White Man (In Hammersmith Palais): Punk, , and the Politics of Race in 1970s

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A Thesis

Presented to

The Honors Tutorial College

Ohio University

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In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of

Bachelor of Arts in History

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By Sam Benezra

May 2018 This thesis has been approved by The Honors Tutorial College and the Department of History

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Dr. Kevin Mattson Professor, History Thesis Advisor

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Dr. Miriam Shadis Honors Tutorial College, Director of Studies History

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Cary Roberts Frith Dean, Honors Tutorial College TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………. 2

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………… 3

Chapter One…………………………………………………………………………………….. 11

“INGLAN IS A BITCH:” IMMIGRATION, ECONOMIC TURMOIL, AND THE

RISING NATIONALIST RIGHT

Chapter Two……………………………………………………………………………………. 35

“WHITE :” PUNK AND THE FAR RIGHT

Chapter Three………………………………………………………………………………..… 57

ROCK AGAINST : FORMING AN ANTI-RACIST PUNK IDENTITY

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………… 83

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………. 86

Acknowledgements

This thesis could not have been produced without assistance, guidance, and moral support from a long list of friends and advisors. I would like to take this moment to thank a few of them.

I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Dr. Kevin Mattson, who, over many conversations in

Bentley Annex, guided me through my research and helped me develop this thesis out of a kernel of an idea. I would also like to thank my Director of Studies, Dr. Miriam Shadis, for seeing me through three years of college with excellent advising. I would like to thank Dr. Kevin Uhalde for filling in while she was gone. And of course, I have to thank Andre Gribou, for taking me to

London and sparking my interest in this topic in the first place.

Aside from all of these individuals, I would like to thank the Provost Undergraduate

Research Fund for providing me with the resources to travel to and to conduct research at the and Liverpool John Moores University.

!2 INTRODUCTION

In April 1978, , the premier punk in England since the recent break-up of the , stepped onto a makeshift stage in Victoria Park. Behind them, a banner read, large and clear, “.” In front of them was a massive crowd, totaling, by some

estimates, 100,000 people.1 The event was the Victoria Park Carnival, a major organized by the Rock Against Racism (RAR), a political and cultural campaign that attempted to use popular music as a vehicle to combat right-wing, nationalist, and racist politics in Britain.

Formed in 1976 by a number of left-wing political activists and organizers, many associated with the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP), RAR had staged hundreds of under slogans like “Love Music, Hate Racism” by its conclusion in 1981.

The campaign was formed in response to mounting racist and anti-immigrant sentiments in England in the mid-1970s. Over the past couple decades, waves of post-war immigration into the UK had started to generate fervent racism and anti-immigrant attitudes throughout the UK, particularly among members of the working-class, who often lived in close proximity to growing populations of immigrants from Commonwealth countries in the West Indies and Asia

(particularly India and Pakistan). Since the 1950s, tensions between this new immigrant population and white Englanders had steadily been mounting, resulting in a number of racially- motivated crimes against immigrants, as well as race . By the late , anti-immigrant

!1 , Beating Time: Riot ’n’ Race ’n’ Rock ’n’ Roll (London: Chatto and Windus, 1986), 90.

!3 sentiments had grown to be pervasive. In 1968, Conservative MP gave his infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech, warning that “In fifteen or twenty years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man,” introducing deeply racist rhetoric into mainstream

politics, and garnering a great deal of support for doing so.2 Over the next decade, as a series of political and economic crises had eroded the political and cultural optimism of the 1950s and

1960s, an increasingly dispossessed and angered working class began to rally behind extremist politics. The National Front (NF), an extreme far-right political party had grown into the most successful far-right group in Britain since Oswald Mosely’s British Union of Fascists in the

1930s. Throughout the decade, the NF became a persistent presence in British politics, garnering a fair amount of success in elections and regularly staging demonstrations through neighborhoods with large immigrant populations.

It was in this political context that punk emerged as a fresh and distinct cultural phenomenon on the streets of London. Punks responded to this general perception of British decline, subverting images of national pride, dressing in ratty clothing, and, mulling on themes of crisis in their music. Punk was immediately interpreted in relation to British politics, though it was variously seen as nihilistic, anarchistic, socialist, and fascist. While some bands—like the

Clash, most prominently—wore an allegiance to the political left on their sleeve, during this period, punk had no defined or cohesive political agenda. In fact, there was a significant sect of punks—and the related subcultural group of —who skewed toward the right. This is perhaps not surprising considering the demographic overlap; punk projected a working-class

!2 Enoch Powell “Rivers of Blood” (speech, , UK, April 20, 1968), , accessed January 7, 2018, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch- Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.html.

!4 identity and image, and the working-class featured as a prominent base of support for the NF. NF supporters and racist punks and skinheads appeared prominently at punk shows, often provoking violent incidents and disrupting bands’ performances.

RAR quickly saw in punk a certain political potential that the organization sought to tap into. Punk’s rebellious, working-class posture didn’t fall cleanly into a left-right analysis but it did bear a certain political character in its anti-establishment ethos. RAR, recognizing this unrefined political energy, began to organize concerts with sympathetic punk bands alongside

Black bands, many of whom used their music to protest the often oppressive conditions under which Black people lived in Britain. As RAR grew deeply associated with punk over the course of 1977, punk was growing more explicitly politicized, with various actors trying to pull the in different directions. The persistent presence of far-right groups around punk suggested a very real possibility that punk could become, as culture did, closely associated with fascist and racist politics. RAR presented a leftist, specifically anti-racist and anti-fascist, interpretation of punk’s political energy, challenging attempts from the right wing to appeal to punk culture. Furthermore, it offered a platform for punk musicians to ally with anti- racist politics and to express opposition to groups like the NF. RAR therefore helped to establish punk as a progressive and inclusive culture and contributed to pushing right-wing punk to the margins of the culture.

Historiography

Since the glory days of punk in the late 1970s, many writers and interpreters have vigorously debated just what punk was about, and what it meant in relation to British culture and

!5 society in its time. In 1979, the sociologist Dick Hebdige published the seminal work :

The Meaning of Style, a critical examination of post-war youth in Britain, including the Teddy Boys of the 1950s, the skinheads of the 1960s, and the punks of the 1970s. Hebdige presented a model for interpreting British punk style in relation to other postwar subcultures and as a response to its class context. Subculture was importantly the first book to approach punk as a subject worthy of scholarly analysis and in many ways set the foundation for later works through his comparison to other British subcultures and his focus on the relationship between subculture and socioeconomic circumstance.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a decade after punk had “ended,” a wave of popular histories of punk were released. Most prominent were Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces: A Secret

History of the Twentieth Century and ’s England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols,

Punk Rock, and Beyond, both written by music journalists who had been in some way associated with punk culture during the 1970s. Savage was the creator of a popular punk fanzine, London’s

Burning and a writer for Sounds, one of the premier British music magazines in the late 1970s;

Marcus covered punk from the United States as a writer for a number of American magazines including and Creem. Savage’s England’s Dreaming, compiled from Savage’s extensive archive, now housed at Liverpool John Moores University, and interviews with many members of punk’s first wave, remains one of the best histories of British punk culture.

England’s Dreaming offered a comprehensive history of punk’s growth out of London, focusing primarily on the Sex Pistols and the Clash. Savage located punk within the context of Britain’s well-chronicled political crises of the 1970s, suggesting punk culture developed partially as a working-class response to its political environment. Marcus’ Lipstick Traces, on the other hand,

!6 draws a connection between punk, dada, and French situationism. Marcus draws on Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren’s flirtations with situationist art, arguing that dadaist anti-aesthetics and techniques like détournement and the situationist prank provided an ideological backdrop for punk’s performative public presentation. He interprets the Sex Pistols as having a politics of

“negation,” essentially a broad-based refusal of modern British society. While these works were roundly influential to the burgeoning field of punk history, they have both been criticized for their approaches. Savage and Marcus both place heavy emphasis on the importance of the Sex

Pistols, while largely overlooking the contributions of countless other bands, fans, writers, and artists. Marcus’ extrapolations about punk’s relationship to dada and situationism, meanwhile, has been criticized for exaggerating this connection and relying to heavily on the testimony of

Malcolm McLaren.

Marcus’s and Savage’s histories nevertheless kicked off the ever-growing industry of punk scholarship, which attempted to expand on and revise punk’s historiography. Following

Savage’s and Marcus’ lead, many histories of punk have tended to follow certain assumptions about punk culture that, in Roger Sabin’s words, “solidify what was going on during punk into a

kind of orthodoxy.”3 There are a number of histories that focused on punk’s relationship to leftist ideas (per Marcus’s thesis), took for granted any kind of political intention in punk, followed

Marcus and Savage’s prioritization of the Sex Pistols, built on the assumption of punk as a working-class movement, etc. More recently, some historians of punk culture have tried to complicate this history and establish a more holistic approach to punk culture. Sabin’s Punk

!3 Roger Sabin, introduction to : So What?: The Cultural Legacy of Punk, ed. Roger Sabin (: Routledge, 1999), 2.

!7 Rock: So What?: The Cultural Legacy of Punk, published in 1999, is an important work in this effort. A of essays, Punk Rock: So What? analyses works associated with punk culture,

from films to literature to fanzines, with the aim of “relocating punk in .”4 Sabin’s book valuably reinterprets punk’s relationship to politics, to notions of class identity, to culture, and more.

Of particular interest in this thesis is the relationship between punk and the politics of race. The success of RAR, the prominence of an outwardly left-leaning band in the Clash, and punk’s leftward turn during the 1980s has constructed the “orthodoxy” that punk was by and large a left-leaning and anti-racist culture, an assumption which largely ignores the political and cultural environment that it grew out of. The dynamics of race and racial identity have more recently come under scrutiny, beginning with an essay by Roger Sabin in Punk Rock: So What? entitled “‘I Won’t Let That Dago By’: Rethinking Punk and Racism.” Sabin’s essay complicates the assumptions about punk’s anti-racism that have dominated histories of the culture, revealing how punk’s response to the politics of race in England was far more complex than is often recognized. He identifies a racist undercurrent in the culture, expressed partially in its fascination with and and resulting in the development of right-wing punk after 1979.

Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay’s edited collection White Riot: Punk Rock and the

Politics of Race, published in 2011, builds off Sabin’s essay in an effort to more fully understand how punk responded to notions of race in both the US and the UK. This is surely the most comprehensive look at the relationship between race and punk, though a number of writers,

!4 Sabin, introduction to Punk Rock: So What?, 2.

!8 including Antonino D’Ambrosio and Matthew Worley, among others, have written shorter pieces

on the subject. 5

RAR, meanwhile, is still a subject in need of more critical attention. Tellingly, two of the three most comprehensive histories of the campaign are an oral history, Daniel Rachel’s Walls

Come Tumbling Down: The of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and , and a book written by an RAR participant, David Widgery’s Beating Time: Riot ’n’ Race ’n’

Rock ’n’ Roll. Histories of RAR have a tendency to look back at the movement with a nostalgic eye and inflate the campaign’s significance. Furthermore, while oral histories and memoirs can provide insight into history, they are often riddled with inaccuracies, and every statement must be approached with a critical eye. A more complete history of RAR, Ian Goodyer’s Crisis Music:

The Cultural Politics of Rock Against Racism, represents the beginning of an effort to create a more impartial analysis of the campaign. Nevertheless, the historiography of RAR has tended on the whole to overstate the campaign’s influence while largely overlooking its failures and missteps. They also tend to offer simplistic understandings of the cultural dynamics of punk and its relationship to racial politics, often falling into the trap of presenting punk as a naturally left- leaning culture.

This thesis interprets the history of RAR through its impact on punk culture at large, specifically through its influence on punk’s politics with respect to race. By incorporating critiques that question punk’s commitment to anti-racism with accounts from RAR participants, a

!5 Antonino D’Ambrosio, “White Riot or Right Riot: A Look Back at Punk Rock and Antiracism,” in Let Fury Have the Hour, ed. Antonino D’Ambrosio (New York: Nation, 2012). Matthew Worley and Nigel Copsey, “White Youth: The Far Right, Punk, and British , 1977-87,” JOMEC Journal 9 (2016): 27-47.

!9 more nuanced story about the relationship between punk, race, and politics emerges than is typically offered in histories of RAR. This thesis draws heavily on punk fanzines and on interviews with band members in the music press. Fanzines served as a distinct mode of expression and communication for people and writers involved in punk culture. Such resources offer insights into the ways that punk culture actually responded to RAR, demonstrating a complex mix of support and skepticism toward the campaign. Yet despite its limitations, RAR effectively undermined the influence of the right-wing on the culture and promoted an inclusive and anti-racist vision of punk.

!10 CHAPTER ONE

“INGLAN IS A BITCH:” IMMIGRATION, ECONOMIC TURMOIL, AND THE RISING

NATIONALIST RIGHT

On June 22, 1948 the MV Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury in London, carrying with it

492 passengers and one stowaway from the West Indies. They may not have known it at the time, but these 492 passengers—primarily West Indian migrants seeking work—were marking a turning point in British history, merely by arriving in London. They were the first in a long wave of Commonwealth immigration into England during the post-war period that would have profound impacts on not only British politics but also on British culture. The arrival of the

Windrush is seen symbolically as the beginning of contemporary Black Britain—that is, a distinct Black British culture—and a multi-ethnic concept of British identity. Since World War II, immigrant have had a tremendous influence in Britain, introducing foods and musical styles now considered intrinsic parts of British culture. Upon their initial arrival, however, immigrants were not readily accepted into the British social framework and often faced open hostility from the white British population. By the 1970s, the management of the immigrant population and the relationship between non-white immigrants and white Britons had become central political issues in the , stoking a rise in racial tensions, racialized violence and far-right and extreme anti-immigrant political groups.

11! But back in 1948, the five hundred people on the Windrush were just looking for work.

Many of these migrants had likely seen an advertisement in a Jamaican newspaper that offered a cheap seat on the Windrush for anybody who wanted to travel to the United Kingdom to work.

Parliament had recently passed the British Nationality Act of 1948, which offered UK citizenship to any and all Commonwealth residents. The 800 million people living under British rule now had the opportunity to travel to and live in the UK without a work visa. In the aftermath of World

War II, opportunities to work in the UK abounded, particularly in the British Rail, the National

Health Service, and public transport. Perceiving opportunity in the so-called “mother country,” many Commonwealth residents decided to pack up and leave for Britain.

The British Nationality Act was passed with the dual intention of tackling the economic crisis that World War II had left in its wake while also shoring up Britain’s imperial power. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Britain faced crippled infrastructure, outstanding national debt and little manpower to help get the country back on its feet. Between casualties in the war and

British emigration into other commonwealth countries, British officials anticipated a major labor

shortage in the coming years.6 In January 1946, the government’s first postwar economic survey forecasted a labor shortage between 600,000 and 1.3 million people which would primarily affect

industries with undesirable work conditions, such as mining, textiles, or agriculture.7 British policymakers considered a multitude of ways to address this shortage, including significant

!6 Clair Wills, Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain (London: Allen Lane, 2017), 24. 650,000 people emigrated from England, primarily to white Commonwealth countries, during the 1950s.

