Fifty years of Rock Against Racism

The 5th August marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Eric Clapton gig to which Red Saunders responded with the letter that started everything. DK Renton recalls those beginnings here.

This piece was first published on my substack and comes from a talk I gave back in the spring at the Marx is’ Muss conference in Berlin. I was together in a panel with a member of the RAR organising committee, the artist and designer Ruth Gregory.

This afternoon, I will celebrate one activist, who helped to shape Rock Against Racism. I mean the doctor and writer, David Widgery. Born in 1947, he contracted polio at 9. He spent months in a hospital bed, with the other children ‘crying ourselves to sleep at night’. Widgery joined the peace movement. He wrote for the school students’ U Magazine. He read the novelist Jack Kerouac. He interviewed the beat-poet Alan Ginsberg. He travelled through the United States during the 1965 Watts riots. He wrote for and edited the counter-culture magazine Oz. 

The times in which Ruth, David and their comrades built Rock Against Racism were not easy. Labour formed a government in 1974. At its start, unemployment stood at around half a million. For 40 years, governments had tried to keep everyone in work. Labour liked unemployment. Ministers hoped it would weaken the unions. By early 1976, unemployment was over a million. It remained over a million for as long as Labour stayed in office. Remember the Sex Pistols’ song, God Save the Queen. It repeats the lines, ‘No future no future’ and ‘No future for you’. Eighteen times, the song says, ‘No future.’ David Widgery wrote, 

Whole regions of Britain are slipping off the industrial map. British Leyland, Dunlop, Massey Ferguson, Singers, British Shipbuilding have announced major closures. Go to Liverpool or Wigan or Skelmersdale and see the despair in the faces.

Workers were suffering. The newspapers blamed immigrants. Racists murdered 31 black people in Britain between 1976 and 1981. The photographer Syd Shelton was another activist in RAR. He says, ‘Looking back, we forget how racist this country was and how unpopular anti-racism was as well.’

After the long, complicated, rock operas of The  Who or Queen – punk was simple. The best part of punk was the idea that anyone could make music. One fanzine, Sideburns, told its readers where to put their fingers to make an A, an E, and a G. ‘This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band.’ The fascists saw in punk a movement they could infiltrate. Punk was amphetamine quick. It was three-chord repetitions. It cut out of Rock music all black influences. Members of the entourage of the Sex Pistols wore swastikas, as if the symbol could be a fashion statement. When the Clash sang White Riot, the first listeners could not tell whether it was a racist or an anti-racist song. The rise of punk was an opportunity for anti-fascists. It was also a threat. It wasn’t just about breaking the laws of the state, but also the social values which held together the stale social democratic culture of the time. It was the counterpart in the 1970s to those ‘subversive’ cultures Gramsci had seen, 50 years earlier, fall one after another under the sway of fascism. Punk could easily have gone to the right had it not had a bunch of people intervening and shaping the movement. 

In August 1976, blues musician Eric Clapton stopped a concert. He gave a speech supporting Enoch Powell, the former Tory MP. Red Saunders wrote a letter, ‘Come on Eric … Own up. You’re rock music’s biggest colonist … We want to organise a rank and file movement against the racist poison music.’ That became Rock Against Racism.

‘We want Rebel music, street music,’ David Widgery wrote, ‘Music that breaks down people’s fear of one another’. He demanded different kinds of songs that no-one had written. ‘Crisis music. Now music. Music that knows who the real enemy is.’

Rock Against Racism produced a magazine, Temporary Hoarding. The first issue contained a poster showing a family watching the National Front on TV. ‘Don’t sit back and watch it … smash racism!’ The paper showed lines of police behind riot shields. It celebrated musicians playing live. The images were new. They were different.

For 50 years, the British left had wanted to copy the Russian Revolution. For 10 years, they’d been trying to copy the May Day general strike in France. This was something new. It was different. It was workers, it was students, and it was something else and something new. It was young people who had grown up in tower blocks. It was about putting culture in charge.

Widgery wrote, ‘The problem is not the new fascists from the old slime.’ When fascists went into a black community the people could defend themselves. The problem was the state. ‘The bigger danger is the racist magistrates with the cold sneering authority.’ It was, ‘the immigration men who mock an Asian mother as she gives birth to a dead child on their office floor.’ It was, ‘policemen for whom answering back is a crime.’

Rock Against Racism spread beyond Britain. There were RAR concerts in the United States. In Ireland, France, Belgium, Sweden, Holland, Germany and Norway. 50,000 people joined a Rock Gegen Rechts festival in Frankfurt in 1979. Anti-fascism felt like a quick march. By mobilising culture, it seemed, anti-fascists could defeat fascists everywhere.

After 1981, it became harder. Thatcher won, Reagan and Mitterrand. Anti-fascism was now a slower battle – town by town, venue by venue. A slog. Music became something that anti-fascists did. It was part of our shared collective knowledge. It was how we built movements. The cultural anti-fascism of the 1970s brought the masses into politics. The cultural anti-fascism of the 1980s was about defending counter-cultures from attack.

In the 1970s, new technologies gave people a new freedom to make music. The consumers of culture became its producers. Widgery wrote that the ‘general trend’ of the 1970s was ‘towards conservatism’. But those downtimes were ‘punctuated by repeated radical outbursts’. He told the generations who came after that they shouldn’t try to copy the 1970s. ‘The dole demoralises, constant policing intimidates, no money’s no fun.’ The 1970s had been like the 1930s, a time of sweet tea and Hollywood movies. Palliatives for depressed people.

Rock Against Racism won a political victory, he wrote, against history. RAR succeeded despite the rise of what we now call neoliberalism. The book Widgery wrote about this period he titled Beating Time. Sometimes movements have to fight under conditions which are unfavourable. Even in down times, you can still make history.

The culture politics of today are different from the 1970s. But what hasn’t changed is the same basic calculation. In any society, the same numbers of people will support the left and the right. If the left are going to win, we will need to bring more people onto our side.

That means talking to people who don’t care about politics. We need to find a way of moving them into action. One way to change the balance of forces is by looking to culture. ‘In periods of prolonged recession,’ Widgery wrote, ‘culture becomes more, not less, important.’