’s what kind of politics we could have created together. If it had developed for another few years it would have been extraordinary.