!7 Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 4.

!12 reductions to the armed forces. This raised objections from politicians who believed that a strong military was necessary to maintain control of the Empire. Though gunboat diplomacy was no longer a feasible method of rule in post-war international politics, many politicians saw a strong

military as a necessary facet of imperial rule, if only for symbolic reasons.8 Furthermore, in 1948 many British territories were pushing for self-determination, if not outright independence. With brute force no longer a plausible option for managing imperial territories, the Labour government sought solutions that would both ease Britain’s economic woes and appease the territories. The

British Nationality Act was passed under these pretenses. By extending citizenship rights to all members of the empire, Britain sought to bolster its relationship with the Empire. As Kathleen

Paul writes, it was “a means of securing Britain’s role at the center of an empire/commonwealth and securing the continuing dependence of parts of that empire,” all the while filling gaps in the

needy labor market.9

Even if British policymakers were willing to look to the Commonwealth to fill gaps in the labor market, they did not expect or desire major immigration into the United Kingdom. A

1949 Royal Commission Report on the British population estimated that in order to correct a coming labor shortage, 140,000 people would have to immigrate to the United Kingdom every

year.10 Nevertheless, it concluded that immigration—especially non-white immigration—wasn’t a desirable fix for Britain’s economic woes. It cautioned: “Immigration on a large scale into a

8! Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 6.

!9 Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 9.

!10 Robert Miles and Annie Phizacklea, White Man’s Country: Racism in British Politics (London: Pluto, 1984), 24.

!13 fully established society like ours would only be welcomed without reserve if the immigrants were of good stock and were not prevented by their religion or race from intermarrying with the

host population and becoming merged with it.”11 As a result, it concluded, “the sources of supply

for suitable immigrants for Great Britain are limited.”12 The coded terminology used in the report suggested that the hundreds of millions of non-white and non-Christian peoples living in the

Commonwealth were neither of “good stock” nor “suitable immigrants,” despite the implications of the British Nationality Act. It also suggests that the 1948 act was not passed with the intentions of encouraging a wave of mass immigration from Commonwealth countries.

Twenty years after the fact, it was clear that the 1948 act did not have the expected effect.

Immigration into the UK far exceeded what was expected and seemed to be on a continual rise.

In only 10 years between 1951 and 1961, the West-Indian-born population in Britain alone had

risen from 15,000 to 172,000 people.13 Irish people, the largest immigrant group, were moving into England at a rate of 40,000 per year during the 1950s. By 1968, approximately two million people, many from Pakistan, India, and the West Indies, had immigrated to the United Kingdom

in the post-war period.14 If the British Nationality Act was passed partially with the intention of boosting a floundering labor market, it had perhaps worked too well.

!11 Miles and Phizacklea, White Man’s Country, 24.

12! Miles and Phizacklea, White Man’s Country, 24.

!13 Ceri Peach, “Patterns of Afro-Caribbean Migration and Settlement in Great Britain: 1945-1981,” in The Caribbean in : Aspects of the West Indian Experience in Britain, France and the Netherlands, ed. Colin Brock (London: Frank Cass & Co.), 64.

!14 Camilla Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (New York: University Press, 2013), 211.

!14 While many of the immigrants into the UK arrived from Ireland and white European countries, the arrival of thousands of Black and Asian immigrants created a perception of a

‘coloured problem’ in England. In a 1955 BBC television documentary titled Has Britain a

Colour Bar?, host Robert Reid asks of the audience: “How do they [Black and Asian migrants] fit into our ways and standards of life, coming as they do, from places where customs, standards

of life, are much different, and very often, lower than our own?”15 Portraying non-white immigrants as alien, unfamiliar with British customs, and unadaptable to British culture, Reid echoes common prejudices and stereotypes of West Indian and Asian immigrants. Later in the program, Renee Cutworth, amid displays of Muslim immigrants chanting in a mosque and eating curry in Birmingham, elaborates: “Well, let’s face it. They are different. They look different and they behave differently…they sound different and their tastes in matters of food are different.”

Their curry, he notes, “has a very strong and very un-English smell.”16

In the minds of many British, not only were non-white immigrants unable to adjust to

British cultural norms, but their differences also created social tensions. One contributor to the

Spectator in 1954 commented, “Local authorities are beginning to show signs of alarm at this flood of migrants whose standards in the matter of housing, in particular, are necessarily very

much lower than those current here.”17 Noting the poor conditions many immigrants lived in, the

15! Has Britain a Colour Bar?, BBC television, January 31, 1955, quoted in Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire 1939-1965, (: Oxford University Press, 2005), 161.

!16 Has Britain a Colour Bar?, quoted in Webster, Englishness and Empire 1939-1965, 161.

!17 “Immigration and Racial Feeling,” The Spectator, November 12, 1954, 4. The Spectator Archive, accessed January 27, 2018, http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/12th-november-1954/4/ immigration-and-racial-feeling.

!15 writer suggests that the presence of immigrants lowered the standards of living in England and put stress on the local, working class white populations. “When the proportion of coloured people in the population rises above a certain level,” he warned, “we may expect the ugly

incidents that always occur in similar situations.”18 Ten years later, another Spectator writer framed these issues in even harsher terms: “It is the frightening increase in their numbers, their abject poverty and the physical impossibility of all their surplus unemployed, half-starved and often illiterate population being admitted to these already overcrowded islands that make far

stricter control inevitable.”19

Despite the exclusionary and racist character of these arguments, there was some truth to them. Non-white immigrants often did face lower standards of living than white English people, though this was primarily the result of discriminatory housing practices. Housing advertisements would routinely bear an “anti-coloured tag” with statements like “No Coloured” or “English

Only.” 20 Black renters also often faced steep prices for poor living conditions with insufficient access to basic necessities like running water. Landlords commonly used intimidation tactics like playing loud music, removing light fittings, changing locks, and removing doors to push out

unwanted tenants. 21 This kind of outright discrimination was all too common until the 1968 Race

Relations Act formally outlawed discrimination in housing and employment.

!18 “Immigration and Racial Feeling,” 4.

19! Cyril Osborne, “Right,” The Spectator, December 4, 1964, 7. The Spectator Archive, accessed January 27, 2018, http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/4th-december-1964/7/right.

!20 Wills, Lovers and Strangers, 257.

!21 Wills, Lovers and Strangers, 258.

!16 Also, the influx of immigrants into white working class neighborhoods did develop tensions between white and Black residents. Much of the prejudice immigrants faced in their daily lives came from those with whom they lived in close proximity and were competing for resources—namely, the white working class. Immigrant workers tended to behave differently than their white counterparts. As historian Clair Wills notes:“They tended (at this stage) not to join unions, to work unbelievably long hours, to sacrifice family life for higher wages, to spend nothing on leisure, and to refuse to integrate into the communities in which they lived. And not only did they fail to understand working-class , their reliance on the bribery and ‘pull’ of middlemen appeared to confirm the suspicion that they did not understand democracy

either.” 22 These kinds of behavioral differences formed a barrier between white and Black or

Asian workers, prompting many white workers to view their non-white counterparts not as allies but as threats to their job security. Due to widespread employment discrimination, most non- white immigrants filled jobs that many white people were reluctant to take and were barred from

advancing in the workplace. In the words of one Punjabi worker: “they keep us bottom ladder.”23

Despite this reality, many white workers began to view immigrants as a threat to their own status and power as workers and grew suspicious and resentful of immigrants. “The blokes here, cheap labor that's all it is,” one man commented, “They have a low standard of living in their own

country… The boss would like to bring us down to their level if he could.”24

22! Wills, Lovers and Strangers, 201.

!23 Wills, Lovers and Strangers, 201.

!24 Wills, Lovers and Strangers, 201.

!17 As tensions developed between white and immigrant communities, white English people expressed their prejudices openly. Immigrants were subjected to racial slurs and were often denied business at white-owned stores and retailers. By the late 1950s, anti-immigrant prejudice began to take on a violent character. In late August 1958, tensions between white and Black residents of Notting Hill ignited into violent clashes and riots that lasted for several days. In the months leading up to the riots, mobs of young white Teddy Boys—working-class white youths distinguished by their Edwardian fashion sense—perpetrated increasingly violent attacks on

West Indian immigrants in areas of London with high immigrant populations. In one instance,

West Indian immigrants reported a bomb thrown through the window of the Calypso Club in

Notting Hill.25 On August 23, nine white men paraded around West London on a “nigger hunt” with weapons fashioned out of iron bars from street railings, starting handles, table legs, pieces

of wood and knives assaulting Black men walking down the street.26 There were reports of attacks on six West Indian men in four separate incidents. Many immigrants reported having their windows smashed in throughout the summer.

Then, on August 29, a dispute between a white woman, Majbritt Morrison, and her Black husband Raymond Morrison, developed into a clash between a white crowd who came to intervene in the matter and some of Raymond Morrison’s West Indian friends. Majbritt Morrison

!25 “Memorandum of Interview With Residents of Notting Hill,” September 5, 1958. Warwick Digital Collections, accessed January 29, 2018, https://wdc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/ tav/id/4662.

!26 “Coloured People in Great Britain: Summary of Press News and Comment,” September 1958. Warwick Digital Collections, accessed January 19, 2018, https://wdc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/ collection/tav/id/4834. Clair Wills, Lovers and Strangers, 160.

!18 described a group of Teddy Boys assaulting the two of them with empty milk bottles and iron

bars, while calling her slurs like “black man’s trollop.”27 The following night, hundreds of young

white men from across London flooded into Notting Hill intending to “get rid of these niggers.”28

They walked around the neighborhood destroying property and assaulting Black people. When groups of Black men retaliated, riots broke out across Notting Hill. The chaos continued for the next week, as the streets of Notting Hill became a battlefield. White people continued to invade the neighborhood and destroy Black homes and businesses, egged on by many white spectators who sympathized with the attackers. The riots ended after about a week of conflict, but assaults on Black immigrants in Notting Hill did not; over the next month, reports of groups of young

white men assaulting Black immigrants and destroying their property proliferated in the news.29

The Notting Hill riots were not the first examples of conflicts between Black immigrants and white Englanders, but they were, to this point, the largest and most widely publicized, and had important implications for racial relations moving forward. Firstly, they revealed the recent growth of far-right and fascist ideas among the white working class. Among the crowds of white attackers in the riots were members of fascist organizations like Oswald Moseley’s Union

Movement, the White Defense League and the National Labor Party, all of whom had been

27! “This Disgraceful Riot,” Daily Mirror, September 2, 1958. British Newspaper Archive, accessed January 29, 2018, https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/ 0000560/19580902/067/0010.

!28 Wills, Lovers and Strangers, 158.

!29 “Coloured People in Great Britain: Summary of Press News and Comment.”

!19 organizing and distributing pamphlets in Notting Hill throughout the summer.30 While these organizations had nothing close to widespread appeal, under the banner of “Keep Britain White,” they were evidently gaining traction on the fringe of the white working class and appealing particularly to rebellious white youths.

They also had the effect of deepening racial tensions between these groups and instilling a sense of insecurity and fear in the Black population. In the wake of the incidents, Black Notting

Hill residents described feeling unsafe in their neighborhoods, even feeling the need to arm themselves. One white police officer found it “almost impossible to convince them [Black

Notting Hill residents] that they must not carry knives.”31 Black immigrants began to organize in the interest of self-defense and formed organizations like the Afro-Asian West Indian Union.

“We must do something ourselves,” declared this organization in a 1959 statement published in response to the murder of Kelso Cochrane, a young West Indian man in West London. They called for Black political organization and self-defense: “keep women and children off the streets as much as possible. Don’t walk alone in the early hours. Don’t run away from danger, but don’t

go looking for it.”32

The riots also brought racial relations into the political spotlight. The riots were widely condemned in the British press, with most commentators placing blame on the white youths who

30! Miles and Phizacklea, White Man’s Country, 119 “Memorandum of Interview With Residents of Notting Hill.”

!31 “Memorandum of Interview With Residents of Notting Hill.”

!32 “Afro-Asian West Indian Union, To the Coloured Citizens of West London,” 1959, Box 325, Folder 44, Archive of Jimmy Deane, Warwick Digital Collections, accessed January 30, 2018. https://wdc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/tav/id/4919

!20 provoked them. At this point, neither Labour nor Conservative leaders were willing to consider restrictions of Commonwealth immigration, with Tom Driberg, Labour Party Chairman stating in

a speech before the TUC, “The problem is not one of black skins but white prejudices.”33

However, newspapers bearing headlines about “colour riots” and “race war,” and drawing comparisons to the recent events in Little Rock, Arkansas only served to deepen the perception

of a “colour problem” and concerns about Black immigration.34 If Westminster was not yet ready to consider immigration restrictions, many political commentators were. One writer in the

Spectator, for example, suggested, “Nobody, not even the immigrants themselves, can feel that the present system of unrestricted entry is satisfactory…. Whatever is undertaken to deal with the immediate problem of race rioting, there is certainly a need for a detailed investigation of the

whole colour problem in Britain: and the sooner it is undertaken the better.”35

By the early 1960s, the political imperative surrounding immigration had shifted from accepting Commonwealth immigration to finding ways to restrict it. British policymakers specifically targeted non-white immigration and attempted to find means to control immigration from Pakistan, India, and the West Indies without applying overtly discriminatory immigration policies. In 1951, the Cabinet of the Labour government established a committee to review non- white immigration into the United Kingdom. The Cabinet committee report revealed that the

33! “Law needed to end colour war,” Daily Herald, Tuesday, September 2, 1958. British Newspaper Archive, accessed January 30, 2018, https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/ viewer/bl/0000681/19580902/012/0001.

!34 “Law needed to end colour war.”

!35 “White Mischief,” The Spectator, 5 September 1958. The Spectator Archive, accessed February 16, 2018, http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/5th-september-1958/4/white-mischief.

!21 priority of immigration policy moving forward would be formulated specifically to control non- white immigration: “Any solution depending on an apparent or concealed coloured test would be so invidious as to make it impossible of adoption. Nevertheless, the use of any powers taken to restrict the free entry of British subjects to this country would, as a general rule, be more or less

confined to coloured persons.”36 So, in 1962, Harold MacMillan’s Conservative government passed a revision to the 1948 British Nationality Act—the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962

—which restricted Commonwealth immigration by requiring prospective immigrants to apply for a work voucher. Six years later, as thousands of Kenyan Asians sought refuge in Britain in the wake of Africanization policies in that discriminated against Asian residents, Westminster, seeking to curb this immigration from Kenya, would further extend these controls with the

Commonwealth Immigration Act 1968. The revision barred prospective immigrants from

Commonwealth countries unless the citizen, or at least one of his or her parents or grandparents, was born, naturalized, or adopted in the UK. In effect, the act essentially revoked the freedom of entry granted in the British Nationality Act 1948. Furthermore, the 1968 act, passed under

Harold Wilson’s Labour government, demonstrated a dramatic shift in Labour policy from 1962,

when it “vigorously opposed” restriction of immigration.37

Parliament simultaneously pursued legislation to improve racial relations by outlawing discrimination. The first such measure, the Race Relations Act 1965, outlawed discrimination on

“grounds of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins,” in public places and established the Race

!36 Miles and Phizacklea, White Man’s Country, 28.

!37 Ian R.G. Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since 1939, (London: Routledge, 1997), 134.

!22 Relations Board to monitor discriminatory practices.38 This first Race Relations Act was limited in its scope, did not make racial discrimination a crime, and was accused by anti-racist advocacy groups of not being extensive enough, but nevertheless drew criticism from some Conservative

Members of Parliament. When the Labour government sought to expand the law in 1968 to tighten laws against racial discrimination in housing, employment, and public services, the

Conservative minority pushed back more aggressively.

It was in this context that Enoch Powell, on April 20, 1968, stood before a congregation of the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham and gave the speech that would come to define his political career. Powell, a Tory MP for Wolverhampton South, was a rising star in the

Conservative Party. At once a fierce skeptic and a traditionalist, Powell had been a unique presence in government since his election to Parliament in 1950. He was an intellectual steeped in the classics with a tendency to speak in sweeping and often melodramatic oratory. As the journalist Henry Fairlie defined Powell’s political style for The Spectator in 1955: “He simply believes in Order and Authority and is always prepared to offer a half-brilliant, half-mad

intellectual defense of them.”39 Over his eighteen years in politics he had steadily developed a reputation of cautious respect, rising by 1965 to the position of Shadow Defense Secretary in

Edward Heath’s opposition government.

On that day in Birmingham, however, his fate was altered dramatically as he delivered one of the most controversial lectures in the history of modern British politics. The “Rivers of

!38 “New UK Race Law ‘Not Tight Enough,’ BBC, 8 December, 1965, accessed January 30, 2018, http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/8/newsid_4457000/4457112.stm.

!39 Alwyn Turner, Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s, (London: Aurum Press, 2007), 28.

!23 Blood” speech, as it would come to be called, was written as a rebuke of the 1968 Race

Relations Act. Powell suggested that the expansion of the Race Relations Act would increase an already quickly rising immigrant population and give the foreign-born population ever more power over the native British. He forecast a bleak landscape for native Brits: “For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country. They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future

defeated.”40 While Powell’s speech didn’t deviate far from the Conservative Party’s policy line, his rhetoric went far beyond the standards of political discourse. Powell spoke against rising immigration in poetically apocalyptic terms: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like

the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”41 A reference to the

Sybil’s prophecy of war in Virgil’s Aeneid, Powell evoked a future where immigration into the

UK would incite a that would subject native Brits to the whims of an unfamiliar

Other. “It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre,” he

declared. 42

Between these catastrophic prophecies, Powell borrowed stories and outwardly racist rhetoric from figures in his constituency. A middle-aged working class man—“a decent, ordinary fellow-Englishman”—fears for the future of his family. “In fifteen or twenty years’ time the

40! Powell, “Rivers of Blood.”

!41 Powell, “Rivers of Blood.”

!42 Powell, “Rivers of Blood.”

!24 black man will have the whip hand over the white man,” Powell recounts him saying. An elderly woman who finds herself the only white resident left on her street claims abuse from her Black neighbors. He recounts:

She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through

her letter box. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-

grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. ‘Racialist,’

they chant. 43

In drawing on their stories, Powell constructed a populist narrative of a nation in decline, a people under siege, and a working class left behind.

“The Rivers of Blood” speech stirred a tremendous controversy throughout the United

Kingdom. Powell was harshly criticized in many editorials and denounced by many of his political allies. The Times derided Powell and his “evil speech,” stating, “This is the first time that a serious British politician has appealed to racial hatred in this direct way in our postwar

history.” 44 For a moment, the Birmingham speech seemed to derail Powell’s political career as

Conservative leaders began to see him as a political liability. At the behest of four fellow members of the conservative Shadow Cabinet, Edward Heath removed Powell from his position as Shadow Secretary of Defense, stating, “I consider the speech he made in Birmingham

yesterday to have been racialist in tone and liable to exacerbate racial tensions.”45

43! Powell, “Rivers of Blood.”

!44 Editorial comment, The Times, 22 April 1968.

!45 Ian Aitken, “Mr. Heath Dismisses Mr. Powell for ‘Racialist’ Speech,” , April 22, 1968, accessed Feb 2, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1968/apr/22/race.past.

!25 But as Powell became a pariah in politics, he became a martyr for many everyday Britons who were attracted to his nationalist brand of . The widespread denunciation of

Powell’s speech had the effect of making him one of the most prominent names in Britain, as he found a large audience beyond the political sphere. In the days after his sacking, he received thousands of letters of support from people throughout the UK. Dockworkers and meat porters in

London struck in support of Powell. An April 1968 Gallup Poll found that over 74% of the

British populace agreed with Powell’s views.46 The “Rivers of Blood” speech mainstreamed the ideas of the British far-right, but it also revealed that the ethnonationalist language and ideas in

Powell’s speech already had widespread appeal. That is, by giving a voice to racist and anti- immigrant beliefs that were already popular among white Britons, Powell opened a space for blunt racism in formal politics.

This groundswell of support for Powell also revealed the distance between the political elite and the average white Englishman. Though the post-war consensus had helped England recover from war-time catastrophe and brought two decades of prosperity, the managerial and impersonal style of politics that had dominated during this period had left many Britons feeling disconnected from their government. David Watts, a journalist for The Financial Times, wrote in

1968 that “The isolation of politicians, the in-groupness of the Westminster, the blandness of the political establishment, the tendency to keep unpleasant facts under the table for the best of motives (as well as the worst), the irrelevance of many of the old party divisions to modern problems—these are the main characteristics of the conventional system as the man in the street

!46 Edward Heath, quoted in Alwyn Turner, Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s, 30.

!26 sees it.”47 To many, Powell represented an alternative. He figured as an outsider in Westminster, someone who appealed to the issues and voices of average British people, a reputation bolstered by his dismissal from the Shadow Cabinet after the “Rivers of Blood” speech.

As all of this transpired in 1968, England was on the cusp of a major economic downturn.

Through the 1950s, England experienced a boom period. British manufacturing was as strong as it ever had been thanks to surges in the steel, coal, and automotive industries, among others, leading to increases in wages, exports, and investments. “Most of our people have never had it so good,” declared Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, “Go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my

lifetime—nor indeed in the history of this country.”48 After years of war and austerity, the flood of wealth was readily welcomed, transforming Britain into an affluent society. Families invested in houses, purchased cars, and furnished their homes with electrical appliances and televisions, while teenagers used spending money to buy up Cliff Richard and Billy Fury records.

By the mid-1960s the good times were still rolling, but there were cracks forming in the surface. Though manufacturing was booming, Britain’s share of manufacturing trade worldwide was steadily slipping, from 25 percent in 1950, to 17 percent in 1960, to 10 percent in 1970. By

1961, Britain was facing mounting debt and rising inflation, prompting Macmillan to initiate an unpopular wage freeze, the first in a series of austerity measures the government would take over the coming decades. When Harold Wilson’s Labour government took over in 1964, Britain had

!47 Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain, 221.

!48 “Britons ‘have never had it so good’,” BBC, 20 July 1957, accessed February 2, 2018, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/july/20/newsid_3728000/3728225.stm.

!27 an £800 million deficit, leading to international fears of the devaluation of the pound. Wilson would reduce government spending on education, housing and public works, and initiate a credit squeeze and another wage freeze. Meanwhile, prices continued to rise. In 1970, cost inflation

was increasing at the highest rate since 1951.49 Frustrated workers pushing for higher wages

struck across the country, leading to reports of “near-anarchy” on shop floors.50 Under pressure to decrease inflation cost, the government tended to place the burden on laborers by setting wage freezes while doing nothing to curb rising costs in electricity and in gas, effectively further alienating many in the working class.

When Edward Heath took over the premiership in 1970, government-worker relations only worsened and the economy began a decade-long skid. In 1969, the Cabinet reported on “the

deteriorating condition of industrial relations.”51 Heath’s tenure would be characterized by persistent strikes and demands for wage increases from the Trade Unions Congress (TUC), creating a perception that his government was beholden to labor. In 1971, his government passed the Industrial Relations Act, outlawing the closed shop and mandating ballots before strikes, further frustrating unions and laborers who saw it as a blatant attempt to curb union power. The first major strike of the 1970s occurred in January 1972 when coal miners across the country walked out. The two-month-long strike resulted in power shortages across the country in one of

49! Dominic Sandbrook, State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain, 1970-1974 (London: Penguin, 2011), 73.

!50 “Cabinet Report on Industrial Relations,” 1969, CAB, Box 128, Folder 44, The National Archives, Discover, accessed February 2, 2018, http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pdfs/ small/cab128-44-cc51-69-3.pdf.

!51 Cabinet Report on Industrial Relations.

!28 the coldest winters in recent memory. In December 1973, amidst an oil crisis and an international recession, coal miners struck once again, creating an energy crisis in the UK. Heath’s government initiated a “Three Day Week,” where commercial entities were limited to three days of operation per week in order to conserve electricity. For the rest of the decade, Britain was caught between worker unrest, slow growth, rising energy prices, and rampant inflation. Every solution seemed to create another problem and each crisis seemed to feed into the next, and all the while the government seemed entirely unable to stop the long slide.

The government’s inability to manage mounting social and economic crises at home was compounded by Britain’s decline as an international power. By the late 1960s, the last vestiges of imperial glory had long been fading as former colonies across the world liberated themselves from British rule. Since the end of World War II, the United States had ascended to the peak of global politics; India, Pakistan, and Ghana had all become independent states; the failure to retake the Suez canal embarrassed Britain on the world stage; and Britain had lost its influence in

Central as Malawi, Zambia, and Rhodesia had all broken from British rule. The dismantling of the empire not only impacted Britain’s position on the world stage but disrupted notions of imperial glory that figured prominently in the nation’s political myth. While many

Britons were ignorant of the workings and politics of Britain’s Empire, it nevertheless figured prominently in British self-conception and political identity. Powell diagnosed Britain in 1965

with “post-imperial neurosis.”52 In the transition from Empire to island, leaders needed to craft a new conception of British nationhood and identity and reinterpret Britain’s role in world affairs.

With the economy in a tailspin, the government seemingly beholden to union power, blossoming

!52 Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain, 160.

!29 racial tensions, ever-increasing immigration, and a dearth of effective governance and leadership from Westminster, a space opened for radical politics.

Beginning in the early 1970s, the far-right developed into a significant—and visible— political force. The far-right had been a fringe presence in Britain since the 1930s, but never managed to gain much popular support. This wouldn’t necessarily change in the 1970s. Far-right and fascist political parties never managed to attract more than a sliver of the vote in parliamentary elections, largely due to ineffective leadership and a lack of electoral experience.

Nevertheless, the far-right, and particularly the newly-formed National Front (NF), grew significantly during the 1970s, capitalizing on the immigration issue, the support shown for

Enoch Powell, and popular mistrust in the major parties.

The National Front (NF) was by far the most prominent far-right group. Though it was never an openly fascist organization, its associations with fascism were all too obvious and many of its most influential members had previous ties to openly fascist organizations, including the

National Labour Party, the , and the . Created in

1966 under the leadership of A.K. Chesterton, the leader of the League of Empire Loyalists, and a veteran of several fascist and far-right organizations, the NF was founded with the intention of consolidating the far-right in Britain. It attempted to mainstream and formalize far-right politics by obscuring its relationship to fascism and and focusing on immigration, a strategy that

Richard Thurlow describes as “camouflaged extremism.”53 Under the leadership of John Tyndall and , the NF grew into a major political force in Britain during the 1970s,

!53 Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918-1985 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 278.

!30 arguably becoming Britain’s fourth party by the middle of the decade. The NF established a more populist brand of fascism that spoke to the conditions of the 1970s and was premised upon anti- immigration.

Initially bolstered by the “Rivers of Blood” speech and the politicization of race in the late 1960s, the NF continued to grow in the early 1970s. In particular, concerns about Ugandan

Asians fleeing repression from authoritarian Ugandan ruler Idi Amin seeking refuge in England in 1972 served as a boon to the NF. In 1973, the NF was reported to have 14,000 members, and

gained 16 percent of the vote in a by-election in West Bromwich.54 More significant than its electoral success, however, was its public presence. The NF regularly held demonstrations across

Britain in working class and Black communities, establishing the party in the popular consciousness while also intimidating Britain’s Black communities. NF demonstrators and sympathizers promoted and often perpetrated violence against Black people, leading to a number of deaths and “scores of other similar incidents of unprovoked and savage racist attacks,”

according to a 1978 report by Bethnal Green and Stepney Trades Council.55

Paralleling the growth of the right wing fringe was a rise in anti-racist activism and in

Black advocacy. In the wake of the “Rivers of Blood” speech, over fifty West Indian, Pakistani and Indian labor unions came together to form the Black People’s Alliance. The British Black

Panther movement also organized in 1968. In the coming years, these organizations led large demonstrations against racism and restrictive immigration legislation, including the 1969 “March

!54 Miles and Phizacklea, White Man’s Country, 122.

!55 Bethnal Green and Stepney Trades Council, Blood on the Streets: A Report by Bethnal Green and Stepney Trades Council on Racial Attacks in East London (London: BG and STC, 1978), 4.

!31 for Dignity.” Through publications like Race Today, activists and writers like the Jamaican-born dub poet , the prominent Trinidadian-born activist and editor of Race

Today Darcus Howe, and Indian-born playwright and left-wing activist Farrukh Dhondy established an intellectual foundation for British anti-racism based on anti-colonialism and libertarian Marxism. Anti-racist organization began within Black communities with groups such as these and earlier civil rights advocacy groups that borrowed mobilization strategies from the

American Civil Rights Movement.56 Responding to the political mobilization of fascist organizations as well as violent attacks against British Blacks, these organizations provided a

Black response to the rise in racism and a vehicle for Black self-defense.

Black anti-racist activists collaborated with leftist anti-fascist organizations, forming a multi-racial leftist opposition to the rise of the NF. The UK Socialist Workers Party (SWP), an anti-Soviet and Trotskyist political party, contributed to the establishment of several organizations formed specifically in opposition to the National Front, including the Anti-Nazi

League (ANL) and Rock Against Racism (RAR). Mirroring Race Today was Gerry Gable’s anti- fascist newspaper Searchlight, founded in 1975 with the intention of combating the far-right through exposés of right wing political figures, investigations on racial violence, and other stories related to British racial relations. These organizations and publications, closely tied to socialist organizations like the SWP, equated anti-racism with anti-fascism and opposition to the

NF. This approach to anti-racism has been critiqued as more reductionist than that offered by

!56 Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 31.

!32 Race Today. 57 Nevertheless, they played an important role in combating the NF and directing anti-racist activism in the 1970s. In effect, Black anti-racist and white anti-fascist leaders together acted as a factionalized, yet in many ways effective, opposition to the NF and the growing far-right.

The NF and oppositional groups acted as two increasingly present and visible poles in

UK politics. Both organizations took to street politics as their preferred mode of expression and regularly organized mass demonstrations. Street fights between NF demonstrators and anti- fascist demonstrators became a common sight in the mid to late 1970s, and involved, in some cases, thousands of people. In in 1977, a NF march of 500 people was met by a 4,000

strong counter-demonstration.58 In the resulting clashes between NF members, counter- demonstrators, and police officers, there were at least 111 injured, including 56 police officers,

and 214 arrests.59 It was the largest street fight between fascists and anti-fascists since Cable

Street in 1936, when a march of ’s British Union of Fascists clashed with various anti-fascist groups. As such conflicts became more common, they drew national attention and dramatically and viscerally demonstrated the escalation of tensions surrounding the politics of race and immigration. To many participants and observers, the persistence and scale of these

57! Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, 154.

!58 Lindsay Mackie, “The real losers in Saturday’s battle of Lewisham,” The Guardian, August 15, 1977, accessed February 4, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/century/1970-1979/Story/ 0,,106928,00.html.

!59 Mark Townsend, “How the battle of Lewisham helped to halt the rise of Britain’s far right,” The Guardian, 12 August, 2017, accessed February 5, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/uk- news/2017/aug/13/battle-of-lewisham-national-front-1977-far-right-london-police.

!33 clashes must have felt like a national reckoning over the future of racial relations and British identity.

By the dawn of British punk, race and immigration had become not only important political issues, but highly contentious ones which provoked large-scale conflicts. The now 30- year trend of non-white immigration into the UK presented Britain with something of an identity crisis. How would Black immigrants fit in and define themselves in relation to white British culture? How would white Britons define themselves in relation to Black immigrant culture?

Questions like these shaped how British people, white and Black, approached the formal and cultural politics of race. Punk was in no way isolated from Britain’s identity crisis. In fact, as punk youth culture developed from 1975 to 1980, the politics and identity of punk were deeply tied to issues of immigration. Punks were at the center of this conflict, and often figured as foot- soldiers on both sides of the battlefield.

!34 CHAPTER TWO

“WHITE RIOT:” PUNK AND THE FAR RIGHT

“Cause I want to be anarchy:” Punk Breaks Out

In 1976, when punks began to appear in numbers along King’s Road and in the neighborhoods of Camden and , it must have appeared to many onlookers as an

“invasion of centaurs,” to borrow Theodor Roszak’s description of the in Haight-

Ashbury about a decade earlier.60 Who were these strange youth, clad in torn clothing, with safety pins protruding from their faces, espousing words like ‘anarchy’? Were they nihilists?

Were they fascists? Were they simply, in the words of one writer in the Spectator, “an unpleasant

group of meretricious yobboes?”61

Punk caused a firestorm when it first came to the attention of the national public in 1976.

It erupted in December of that year, when the Sex Pistols, along with a few members of the

Bromley Contingent (the name given to their entourage), appeared on ’s Today show. After a performance, they gave a short and strange interview, juxtaposing ,

Today’s middle-aged host, with the Pistols and their cohort, fully-dressed in punk chic. The

!60 Theodore Roszak, The Making of a : Reflections on the Technocracy and Its Youthful Opposition (Berkeley: University of Press, 1969), 42.

!61 Richard Ingrams, “Switched off,” The Spectator, December 11, 1976, 29. The Spectator Archive, accessed February 2, 2018, http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/11th- december-1976/29/switched-off.

!35 appearance might have passed as just that—short and strange—if not for the final sixty seconds, during which Johnny Rotten managed to say “shit” twice and referred to Grundy as

a “dirty fucker” and a “fucking rotter.”62 In 1976, swearing was prohibited on air.

The interview only aired live in London, but it prompted a ferocious media backlash across the country. The Daily Mirror proclaimed “!” and reported that “a pop group shocked millions of viewers last night with the filthiest language ever heard on British

television.” 63 Other newspapers ran similar headlines: “Rock Group Start a 4-Letter TV Storm,” in the Sun; “Fury at filthy TV chat” in the Daily Express; “The Bizarre Face of Punk Rock,” in

the Daily Mail. 64 In the aftermath, Grundy was suspended and the Sex Pistols were dropped from their recently signed contract with EMI. Ironically, the controversy also helped introduce punk into the national consciousness, transformed the Sex Pistols into instant celebrities and the faces of punk, and is now remembered as a seminal moment in British television history.

The incident brought punk to national attention, but there was already a vibrant punk culture flourishing on the streets of London, spearheaded by the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the

Damned, and , among countless other bands. To many observers, punks appeared to be the antithesis of respectable society. They dressed in ratty clothing, mocked the Queen, celebrated violence, and frequently bore armbands. Their detractors, including many in the music press, labeled them nihilistic. Others celebrated the movement, variously interpreting it

62! Steve Jones, quoted in Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond (New York: Routledge, 1991), 259.

!63 Savage, England’s Dreaming, 264.

!64 Savage, England’s Dreaming, 264.

!36 as a musical revolt against the excesses of the rock industry or a working-class protest against the politics of 1970s England. From its inception, punk was controversial, simultaneously claimed and condemned, hailed and ridiculed.

As punk has been historicized in the 40-plus years since its origins, many writers, historians, and commentators have grappled with punk and its unique form of countercultural rebellion. What constituted punk culture? How did it respond to the political conditions of 1970s

England? Many have labelled it, as Travis A. Jackson quipped, “the apotheosis of protest music,” often pointing to the working class pretensions of bands like the Clash and the Sex Pistols, or the

leftist sloganeering of later groups like Gang of Four.65 Furthermore, punk’s association with organizations like Rock Against Racism in the UK, and later with movements like in the United States has lead to a tendency to characterize punk as a specifically leftist cultural and musical movement.

Punk’s subversion of national symbols, identification with British working class culture, and DIY ethic amounted to a political statement of sorts, though not necessarily a coherent one.

Punk culture actively responded to the political situation in Britain in the late 1970s. During this tumultuous period, Britain experienced a recession (1.5 million unemployed in 1975, largely from the manufacturing sector), major austerity measures, escalating racial tensions, an empire in

rapid decline, and a crumbling liberal political consensus.66 Punk seized on these political crises,

!65 Travis A. Jackson, “Falling Into Fancy Fragments: Punk, Protest, and Politics,” in The Routledge History of Social Protest in Popular Music, ed. Jonathan C. Friedman (New York, Routledge, 2013), 157.

!66 Ryan Moore, “Postmodernism and : Cultures of Authenticity and Deconstruction,” The Communication Review 7 (2004): 310.

!37 and more broadly on the sense of national decline, and incorporated them into its imagery and aesthetic. By simultaneously destroying symbols of national heritage and clinging to a working- class identity, punks disowned traditional sources of authority and asserted their own power. In this sense, punk’s politics can be said to be broadly populist and anti-establishment. However, it isn’t particularly clear where punk politics stood. Punk, particularly in its original articulation

(from 1976-1977) did not fall in a specific place along a traditional left-right spectrum. Punk music was variously socialist (the Clash), anarchist (), feminist (the Slits), apolitical (the

Damned), fascist (), etc. It was not, as some have tried to label it, protest music—at least not uniformly. Insofar as punk maintained a coherent political stance, it was fundamentally anti-elitist and rejected status quo politics.

As punk developed during the mid-1970s, the political identity of the movement was anything but decided. As punk culture grew and developed, a variety of political movements attempted to claim it as their own. Punk in many ways became a battleground for the political ideologies attempting to take hold in Britain during this period. Among those various political movements was Britain’s insurgent fascist movement and the National Front, who maintained a persistent presence in and around the punk scene in England. In this climate, punks of various political orientations enjoyed the same music together and frequently clashed, sometimes violently. This chapter explores how punk culture created a political dialogue, how it responded to politics, and crafted a language of dissent that appealed to right-wing ideologies.

“Turn up the white noise!:” Punk and

!38 On August 30, 1976, Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon of The Clash were in Notting Hill,

London. Eighteen years earlier, the neighborhood was the site of the 1958 Notting Hill riots, where, after violent assaults on Black immigrants in the neighborhood, Black and white

Englanders clashed in the streets for a week straight.

Since the riots, the neighborhood had hosted the , an annual street festival celebrating West Indian culture. Rooted in the tradition of carnival celebrations in the

West Indies, the carnival was first organized as the “Caribbean Carnival” in 1959 by local organizers and activists in response to the racially-motivated violence that occurred in the neighborhood over the previous year. By 1976, the carnival had blossomed into a yearly tradition

and was “the London West Indian event.”67 Black and white Londoners alike gathered in the streets to drink rum punch, eat curried goat, and dance. Music bounced off the bricks of Notting

Hill townhouses as Russell Henderson’s steel band marched the carnival procession through the neighborhood. Reggae and blasted from large sound systems, evoking dance halls back in . Men and women dressed in elaborate, feathered calypso costumes. The event’s organizers promoted it as a celebration of “joy, love, and fun,” while the Daily Mirror described

an “irresistible explosion of West Indian colour and music.”68

The 1976 festival took off on August 29. It was the end of the hottest summer of the 20th century—and the second driest—but the weather forecast rain on the first day. It didn’t stop the festivities, and the first day went more or less as planned. “Less than heavy showers failed to

!67 , : 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2013), 82.

!68 Dominic Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun: The Battle For Britain, 1974-1979 (London: Penguin, 2012), 569.

!39 dampen the sunshine spirit of the West Indian carnival in London’s Notting Hill yesterday,” the

Daily Mirror reported.69

During the second day of festivities, Notting Hill again broke out into riots. This time the circumstances were different. In 1958, the riots in Notting Hill were instigated by clashes between Black Notting Hill residents and thuggish young whites who came to terrorize their community. Eighteen years later, it was mostly Black, and some white, youths attending the carnival clashing with the police. The growth of the carnival in the early 1970s had inspired opposition from the Kensington and Chelsea Council and other community organizations, who lamented the lack of crowd and noise control and pushed for an increased police presence. As a result of this pressure, the upped the number of officers staffing the carnival

from only 60 in 1975 to 1,600 in 1976.70 Tensions were already pitched between British West

Indians and the Met, whose stop-and-search tactics tended to target Brits with black more often than whites. Such policing tactics were enabled by the “sus” law, a rule dating back to the

Napoleonic Wars which allowed officers to to stop, search, and potentially even arrest any person that might intend to commit a crime. Such laws had already stirred tensions, and occasionally even conflicts, between police and Black communities in many parts of England over the past few years.

!69 “A cop gets the beat,” Daily Mirror, August 30, 1976. British Newspaper Archive, accessed Feb. 10, 2018, https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/ 0000560/19760830/002/0002

!70 Everton A. Bryce, “Notting Hill Gate Carnival: Black Politics, Resistance, and Leadership 1976-78,” Caribbean Quarterly 31, No. 2 (June, 1985): 38.

!40 The conflict started after police attempted to arrest some Black men who were suspected pickpockets on Acklam Road. A few other West Indian men attempted to intervene, and the situation quickly escalated. Within moments, there was a full-scale conflict. Crowds of people attacked the police with whatever they could find, while the ill-equipped police “picked up

dustbin lids and milk crates to charge the rioters.”71 The police, outnumbered by the 250,000 carnival attendees, lost control of the situation and started to flee. Dotun Adebayo, who would later become a BBC radio presenter, was a 16-year old dancing to calypso music when the riots erupted. “I had never seen policemen running away from a situation before,” he recalled, “I don’t know where all the rocks came from, but they were raining down on the fleeing cops. One or two

police vehicles… tried to make it up the road but were turned back with a shower of missiles.”72

Another witness told the BBC that he saw a police van set ablaze: “the two policemen managed

to get out of the van and fled. The gang then turned the van over and set fire to it.”73 In all, around 100 police officers and 60 carnival attendees were taken to the hospital, while 66 people were arrested. According to legend, reggae legend Junior Murvin’s voice, lamenting “all the peace makers turned war officers” in “Police and Thieves,” was “booming from every

soundsystem in the Carnival.”74

!71 Dotun Adebayo, quoted in Emma Griffiths, “Remembering the Notting Hill Riot,” BBC News, August 25, 2006, accessed February 12, 2018, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/ london/5275542.stm.

72! Griffiths, “Remembering the Notting Hill Riot.”

!73 “Notting Hill Carnival ends in riot,” BBC, August 30, 1976, accessed February 12, 2018, http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/august/30/newsid_2511000/2511059.stm.

!74 David Katz, People Funny Boy: The Genius of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry (London: Omnibus Press, 2009) 249.

!41 In the midst of all the chaos, Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon seemed to be enjoying themselves. “It was like Zulu,” said Strummer, referencing the depiction of battles between the

British Army and the Zulu Kingdom in the 1964 film.75 Simonon and Strummer could be seen amongst the crowd hurling bricks at the police. “Standing there I saw Paul with one of those plastic cones,” remembered Strummer in an interview with Jon Savage, “and a police motorcycle came bombing down the road and Paul slung this plastic cone across the road and hit the front

wheel of the motorbike, but he managed to keep on the bike and carried on.”76 At one point,

Strummer even attempted to light an upturned car on fire, but gave up after his matches kept blowing out in the wind. , a close friend and videographer of the Clash (and notably, the son of West Indian migrants), was also at the carnival. A famous photograph, later used on the Black Market Clash , shows him walking alone in front of a wall of approaching policemen. “Behind me there are about 5,000 brothers all bricked up ready to throw,” he recalled, “there are cops ahead of me. I am like, ‘OK, I’d better move to one side

here.’ That is the moment they captured.”77

Strummer’s and Simonon’s experience at the riots sharply revealed to them the distinction between the Black British struggle and their own. “I realized it wasn’t our riot,” said

Strummer, “It was the one day of the year when the Blacks were going to get their own back

75! Pat Gilbert, Passion is a Fashion: The Real Story of the Clash (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2004), 101.

!76 Joe Strummer, interview by Jon Savage, in The England’s Dreaming Tapes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 263.

!77 Gilbert, Passion is a Fashion, 101.

!42 against the really atrocious way the police behaved.”78 This realization was pivotal for the Clash, who were still formulating their anti-establishment identity. Their experience at the riots helped the Clash establish a rebellious ethos premised around their own experience as young white

British men, while also cementing an allegiance with Black Britain.

Out of the Clash’s experience at the riots came one of their most eminent singles, “White

Riot.” Featuring Strummer’s distinctive growl and choppy rhythm guitar, the song follows the aesthetic prototype for early punk, as formulated by the Sex Pistols. It is also one of the clearest expressions of the Clash’s politics up to this point in their career. “Black people gotta lot a problems / But they don’t mind throwing a brick / White people go to school / Where they teach you how to be thick,” Joe Strummer cries emphatically, calling for dispossessed white British

youth to take inspiration from the Notting Hill rioters.79 In “White Riot,” the Clash articulated a vision of united struggle between the Black and white lower classes. They target the wealthy and call for solidarity: “All the powers in the hands / Of people rich enough to buy it / While we walk

the street / Too chicken to even try it.”80 The Clash tied these not-so-subtle class critiques to riotous, perhaps even revolutionary (“Are you taking over”) aspirations, hinting at a vision of a

Marxist-style proletarian rebellion.81 The song is short, straight to the point, and a powerful statement of allegiance with the Notting Hill rioters. As Nick Kent described it, “insidiously

!78 Joe Strummer, interview by Jon Savage, in The England’s Dreaming Tapes, 264.

79! Mick Jones and Joe Strummer, “White Riot,” Genius, accessed February 20, 2018, https:// genius.com/The-clash-white-riot-lyrics.

!80 Jones and Strummer, “White Riot.”

!81 Jones and Strummer, “White Riot.”

!43 catchy enough to be a sort of football chant… commercial enough, in other words, to be

subversive.”82

In this sense, the Clash provided an interpretation of punk politics—and of punk identity

—as being explicitly aligned with the political left. Most songs in the Clash’s early catalogue make clear political statements, or at least bear obvious political overtones. Some attack governmental organizations, some address power imbalances in 1970s England, others even confront British colonialism. Apolitical musicians, in their eyes, are “a bunch of ostriches;

they’re sticking their heads in the fuckin’ sand!”83 Neither did they ever make any secret about their political allegiance. “First of all, let me tell you my personal politics are and have always

been and always will be to the Left,” Strummer told Punk magazine in 1978.84 The Clash were the biggest act to set foot at a Rock Against Racism concert, supported the Irish Republican

Army’s H-Block protests in 1976, and released an album entitled Sandinista! in solidarity with the Nicaraguan revolutionaries in 1980.

Yet despite the Clash’s political orientations, British nationalist movements took ’s most anthemic political statement and claimed it as their own. While the Clash clearly aligned themselves with antiracist politics, the vagueness of this message in some of their lyrics

82! Nick Kent, “On the Town: London’s Burning (Out?), New Musical Express March 19, 1977, 41. Add MS 89160/2/34, The Papers of Barry Miles (1960-2013), British Library: Western Manuscripts, London, UK.

!83 Mick Jones, interview by Steve Walsh and Mark Perry, “The Very Angry Clash,” Sniffin’ Glue, October 1976, in The Clash on the Clash: Interviews and Encounters, ed. Sean Egan (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2018), 53.

!84 Joe Strummer, interview by Jolly, “Clash,” Punk 17, May/June, 1979, Box B10, Folder 58, ED/3/53/4/8, England’s Dreaming: The Jon Savage Archive, Liverpool John Moores University Special Collections and Archives, Liverpool John Moores University, 11.

!44 could be manipulated and used against their own interests. As Roger Sabin has noted, “in terms

of song lyrics, anybody who used the word ‘white’ could be asking for trouble.”85 “White Riot”

serves as a prime example, becoming a “anthemic favorite” of the nationalist right-wing.86

National Front, through their magazine Bulldog, did their best to co-opt the song. They also targeted others bearing similar titles, such as ’ “White Noise” and the Clash’s

“White Man (In Hammersmith Palais).”

This appropriation of punk songs was part of a targeted effort by the National Front to appeal to British youth. This effort was in part led by Joe Pearce, the NF member who founded

Bulldog as a sixteen-year-old. The magazine itself, featuring cartoons and editorials on popular music, bore a certain resemblance to punk fanzines. The NF specifically branded the magazine to

British youth (specifically targeting working-class youth), frequently selling it at football

matches and British schools.87 Bulldog also borrowed the rhetoric of punk’s countercultural revolt. One issue, for example, specifically called for “skins, mods, punks and teds” to unite

opposition to the “long-haired lefty .” 88 Not coincidentally, the magazine debuted in

1977, the same year that the NF decided to establish a youth branch, the Young National Front

(YNF). In the coming years, the NF would further this outreach project. Pearce helped to found the right-wing’s response to RAR, Rock Against (RAC) in 1979, a concert series

!85 Roger Sabin, “‘I Won’t Let That Dago By:’ Rethinking Punk and Racism,” Punk Rock: So What?, 209.

86! D’Ambrosio, “White Riot or Right Riot: A Look Back at Punk Rock and Antiracism,” 126.

!87 Bulldog, No. 14, 1979, 3, quoted in Worley and Copsey, “White Youth,” 32.

!88 Bulldog, No. 14, 1979, 3, quoted in Matthew Worley and Nigel Copsey, “White Youth,” 32.

!45 featuring right-wing punk bands including The Dentists, The Ventz, and Skrewdriver. In 1978,

Eddy Morrison, another young NF member, created The Punk Front, a right-wing punk fanzine.

In many ways, punk’s countercultural identity played into the hands of the National

Front’s propaganda campaign. Punks conceptualized their culture as distinctly British and took pride in British heritage. Mick Jones made note of this in a 1976 interview for :

“It's the music of now. And it's in English. We sing in English, not mimicking some American

rock singer's accent. That's just pretending to be something you ain’t.”89 Surely, punk vocalists embraced their British identity, singing in distinctly British accents about specifically British issues. Another quote from the same interview seems to locate punk not only as British, but also distinctly white. “It’s the only music about young white kids,” said Jones, “Black kids have got it all sewn up. They have their own cultural music. Basically young white kids are relying on a

different time to provide for their kids.”90 Statements like these suggest that even if the Clash pointed to a vision of racial unity, they also understood their own identity—and the identity of punk in general—as distinctly white British. Dick Hebdige describes this as the formation of a

“parallel white ‘ethnicity’” defined partially, and “however iconoclastically, on traditional

notions of Britishness (the Queen, the Union Jack, etc.).”91

Punk music and artwork is also strewn with references to British history. One of the most obvious examples is ’s 1977 film Jubilee, a fictional documentation of punk culture

89! Mick Jones, interview by , “Down and Out and Proud,” Melody Maker, November 13, 1976, in The Clash on the Clash: Interviews and Encounters, ed. Sean Egan, 59.

!90 Mick Jones, interview by Caroline Coon, “Down and Out and Proud,” Melody Maker, November 13, 1976, in The Clash on the Clash, 59.

!91 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979), 65.

!46 starring punk style icons and Toyah Willcox and featuring cameos by the Slits and

Souxsie and the Banshees. In Jubilee, Queen Elizabeth I is sent from the 16th century to 1970s

London by John Dee and the spirit Ariel (like the homonymous spirit in Shakespeare’s The

Tempest). She arrives in a derelict city governed by mob law and overrun by violent and nihilistic gangs of punks. The film focuses on the sense of English decline that punks were so captivated by, and plays with English history to emphasize this feeling. In contrast to the 16th century royal courts the film opens on, contemporary London appears as a wasteland with looming tower blocks and leftover rubble from the London Blitz. In the fashion of the Sex Pistols’ lyrics and

Jamie Reid’s artwork, the film parodies and distorts symbols of British heritage. Aside from the numerous Shakespeare references, this includes a punked-up rendition of Rule Britannia performed by Jordan, another punk celebrity. The use and distortion of these historical and cultural references further demonstrate how punk located itself as a countercultural but distinctively English subculture. While not inherently problematic, defining punk specifically in terms of a white British heritage both implicitly excluded immigrants and non-white British people from the subculture.

The distinctly British identity that punk developed also involved a working-class consciousness. This was a trend that began with the Sex Pistols, though it would be more clearly defined and more directly embraced by succeeding bands like the Clash and . Beginning with Johnny Rotten, punk vocalists tended to sing in exaggerated working-class accents. The

Clash’s music, meanwhile, was filled with symbols of working-class life in 1970s England such as dole queues and tower blocks. The Sex Pistols’ dress reflected a sort of glamorized poverty. In

Malcolm McLaren’s words, they appeared as “little Artful Dodgers,” recalling the character in

!47 Dickens’ Oliver Twist.92 Their ragged dress in kink gear, second-hand clothing, leather, and safety pins distinguished them from the jet-set rock stars that dominated 1970s pop music in

1976. Punks positioned themselves as downtrodden outsiders, and basked in ugliness. Dick

Hebdige writes of punk’s style: “Converted into icons (the safety pin, the rip, the mindless lean and hungry look) these paradigms of crisis could live a double life, at once fictional and real.

They reflected in a heightened form a perceived condition: a condition of unmitigated exile,

voluntarily assumed.”93

This perception of punk as working class was critical to its countercultural and political identity, even as a number of punk historians have criticized punk’s working class posturing as inauthentic. Without a doubt, many of punk’s most recognizable faces existed well outside of the typical boundaries of a working-class milieu. David Laing estimated that around a third of punk

musicians were students, many of them art students. 94 Malcolm McLaren was a fashion student;

Strummer was born to a well-off family and attended boarding school. He, Jones, and Simonon

were also all art school attendees.95 Simon Frith described this phenomenon as punk bohemia:

“The sociological assumption was (and is) that youth culture was a middle-class response

!92 Ruth Adams, “The Englishness of English Punk: Sex Pistols, Subcultures, and Nostalgia,” Popular Music and Society 31, no. 4 (October 2008): 470.

93! Hebdige, Subculture, 65.

!94 Dave Laing, One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock (Oakland: PM Press, 2015), 168.

!95 It was, however, common for working-class kids to attend art school in 1970s England, where you could get a government grant to attend school for three years. There is a long tradition of aspiring rock and pop musicians who came from working-class families attending art school on government grants that includes of , of , and Ray Davies of the Kinks.

!48 to affluence, punk a working class response to decay, but both responses were mediated by art students and articulated ideas of labor and leisure which reflected art students’ own class

confusion.”96 That said, these kinds of readings also give too little credence to the social realities of many punk musicians’ lives. Many punk musicians did come from working-class backgrounds, including Steve Jones, Paul Simonon, Mick Jones, and . Furthermore, many of the original punk bands, including the Sex Pistols, the Slits, and the Clash, came together in London squats and their members all lived off the dole. If their lyrics didn’t respond to the realities of working-class life, they were certainly responding to conditions of being young, poor, and unemployed. Simply pointing out these artists’ art school backgrounds misses the importance of punk’s symbol identification with the working class. Regardless, this working- class identity was ingrained into the mythology of punk. Some bands embraced and reflected it more authentically than others, but it nevertheless formed the basis of punk’s subcultural identity.

The band that most clearly and authentically embraced its working-class roots was Sham

69. Headed by singer and lyricist Jimmy Pursey, Sham 69 rose out of ’s working-class community to become pioneers of the Oi! punk subgenre, which tied punk culture to working- class subcultures like skinheads and football hooligans. Pursey’s lyrics address the conditions of working-class life. Some, like “Hey Little Rich Boy,” espouse working-class pride: “Hey little rich boy / Take a good look at me / I don't need a flash car to take me around / I can get the bus to the other side of town.” Others, like “We Got a Fight,” articulate working-class anger: “I've been staying in watching television / While my mates got put in prison / You don't care what's happening to me.” While definitively punk in their musical stylings, Sham 69 avoided the

!96 Simon Frith and Howard Home, Art Into Pop (London: Routledge, 1987), 61.

!49 glamorized fashions worn by the Sex Pistols and the Damned, adopting a more proletarian appearance more reminiscent of skinhead dress.

Sham 69 specifically disavowed the ideological angling of many of their punk contemporaries. In Pursey’s view, punk was intended as a pure expression of working-class youth culture. “It was supposed to be about the kids that were comin’ outta the gutter type places,” he told Sounds in 1978, “tower blocks, shitty streets, , ,

Liverpool, Glasgow, don’t matter where it was, they were the kids you were supposed to be

playin’ to.” 97 He saw political punk as not only moving away from these roots, but acting as a divisive force within the punk scene: “They should think before they start, because what they’re doin’ is creatin’ another barrier between them and some more kids…. if you build up something that’s really big an’ political, you build up two sides. At the moment they’re building up two

sides, an’ that is horrific.”98 While Sham 69 did perform at Rock Against Racism, they were also known for having a fairly strong following of skinheads and NF members, who often violently disrupted their concerts. And while Pursey was disapproving of the violence, he expressed some sympathy for their beliefs: “Some of ‘em are also National Front or . But, it’s the situations where they come from. Listen, if your dad is a conservative, or a liberal or a

Communist or whatever, nine times out of ten you’re gonna believe in the same things that your

dad believes in, up to a certain age.”99 Some of his comments even followed the line of anti-

97! Jimmy Pursey, interview by Sandy Robertson, “Sham 69: Son of Sham,” Sounds, April 29, 1978, in White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race, ed. Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay (London: Verso, 2011), 70.

!98 Jimmy Pursey, interview by Sandy Robertson, “Sham 69: Son of Sham,” 70.

!99 Jimmy Pursey, interview by Sandy Robertson, “Sham 69: Son of Sham,” 71.

!50 immigration politics: “And they come from places where the Black population is over the limit.

So if you’re livin’ in them type of situations that’s why your [sic] gonna start thinkin’ that

way.”100 Pursey’s comments reveal how this working-class identity that punk attached itself to acted as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, bands like the Clash tried to connect this identity to a vaguely Marxist concept of class struggle and working-class revolt. But the same theme of working-class angst could easily be related to the rhetoric of the racist and anti- immigrant right-wing—NF, British Movement, and pro-Enoch alike. This was not lost on NF organizers like , who noted how punk reflected the “frustration of white working class youth,” and Joe Pearce, who suggested “Its energy expresses the frustrations of white youths. Its lyrics describe the reality of life on the dole… It is about fighting the government,

about fighting the whole system. It is the music of white rebellion.”101

Punk’s symbology was also easily appropriated by the far-right. Most obvious is punk’s early embrace of the swastika. Many writers have dismissed punk’s flirtation with the swastika as a mere shock tactic. Surely, in many cases it was. Punks had an early fascination with nazi regalia. The trend perhaps started with Ron Asheton, guitarist for the American proto-punk band the Stooges, who made swastikas part of his on-stage uniform. While Asheton’s fascination with nazism dated back to high school and seemed to be mostly apolitical, when it was grafted onto

English punk culture it took on a different significance. As Jon Savage wrote in a December

!100 Jimmy Pursey, interview by Sandy Robertson, “Sham 69: Son of Sham,” 71.

!101 “We are the New Breed,” Bulldog, No. 21, 1981, 3, in Worley and Copsey, “White Youth,” 35. Matthew Worley, “Shot By Both Sides: Punk Politics and the End of ‘Consensus,’” Contemporary British History 26, vol. 3 (2012): 343.

!51 1976 edition of the fanzine London’s Outrage, “As for the kink gear and Nazi ephemera—it fits a particularly English kind of decay; perversity thru [sic] repression given true expression… At

last the English fascination w/ WW 2 finds the darker side.”102 In 1970s England, where the residual destruction of the Second World War was still widely visible on the streets of London, nazism and the war still held a powerful grip over England’s national narrative. “The mythology of heroic war films and the soft stereotypes of ’Allo, ’Allo and Dad’s Army, is rooted deeply within our national consciousness,” the musician noted, referencing popular sitcoms

that glorified Britain’s role in the war.103 Flaunting Nazi symbology therefore became a targeted generational protest as well as a commentary on English heritage and politics. As Jon Savage wrote, “it was this very Churchillian myth that, thirty years after VE Day, Punk set out to challenge across a broad front: England had not won the war but lost. There was no longer the cushion of empire, just dreams of historic glories, of Douglas Bader and Jack Warner, of the

Silver Jubilee and all that red, white and blue bunting.”104 Embracing the swastika became a way to challenge England’s sources of national pride just as the desecration of the Queen’s image did.

But even if the infamous flirtations with the swastika may have mostly been a shock tactic, given the prominence of the NF at the time, it wasn’t a harmless one. Take the testament of a writer in Ripped and Torn: “I wore a swastika and an iron cross… it was starting to interest me… I was starting to stand up for the insults people made about the Nazi stuff. You know,

102! Jon Savage, London’s Outrage, 1976, Box F2, Folder 28, ED/3/28/2, England’s Dreaming: The Jon Savage Archive, Liverpool John Moores University Special Collections and Archives, Liverpool John Moores University, 8.

!103 Billy Bragg, quoted in Savage, England’s Dreaming, x.

!104 Savage, England’s Dreaming, x.

!52 people would say ‘fucking Jew hater,’ and I’d stick up for Jew killing.”105 The anonymous writer goes on to argue against wearing swastikas, but the point remains: punk icons flaunting Nazi paraphernalia were playing a dangerous game. How might the casual punk fan interpret Siouxsie

Sioux, often equipped with a swastika armband, singing “too many for my liking” in “Love in a Void?” Punk’s use of the Union Jack in the mid-1970s had similar implications. As Roger

Sabin writes, the Union Jack, “could be worn ironically (especially around the time of the Jubilee e.g., the Pistols, Clash), could be a homage to the era (e.g., and their fans), or, much less commonly, could be a statement against American influence (and American punk).

But, similarly, it could be a symbol of the NF: by 1977, the party had pretty much made the flag

its own.” 106 Certainly, the fascist right took notice, as evidenced by a 1977 article in the British

Movement’s tabloid British Patriot suggesting that punk’s use of swastikas and iron crosses

might suggest an interest in racist politics.107

The relationship between punk and the nationalist right-wing was strong enough to draw the attention—concern, in fact—of some within punk. As early as 1976, Jon Savage expressed concern that punk may be, “the first stirrings, on a mass level, of a particularly English kind of

fascism.”108 Among some more dubious connections he makes between punk’s “cult of the powerful” attitude and the “bully-boy -power of Nazism,” he highlights the prevalence of

!105 Sabin, “‘I Won’t Let That Dago By,’” 208.

106! Sabin, “‘I Won’t Let That Dago By,’” 209.

!107 Worley and Copsey, “White Youth,” 35.

!108 Savage, London’s Outrage, 1976, 11.

!53 violence in punk’s rhetoric.109 Comparing violence among punks to that among mods and Teddy

Boys a decade earlier, he writes, “The main difference is not in the violence-as-a-way-of-life schtick, but with the overtly political nature of much of the material, the violence as an answer to

the dole, etc.”110 It’s easy to understand Savage’s concern. Punk espoused violence and working- class rage, and also happened to embrace swastikas as a shock tactic. While that alone certainly doesn’t make punk fascist, it also doesn’t make it anti-fascist or anti-racist. To Savage, it also made punk uniquely susceptible to manipulation by the right-wing: “it needs one bright

politician (Enoch) to make the link… between rock ’n politics & it’ll be a wipe-out.”111

Moreover, Savage may have feared that punk culture would be subsumed by the racist right, as skinhead culture was in the late 1970s. Skinhead culture developed originally in the

1960s as a “multicultural synthesis organized around fashion and music.”112 The skinhead culture of the 1960s can be seen as a working-class offshoot of the ‘mod’ subculture that incorporated a heavy influence from Jamaican immigrant culture. Signifiers of the 1960s skinhead (also referred to as ) style were rolled jeans, heavy , button-down shirts,

Fred Perry polo shirts, braces, Harrington jackets, and tightly cropped hair. In many ways, skinhead culture was defined by its relationship with Black British culture. White skinheads’ music of choice was Jamaican and they “happily bopped alongside youths of Afro-Caribbean

!109 Savage, London’s Outrage, 1976, 8.

110! Savage, London’s Outrage, 1976, 8.

!111 Savage, London’s Outrage, 1976, 8.

!112 Timothy S. Brown. “Subcultures, Pop Music and Politics: Skinheads and ‘Nazi Rock’ in England and Germany,” Journal of Social History 38, no. 1, (fall 2004): 157.

!54 origin.”113 During a skinhead revival in the 1970s, however, a harder, more politicized, and more consciously working-class variation of the skinhead look and culture emerged. The culture lost its multiracial character and became more specifically associated with white identity. Skinheads became widely associated with the far-right in England, to the extent that in the 21st century, the term is nearly synonymous with racism. At various times since the 1970s, subsets of explicitly non-political and left-wing skinheads have tried to reclaim the culture, but its associations with the right-wing have come to dominate its popular perception.

By 1977-78, there was already a strong enough presence of far-right sympathizers in and around the punk scene to garner some pretty significant concern that punk could go down the path that skinhead culture took. There was a particularly strong presence around many of the groups that defined themselves around a working-class identity and those most closely associated with the ‘70s skinhead revival. This included a pretty diverse grouping of bands, such as

Skrewdriver, an originally apolitical punk band who would refashion themselves as a Nazi-rock band around 1980; Sham 69, of the Oi! scene; and, strangely enough, the mixed-race two-tone band . NF supporters and far-right punk fans were notorious for causing fights to break out in the crowds at punk concerts, creating a verifiably hostile environment. As Paul

Heaton described, “My best friend Joe was black and he wouldn’t come to gigs because it was dangerous… People were getting attacked at gigs and there was always far-right literature

about.”114 A writer for the fanzine Armed Force described one instance where, “a ‘skinhead’

!113 John Pollard, “Skinhead Culture: The Ideologies, Mythologies, Religions and Conspiracy Theories of Racist Skinheads,” Patterns of Prejudice 50, nos. 4-5, (2016): 405.

!114 Paul Heaton, in Walls Come Tumbling Down:The Music and Politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge, ed. Daniel Rachel (London: Picador, 2016), 54.

!55 smashes a bottle on the head of a ‘punk’ who is later taken to the hospital,” while a writer for

City Fun casually noticed “5 or 6 skinheads behind me were trying to start a fight (yawn).”115

NF-supporting fans at Sham 69 shows would chant “What’ve we got? Fuck all! National

Front!” 116 At Specials shows, some racist audience members would give Nazi salutes and throw

pennies at the Black members of the band.117 Even Sham 69’s final concert was broken up after skinheads stormed the stage, an unfortunately fitting bookend to the band’s short and tumultuous career.

To this effect, the punk scene in the late 1970s became, quite literally, a battlefield on which fascist and anti-fascists in England clashed. Without a doubt, punk was not a definitively racist scene and many of punk’s most recognizable faces were outwardly anti-racist and anti- fascist. But, given punk’s close association with British working-class culture—one of the prime targets of right-wing organizing and propaganda, and indeed, an important part of the fascist base

—as well as its general ambivalence on the issue of race in England and to the rise of the far- right in general, it was also anything but definitively anti-racist. As punk culture developed in the late 1970s, punks disagreed, argued, and fought over punk’s politics.

115! Andy Waide, Armed Force, Box B20, Folder 2, 6\4\44\10, England’s Dreaming: The Jon Savage Archive, Liverpool John Moores University Special Collections and Archives, Liverpool John Moores University, 1. Jon Savage, City Fun 14, 1980, Box F1, Folder 8, 3\8\2, England’s Dreaming: The Jon Savage Archive, Liverpool John Moores University Special Collections and Archives, Liverpool John Moores University, 2.

!116 Sabin, “‘I Won’t Let That Dago By,’” 210.

!117 Heather Augustyn, Ska: An Oral History, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 99.

!56 CHAPTER THREE

ROCK AGAINST RACISM: FORMING AN ANTI-RACIST PUNK IDENTITY

“Who shot the sheriff, Eric?:” Creating Rock Against Racism

Eric Clapton was performing at the Birmingham Odeon when he unintentionally kickstarted Rock Against Racism (RAR). Between songs at an August 1976 concert, the sixties -rocker launched into a drunken, racist tirade, targeting Black and Asian immigrants and declaring his support for Enoch Powell. Red Saunders, a London photographer, activist, and one of the soon-to-be founders of RAR, recalled reading this in a review of the concert in Sounds:

“he shambled on stage and began warning us all about ‘foreigners’ and the need to vote for

Enoch Powell whom Eric described as ‘a prophet’ and the danger of the country ‘being a colony

within ten years’ and of how Eric was thinking of retiring to become an MP.”118 The British

Afro-Caribbean novelist Caryl Phillips was in the audience. The writer expected to see “about as black a musician as I ever listened to,” and was shocked when Clapton declared, “Enoch was

right—I think we should send them all back.”119 The remarks were particularly surprising given that Clapton built his career upon Black music. He was a renowned blues stylist who made hits out of ’s “Born Under a Bad Sign,” Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads,” and Howlin’

!118 Red Saunders, in Walls Come Tumbling Down, 5.

!119 Robin Denselow, When the Music’s Over: The Story of Political Pop (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 139.

!57 Wolf’s “Crossroads.” More recently, he’d even ventured into reggae with a cover ’s

“I Shot the Sheriff.” “The root of all this music was the blues and and slave music, and then to hear Clapton, that’s what provoked not just massive disappointment but anger,” Saunders remembered. And yet, here he was, in the same city that Powell delivered his

“Rivers of Blood” speech less than a decade earlier—a city well-known for its large immigrant population—stoking the already burning flame of anti-immigrant paranoia.

Clapton wasn’t alone. , demonstrating a strange fascination with Nazism and occultism, had recently made statements in the press praising Hitler and fascism. Just preceding his album Station to Station, released in 1975, Bowie had adopted a new character, the

Thin White Duke, an Aryan figure with slicked blonde hair and pale features. In 1976, appearing as the Thin White Duke, Bowie was photographed in Victoria Station with his arm raised in what appeared to be a . In interviews, he had compared Hitler to Mick Jagger, and stated, “I

think Britain could benefit from a fascist leader. After all, fascism is really nationalism.”120 The photograph and remarks sparked controversy in the music press while also garnering him favor with white nationalists and fascists across England, one of whom described Bowie in the NF’s

Bulldog magazine as the pioneer of “white European dance music.”121 To Red Saunders and other onlookers, seemed to be making a rightward turn at precisely the wrong moment, potentially boosting the credibility and fashionability of the NF among British youth.

!120 ‘Heil and farewell’, New Musical Express, 8 May 1976, 9, quoted in Ryan Schaffer, “The Soundtrack of Neo-Fascism: Youth and Music in the National Front,” Patterns of Prejudice 17, No. 4-5 (2013): 466.

!121 “White European Dance Music,” Bulldog, No. 25, 1981, 3, quoted in Worley and Copsey, “White Youth,” 39.

!58 The news of Clapton’s outburst was offensive enough to Saunders to compel him to write a response letter to the rock magazine the New Musical Express (NME). The first half of the letter reads as a parade of insults directed toward the prominent bluesman. “When I read about

Eric Clapton’s Birmingham concert when he urged support for Enoch Powell, we nearly puked,” the letter began. “What’s going on Eric? You’ve got a touch of brain damage…. Own up, half

your music is black. You’re rock’s biggest colonist.” 122 Saunders then gets to the point, with some rhetorical flair: “You’ve got to fight the racist poison… Rock was and still can be a real progressive culture, not a package mail-order stick-on nightmare of mediocre garbage. We want to organize a rank-and-file movement against the racist poison in rock music—we urge support

—all those interested please write to ROCK AGAINST RACISM.”123 Saunders and a group of associates and friends—many of whom were members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and other left-wing organizations—cosigned the letter and sent it to the NME, who published it shortly after, along with two other major music magazines, Sounds and Melody Maker.

About a month after the concert, Clapton issued a hand-written, half-hearted apology “to all the foreigners in Brum,” blaming his comments on the bottle and a “foreigner who pinched my missus’ bum,” and maintaining his belief that “Enoch is the only politician mad enough to

run this country.”124 Surely, less an apology than a reaffirmation of what he had said on stage, but it really didn’t matter, anyway; the damage had been done, the wheels set in motion. In the two

122! Red Saunders, Rock Against Racism Letter, in Walls Come Tumbling Down, 6.

!123 Red Saunders, Rock Against Racism Letter, in Walls Come Tumbling Down, 6.

!124 Eric Clapton, Apology Letter in the New Musical Express, in Walls Come Tumbling Down, 13.

!59 weeks after Saunders’ letter had been sent to the NME, there was an outpouring of support. There were 600 replies to the letter, and many more after it was republished in the SWP’s weekly paper,

Socialist Worker. 125 Barry Miles, a veteran writer for the NME, described the enthusiasm following Saunders’ letter: “They received letters from schoolkids enclosing postage stamps; from a man of 65 who said he disliked rock but hated racism far more; from a musician in the

Shetland Islands; and from an NME reader in Milan; from public schoolboys writing on crested

paper; from a group of guys living in Kingston, Jamaica.”126 RAR had quickly escalated from a concept into a movement. London’s Hope and Anchor pub offered itself as a venue, Carol

Grimes—who had performed on the same bill as Clapton in the past—offered to play, the Royal

College of Art Students’ Union offered their support, and hundreds sent money to fund the

campaign. 127

By the end of 1976, the first RAR concert was already in the books—a December 10 concert featuring Carol Grimes, Matumbi, and Limousine. By this point, RAR was already shaping into form, demonstrating glimpses of what it would grow into. RAR made a clear point from the beginning to focus on booking both white and Black musicians. Matumbi, a Black

British band, and Limousine, a multi-racial band, allowed the organization to accomplish this from the very first show. The show took place at the Princess Alice in London’s East End—a hotspot of right-wing campaigning and support—reflecting RAR’s confrontational style and

125! Ian Goodyer, Crisis Music: The Cultural Politics of Rock Against Racism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 11.

!126 Barry Miles, Clipping about RAR, New Musical Express, n.d., Add MS 89160/2/34, The Papers of Barry Miles (1960-2013), British Library: Western Manuscripts, London, UK.

!127 Miles, Clipping about RAR, New Musical Express, n.d.

!60 attack-at-the-source strategy. “I remember thinking, ‘Blimey, talk about going into the lion’s

den,’” Grimes later recalled.128

There was one definitive aspect of RAR that was missing: the punks. The association between punk and RAR would come later. That relationship, furthermore, can’t accurately be described as organic. The main figures in RAR, particularly during this early stage, were for the most part outside of the punk milieu. They were older, most of them having come of age in the sixties, a collection of former mods and hippies inclined toward social activism. Many of them were in close contact with the SWP. Key figures Roger Huddle and Ruth Gregory, along with

RAR photographer Syd Shelton, were involved in the SWP’s print shop, which would later produce Temporary Hoarding, RAR’s approximation of a fanzine. David Widgery, another key figure who would later author a history of RAR, Beating Time: Riot ’n’ Race ’n’

Rock ’n’ Roll, was an SWP member, while Saunders was closely affiliated with the party.

This connection to the SWP can’t be understated. RAR was not, in truth, a front organization of the Trotskyist SWP. For the most part it operated independently of the organization. However, its close links to the party, as well as the Anti-Nazi League (ANL), which was largely an SWP front organization and a more traditional political organization, deeply informed RAR’s political strategy and ideology. The depth of this relationship only further emphasizes that RAR was in no way a grassroots, organic punk movement. Similar to the way that the NF tried to co-opt punk culture, so did the SWP. The connection between RAR and the

SWP would prove to both benefit and detract from RAR’s goals, providing the organization with

!128 Carol Grimes, in Walls Come Tumbling Down, 17.

!61 structure, resources, and knowhow to facilitate its growth but also undercutting RAR’s claim to punk legitimacy and limiting its appeal within punk culture.

Nevertheless, RAR also had a profound and undeniable impact on punk culture. The campaign solidified and politicized the relationship between punk and reggae, which amounted to a profound anti-racist statement. Putting Black and white musicians on the same stage offered

Black musicians a unique opportunity to voice their politics and grievances to a large, white audience. Furthermore, as Ashley Dawson writes, the fusion of West Indian cultural traditions such as reggae and carnival with the distinctly British punk culture created a “particularly powerful example of what Vijay Prashad calls , a term which challenges

hegemonic , with its model of neatly bounded distinct cultures.”129 That is to say

that RAR offered a vision of Britain a “mongrel rather than ethnically pure nation.”130 In the context of punk culture, which offered its own reimagining of the notion of Britishness, RAR allied the rebellious ethos of punk with that of reggae, and the white, working class struggle with that of the Black or Asian immigrant. It therefore opened a space where white and Black musicians could relate, communicate, and collaborate. Long after the link between reggae and punk had been established by RAR and certain visionary bands, it is easy to forget that the relationship between the genres—and the relationship between punk and anti-racist politics—had to be formed.

“If Left is right then Right is Wrong:” Mobilizing Anti-Racist Punk

!129 Ashley Dawson, “Love Music, Hate Racism: The Cultural Politics of the Rock Against Racism Campaigns, 1976-1981” Postmodern Culture 16, no. 1 (September 2005): n.p. Project MUSE, Accessed April 2, 2018, http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.library.ohio.edu/article/192260.

!130 Dawson, “Love Music, Hate Racism,” n.p.

!62 On August 13, 1977, close to a year after the first RAR concert at the Princess Alice, the

National Front planned a march through southeast London with the intention to highlight “the

disproportionate amount of street crime committed in the area by black youths.”131 The NF intended for about 500 members to march from into the neighborhood of Lewisham, an area with a strong West Indian population. Upon learning about the march, the SWP organized a counterdemonstration. When the NF reached New Cross, they were met by a crowd of

thousands intending to block the NF’s procession.132 After about an hour and a half, the police were able to open up a pathway, and the march went underway, though not without resistance from the crowd gathered in opposition. As the NF marched through London, counter- demonstrators pelted them with anything they could find. In Beating Time, David Widgery remembered the event in dramatic fashion: “Then suddenly the sky darkened (as they say in

Latin epic poetry), only this time with clods, rocks, lumps of wood, planks and bricks.”133 As the

NF moved through London, the protesters stayed with them all the way to Lewisham, blocking their path and assailing the marchers. According to the BBC, by the end of the day “110 people, including 55 police officers, were injured in the disturbances… But apart from a few minor

skirmishes, the 3,000 police officers on duty succeeded in keeping the two groups apart.”134 In

Widgery’s eyes, the counterdemonstration was a success: “The mood was justly euphoric. Not

!131 “Violent Clashes at NF March,” BBC, August 13, 1977, accessed April 2, 2018, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/august/13/newsid_2534000/2534035.stm.

132! Widgery, Beating Time, 47. Mackie, “The real losers in Saturday’s battle of Lewisham.”

!133 Widgery, Beating Time, 47.

!134 “Violent Clashes at NF March.”

!63 only because of the sense of achievement—they didn’t pass, not with any dignity anyway, and the police completely lost the absolute control McNee [David McNee, the Metropolitan

Commissioner of Police] had boasted about—but also because, at last, we were all in it

together.” 135

Widgery describes the events as a major catalyst in the formation of the ANL and in

prompting RAR to “organize in earnest.”136 RAR had been steadily developing since Saunders’ letter was published in the NME. Throughout 1977, the organization settled on some key aspects of the organization’s strategies and tactics. Foremost among these were its visual identity, which furthered the youth-culture-politics connection RAR hoped to draw; its grassroots strategy, which enabled RAR to spread so dramatically across England in such a short span of time; and lastly, its emphasis on a cross-racial musical identity. It was also during this period that many of the musicians and figures—including Aswad, Misty in Roots, , , and —that were key to RAR became involved.

From the outset, one of the definitive aspects of RAR’s tactics was its imagery. From its recognizable red star logo, which could be fashioned into pins or t-shirts, to the DIY fanzine aesthetics of RAR’s Temporary Hoarding newsletter, RAR took its graphic design very seriously.

RAR organizers considered this visual identity as crucial to their project, serving to bridge the gap between youth culture and Marxist politics. The star logo, for example, was directly taken from Marxist imagery. “It was taken from the five-cornered star of which was designed by El

Lissitsky for the Bolshevik Party,” Red Saunders explained, “There are five stars because of the

!135 Widgery, Beating Time, 49.

!136 Widgery, Beating Time, 49.

!64 five continents. It’s the star of the Internationale.”137 But importantly, their designs also spoke to punk aesthetics, incorporating cut-up photographs, collage, and pieced-together text, recalling the imagery of fanzines like Jon Savage’s London’s Burning or Mark Perry’s Sniffin’ Glue.

This visual aspect was instrumental in advancing RAR’s cultural project as well as it’s political project. Pins bearing the RAR star or the ANL logo served as a fashionable means of advertising while Temporary Hoarding incorporated both style and political substance.

According to Lucy Whitman, an RAR organizer, “we wanted to give them something to take home and read and think about. Temporary Hoarding reflected the energy of the gigs. It was

educational agitprop.”138 RAR’s organizers therefore intended for Temporary Hoarding to be as critical to their political project as the concerts were, if not even more so. RAR’s founders, intending for the magazine to have a propagandistic effect, placed equal weight on its visual element as its substance. This fit within the popular approach to campaigning that differentiated

RAR from traditional left-wing campaigns. As Tom Robinson, an early RAR participant and leader of the attested: “They completely got how important graphics were to putting across an idea… It made it much more appealing as an idea. The British left was so

dry and non-visual and it didn’t understand branding.”139 This fusion of style and substance was arguably what enabled RAR to develop a significant presence in British youth culture.

If Temporary Hoarding demonstrated an emphasis on popular appeal, it also served an important function in articulating the campaign’s political agenda. Temporary Hoarding drew the

137! Red Saunders, in Walls Come Tumbling Down, 35.

!138 Lucy Whitman, in Walls Come Tumbling Down, 34.

!139 Tom Robinson, in Walls Come Tumbling Down, 36.

!65 connection between the politics and the music by providing an avenue for activists and musicians alike to discuss race and politics in depth. The second issue contained an interview with none other than Johnny Rotten, the face of punk when the interview was released in mid-1977, declaring “I despise them [the NF]. No-one should have the right to tell anyone they can’t live here because of the color of their skin or their religion or whatever, the size of their nose. How

could anyone vote for something so ridiculously inhumane.”140 Even more important, Temporary

Hoarding gave Black musicians, so often deprived of a voice by the press, the chance to speak.

The same issue as the interview with Johnny Rotten contained a lengthy editorial by Aswad on

Rastafari, racism in Britain, the condition of being a reggae musician, African politics, and

more.141 This offered Black musicians—and more generally, Black people—a chance to speak about their experience of racism to white audiences. Amidst all of this, Temporary Hoarding also included pieces on issues of racial politics worldwide, from South Africa to to

Northern Ireland. This multidimensional approach was unique, as Temporary Hoarding seemingly crossed a bridge between traditional music magazines, punk fanzines, the SWP’s

Socialist Worker, and the foundational Black political journal Race Today. Furthermore, people

were buying it, as each issue was selling 12,000 copies by 1979.142

140! Johnny Rotten, interview by David Widgery, “A Drunken Political Discussion,” Temporary Hoarding 2, 1977, n.p. Box F5, Folder 46, ED/3/47/4, England’s Dreaming: The Jon Savage Archive, Liverpool John Moores University Special Collections and Archives, Liverpool John Moores University.

!141 “Aswad,” Temporary Hoarding 2, 1977, n.p.

!142 Widgery, Beating Time, 62.

!66 Another page in the second issue of Temporary Hoarding contains a revealing insight into a crucial aspect of RAR’s organizational strategy. “For RAR Gig Organizers” reads the

headline, proceeding to list information about how to organize your own RAR concerts.143 This speaks fundamentally to the grassroots, even DIY, approach to organization. It was easily one of the reasons RAR was able to spread so dramatically throughout England (over 200 concerts by

the end of 1977).144 “When people wrote to us and said, ‘How can I be involved?’ we would send them back information about who they could connect up with or what to do to set up things themselves,” recalled RAR organizer Kate Webb. “They sent in their loose change and stamped

addressed envelopes in return for badges and Day-Glo stickers.”145 This also importantly fit within the DIY ethos of punk. RAR organizers wisely identified their movement as a popular movement and tried to make it as easy as possible for anyone to become involved. Without this kind of grassroots approach, it is unlikely that RAR—a campaign rooted and run out of London

—would have spread so rapidly across the country. Furthermore, as Simon Frith and John Street

note, RAR provided a model that allowed local groups to respond to local issues.146 They cite an outdoor concert in , for example, organized in immediate response to a series of violent

!143 “For RAR Gig Organizers,” Temporary Hoarding 2, 1977, n.p.

144! Temporary Hoarding 4, 1977, n.p. Box F5, Folder 46, ED/3/47/1. England’s Dreaming: The Jon Savage Archive, Liverpool John Moores University Special Collections and Archives, Liverpool John Moores University.

!145 Kate Webb, in Walls Come Tumbling Down, 37.

!146 Simon Frith and John Street, “Rock Against Racism and Red Wedge: From Music to Politics, from Politics to Music,” in Rockin’ the Boat: Mass Music and Mass Movements, ed. Reebee Garofalo, (Boston: South End Press,1992), 70.

!67 attacks against Asian British people that included a fatal stabbing.147 In other words, RAR offered the opportunity for people to take issues into their own hands.

As RAR grew during 1977, it gradually became more deeply associated with two genres: punk and reggae. From the outset RAR was intent on booking reggae bands. The relationship was natural. Reggae was the most popular form of Black music in the 1970s and it was also the most directly political. The first concert involved Matumbi, led by the -born guitarist, bassist, and producer Dennis Bovell, one of the most famous British reggae bands in the mid-1970s.

Soon, smaller, British-born, and more directly political reggae bands became associated with the organization. Aswad, led by Brinsley Forde, was one of the first groups to become deeply involved in the campaign, making their first appearance at an RAR show in May 1977 on the same bill as Carol Grimes. Aswad, along with groups like Steel Pulse, was one of the most important bands in a growing homegrown reggae scene in England. These bands spoke specifically to the Black British experience and were often far more politically-oriented than roots reggae coming from the Caribbean islands. In Aswad’s song, “Not Guilty,” Forde speaks to the criminalization of Black men in England: “Forgive them Jah / They know what they’re doing

/ They blame the Rastaman / They blame the Rastaman / It doesn’t matter what the Rastaman say

/ They want to crucify him anyway.”148 Their name, “Aswad,” from the Arabic word for Black ties their music to afro-centric, anti-assimilationist, and anti-Western ideas present in radical

!147 Frith and Street, “Rock Against Racism and Red Wedge,” 70.

!148 Aswad, “Not Guilty,” Jah Lyrics, accessed April 12, 2018, https://www.jah-lyrics.com/song/ aswad-not-guilty.

!68 Rastafari. Steel Pulse, of Handsworth, Birmingham, was equally important. Their song “Ku Klux

Klan” drew an analogy between the actions of the American white supremacist organization and racist violence in the UK: “Walking along just kicking stones / Minding my own business / I come face to face with my foe / Disguised in violence from head to toe / I holler and bawl (the

Ku Klux Klan) / Them no let me go (the ) / To let me go was not dem intention

(they say) / One nigga the less / The better the show / Stand strong black skin and take your

blow.” 149 Reggae was absolutely fundamental for RAR because it brought Black voices and ideas to the fore. Furthermore, the politicized reggae of bands like Aswad and Steel Pulse brought

RAR an articulate radicalism to RAR’s movement based in the roots of Rastafari culture. The music was inherently confrontational and uncompromising. “Reggae was the music of the black youth of Britain,” said the Jamaican-born poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, “It provided us with the means of an independent identity in a racialized environment and culture. It provided us with a

nexus of resistance against police brutality.”150

But staging Black musicians was only half of RAR’s project. RAR intended to speak to

Britain’s white youth, and in order to attract white youth, they required white performers. RAR’s association with punk grew out of this intention. It’s unclear when punk bands became regular features at RAR shows, but Ian Goodyer offers a show at the Roundhouse in May 1977 featuring the Slits as possibly flipping the switch for good, suggesting that the band “alerted RAR to the

!149 Steel Pulse, “Ku Klux Klan,” Genius, accessed April 12, 2018, https://genius.com/Steel- pulse-ku-klux-klan-lyrics.

!150 Linton Kwesi Johnson, in Walls Come Tumbling Down, 57.

!69 latent synergy between the two forms of music [punk and reggae].”151 RAR organizers saw in punk a musical potency and a political energy, if an undefined one, that RAR could tap into. “We both understood that there was a shift and if we didn’t orientate on that, then we would miss the audience,” Roger Huddle explained, “It was our experience politically, that we just knew that

something was happening and the next gig had to be a punk band and a reggae band.”152 RAR also used punk as a way to translate its anti-racist message to working-class youth. “Punk is a kind… its [sic] a real explosion of working class youth and it seems as though that groups could be easily accesable [sic] to fascist ideas as well, more than any other group,” said central RAR committee member Ruth Gregory in a 1977 interview with Bethnal Street Talk, “They [the NF]

still look on them as the new and we’ve got to get in there before they do.”153

Hopping on the punk bandwagon early proved to be critical for RAR, locating the campaign firmly amidst the blossoming youth movement and allowing it to speak directly toward their target audience.

It is important to note that the connection between punk and reggae was anything but natural, even if premier punk bands like the Clash bore the influence of reggae on their shoulders. Mykaell Riley of Steel Pulse described the genres as “oil and water. We were busy learning our instruments to be as proficient as possible and they were going, ‘Just pick it up and

151! Ian Goodyer, Crisis Music, 85.

!152 Roger Huddle, interview by Ian Goodyer, 2000, quoted in Ian Goodyer, Crisis Music, 85.

!153 Ruth Gregory, interview by Sharon Spike, “Interview With RAR,” Bethnal Street Talk, November 1, 1977. Box F7, Folder 59, ED/3/54/8, 3. England’s Dreaming: The Jon Savage Archive, Liverpool John Moores University Special Collections and Archives, Liverpool John Moores University.

!70 play.’…We were rebelling in a different way by talking about politics and the way we dressed

and by having politicized lyrics. Punk was just saying ‘Fuck off.’”154 Within the context of RAR, however, the genres developed a powerful relationship. The politics of reggae contextualized the inarticulate anger expressed in punk. Standing next to reggae’s articulation of Black struggle, the notion of crisis that punk seized upon gathered a new weight.

Nevertheless, there were a number of punk bands that demonstrated a strong reggae influence. The Clash, who covered Junior Murvin’s “Police and Thieves” on their inaugural album, were probably the first band to draw a connection between the genres, but a number of bands followed . The Slits’ first album was produced by Dennis Bovell and featured obvious dub and reggae influences. The Ruts, regular RAR performers, were also heavily influenced by reggae, and were in fact frequently collaborated with reggae band Misty In Roots. Even

Johnny Rotten, whose music with the Sex Pistols bore no recognizable similarities to Afro-

Caribbean music, was a big reggae fan, and invited his friend Linton Kwesi Johnson to open for

PiL after the breakup of the Sex Pistols. Furthermore, Steel Pulse began making appearances on the punk circuit after opening for the band .

As soon as RAR recognized this crossover, punk bands became regular performers at its concerts and punk became a definitive aspect of the campaign. By the end of 1977, RAR had mostly shaped into focus and had grown into a fairly substantial movement. Moving into 1978, however, RAR would continue to expand into a much larger movement. The clash between anti- fascist protestors and the NF in Lewisham in August of that year proved to be something of a turning point for RAR. The formation of the ANL in in the wake of those events gave RAR

!154 Mykaell Riley, in Walls Come Tumbling Down, ed. Daniel Rachel, 57.

!71 something of a sister organization to work with. The collaboration between the two organizations would produce the two largest RAR events: the first and second RAR/ANL carnivals, which combined ANL demonstrations with large open-air concerts featuring a number of prominent punk bands. The first featured the Clash, Steel Pulse, X-Ray Spex, the Ruts, Sham 69, Patrik

Fitzgerald, Generation X, and the Tom Robinson Band; the second featured Aswad, Sham 69,

Misty In Roots, and & the Attractions, among others. A crowd of 100,000 people, by David Widgery’s estimate, gathered in and marched all the way to Victoria

Park in Hackney to attend the first carnival.155 The two organizations collaborated to organize five of these carnivals—the last of which was the final RAR concert in 1981, headlined by two- tone band and regular RAR performers the Specials.

The so-called “Battle of Lewisham” was significant also because it prompted a dialogue about racism in the music press. In the wake of the event, Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons wrote an article for the NME about it, entitled “Dedicated Followers of Fascism.” In the article,

Burchill and Parsons—two of the most prominent advocates of punk in the music press— fervently declared solidarity with RAR and with the ANL. “Perhaps you think this wasn’t your battle. Tell it to the blacks. Tell it to the SWP. Tell it to Rock Against Racism. Over to you,” they

concluded.156 The moment seems to have been a turning point, pushing the music press to cover racial and immigration politics and cementing an allegiance to the RAR campaign. As former

NME editor Neil Spencer testifies, “The NME thought Lewisham was really fucking

!155 Widgery, Beating Time, 90.

!156 Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill, “Dedicated Followers of Fascism,” New Musical Express, August 1977, quoted in Walls Come Tumbling Down, 111.

!72 important.” 157 The NME wasn’t alone either. The March 25, 1978 issue of Sounds was devoted entirely to racism in music, with commentary by Jon Savage, Vivien Goldman, and Gary

Bushell. 158 While it is important not to overstate the influence of the music press on the minds of

British youth, it undoubtedly acted as an important ally for the anti-racist movement and helped to bring the issue to the foreground.

By the end of 1978, RAR had staged over 300 concerts and five carnivals and had featured many of the most prominent and important bands in punk’s vanguard. At this point,

RAR had clearly become a major political and cultural campaign, and it had made a noticeable impact on punk, helping to undermine the fascist undercurrent in the culture. While the Clash were likely the first punks to publicly discuss and confront racism and the NF, RAR brought the issue to the fore. By 1977, its influence was already being deeply felt in the culture.

One of RAR’s biggest achievements was incorporating people and musicians of color into the predominantly white punk culture. If bands like the Sex Pistols and even the Clash had conceptualized their punk identity based on notions of white Britishness, RAR made a significant effort to integrate the culture. The pairing of Black reggae and white punk bands was significant, and helped to inspire the developments of the two-tone ska, but RAR also staged a number of integrated and non-white punk bands. X-Ray Spex, fronted by half-Somali vocalist Poly Styrene, were a prominent feature at some RAR shows. RAR also encouraged Asian people to participate in punk culture. The Asian punk band Alien Kulture became regular performers at RAR, and

RAR staged many concerts in areas with heavily Asian populations, including Southall, site of

!157 Neil Spencer, in Walls Come Tumbling Down, 112.

!158 Sabin, “‘I Won’t Let That Dago By,’” 200.

!73 the 1981 Southall carnival. This outreach to Asian culture was especially significant given the differences between Asian and white culture and the prevalence of “Paki-bashing” and anti-

Asian violence in 1970s England. Roger Sabin commented that it was perhaps harder for young

British rebels to identify with Asian culture than West Indian culture because “Asians simply didn’t have the same romance as Afro-Caribbean youth—especially in terms of the latter’s reputation for being confrontational with the police—and what was equally problematic, they

had no comparable to reggae with which punks could identify.”159 He highlights the tendency for punk bands and fanzines to ignore the prevalent racism against Asian people, even in the cases where they discussed racism against West Indians. RAR, however, made a conscious effort to speak to Asian people, and connected with Asian advocacy and community groups like the

Indian Workers Association and the Southall Youth Movement.160 The filmmaker Gurinder

Chadha, who was a London schoolgirl in 1976, attested that witnessing the march to Victoria

Park before the first RAR carnival helped open her up to rock music and gave her a sense of belonging. “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” she remembered, “these where white, English people, many with long hair like the rockers I could never relate to—marching, chanting to help ME and

my family find our place in our adopted homeland…. I had found my tribe, my kindred clan.” 161

One of the most obvious examples of RAR’s influence on punk is the beginning of two- tone ska, a musical sub-genre that incorporates the influences of Jamaican ska with punk stylings

159! Sabin, “‘I Won’t Let That Dago By,’” 204.

!160 Ian Goodyer, Crisis Music, 82.

!161 Gurinder Chadha, “Gurinder Chadha,” Reminiscences of Rock Against Racism: Rocking Against Racism 1976-1982, ed. Roger Huddle and Red Saunders (London: Redwords, 2016), 45.

!74 and in many ways came to form in RAR. The Specials—a fully multi-racial band led by a Black guitarist and vocalist, Lynval Golding, and a white keyboardist and songwriter, — were pioneers in the genre, and were deeply involved in RAR and in anti-racist politics. The

Specials began in 1977 and more or less grew up in RAR, performing regularly on the RAR circuit in their early stages. The multi-racial focus of RAR was a clear influence on the concept of the band and its political ethos. Dammers later explained that “Rock Against Racism had been an influence on The Specials from the start of the band, an influence on my decision to try and make the band specifically multiracial, playing a truly integrated mix of punk and reggae, and to deliberately recruit members from the communities of both those very different types of

music.”162 This approach of attempting a true fusion of genres, and in a more general sense, of cultures, was not only visionary but also political, the natural extension of RAR’s multiculturalism and the truest expression of polyculturalism (recall the term used by Ashley

Dawson) that RAR offered.

Furthermore, the Specials demonstrated the politicized concept of punk culture that RAR envisioned, using their lyrics as a platform to confront prejudice and promote racial unity. After

Lynval Golding was attacked, almost fatally, in a incident of racist violence, he wrote the song

“Why?” and pronounced, “We don’t need no British Movement / Nor the Ku Klux Klan / Nor the National Front / Make me a [sic] angry man / I just wanna live in peace / Why can’t you be

the same / Why should I live in fear.”163 The Specials played a key role in realizing the vision of

!162 Jerry Dammers, “Jerry Dammers” in Reminiscences of Rock Against Racism, 47.

!163 Lynval Golding, “Why?,” Genius, accessed April 12, 2018, https://genius.com/The-specials- why-lyrics.

!75 RAR, not only by illustrating a truly multi-racial imagination of British youth culture, but also by directly and potently confronting racism and the conditions of Black life in England. In a strange twist of fate, the Specials—who in some ways appeared as an skinhead revival band—developed a following of racist skinheads as their fame grew. Nevertheless, their music can be seen as a key part of what might be considered a fairly strong leftward turn that most of punk music took after

1977.

This leftward turn was not prompted, but certainly advanced, by RAR. In 1977, a number of definitively leftist bands began to appear along the national punk circuit, including the - based bands and Gang of Four (named after the faction of the Chinese Communist

Party), the -based Pop Group, the Essex-based anarcho-punk group Crass, and London’s

Tom Robinson Band (who actually formed in 1976). Of these artists, the Mekons, Gang of Four,

Tom Robinson Band, and Crass were RAR participants (although Crass were notably very critical of RAR), and RAR gave them a major platform to reach audiences. Tom Robinson Band, who used their music as a platform to discuss not only racism but and (lead singer Tom Robinson, notably, was gay) became closely associated with the campaign, was involved in organizing RAR concerts, and headlined the RAR carnival at Victoria Park. As RAR gradually grew into one of the largest social movements in England, punk naturally became increasingly associated with leftist politics. That the right-wing sect of punk, led by Skrewdriver, and (the right’s response to RAR), never gathered the same influence or mainstream recognition as avowedly left-wing punk should be at least partially attributed to the relative success of RAR in introducing left-wing punk bands to large audiences.

!76 RAR also served an important function for some bands as a means for them to declare their solidarity with anti-racist causes. This was especially significant for bands like Sham 69, who had developed a following of racists and NF members, even though the members of the band were not aligned with the right wing. Sham 69 performed at RAR in an attempt to disassociate with the right-wing sect of their fanbase, which had grown increasingly violent. The attempt was unsuccessful, but it was nevertheless an incredible act of courage, as singer Jimmy

Pursey reportedly received death threats after performing at the first RAR carnival in April

1978.164 And yet, he came once again to perform at the second carnival in in

September. RAR photographer Syd Shelton remembered him declaring to the crowd: “I decided in bed last night that I wasn’t gonna come today. But this morning I met this kid who said, ‘You ain’t doing it ‘cos all your fans are National Front.’ And I thought, ‘That’s just what everyone’s gonna think if I don’t turn up.’ WELL, I’M HERE! I’m here because I support Rock Against

Racism!”165 The NF and racist skinheads never stopped appearing at Sham 69 shows, but RAR nevertheless gave Sham 69 the ability to take ownership of their politics and reputation.

In part because of RAR, there also began a movement within punk to rid the culture of one of its most visible symbols—the swastika. The music journalist and punk historian Jon

Savage had questioned punk’s attraction to the swastika and fascism as early as 1976, but he, and most other critics, had cast off this uncomfortable relationship as mostly a shock tactic. With the issue coming into sharper focus in 1977, partially because of the continued presence of the NF and partially because of the actions of RAR, some fanzines began to call into question this

!164 Matthew Worley, “Shot By Both Sides,” 345.

!165 Syd Shelton, in Walls Come Tumbling Down, 175.

!77 relationship.166 The fourth issue of the London-based fanzine Flicks bears the headline “Smash

Fascism” across its cover, superimposed on an image of a swastika.167 The next page bears a powerful statement against the use of the Nazi insignia: “For once in your life THINK as you pin on your swastika. As far as you’re concerned it shocks your parents—and thats [sic] fun OK.

Forget them and THINK for YOURSELF.”168 The writer draws a connection between abroad and racial relations in the London borough of Lambeth: “Look around at Lambeth,

Uganda, or South Africa and see what fascism means. Look outside yourself for once and feel

the pain and terror that fascists cause.” 169 And lastly, the writer includes a call to action:

“Fascism works because people like you remain DUMB about it. Use your brain and get out and

FIGHT IT!” 170 The similarities between this diatribe and editorials in Temporary Hoarding are immediately noticeable. The reference to racial politics in South Africa and , for example, recalls Temporary Hoarding editorials about apartheid and the efforts of RAR to connect their movement to a broader anti-racist cause. Even more important is the rejection of inaction and political ambivalence. This rhetoric represents a departure in punk culture, from the

!166 Ripped and Torn 7, 1977, 7. Box F3, Folder 37, ED/3/38/6, England’s Dreaming: The Jon Savage Archive, Liverpool John Moores University Special Collections and Archives, Liverpool John Moores University.

!167 Flicks 4, 1977, 1. Box F1, Folder 14, ED/3/15/3, England’s Dreaming: The Jon Savage Archive, Liverpool John Moores University Special Collections and Archives, Liverpool John Moores University.

168! Flicks 4, 1977, 2.

!169 Flicks 4, 1977, 2.

!170 Flicks 4, 1977, 2.

!78 quasi-nihilistic rage that the Sex Pistols embodied, to a more cohesive, activist, and decidedly left politics, a politics more in line with the Clash and RAR’s vision.

Another editorial in the same magazine, however, suggests that if punks became attracted to RAR’s anti-racist message, they were also skeptical of its pandering, as well as its association with the SWP. In a short piece responding to the violence at Lewisham, one Flicks contributor wrote: “I don’t want to be manipulated by the SWP any more than by the NF, they’re both forms

of fascism, who was worse, Hitler or Stalin?”171 Without calling RAR by name, the article makes clear reference to the campaign and its attempts to speak to punk. If many punks agreed with

RAR’s antiracist sentiment, many also pushed back against the perceived influence of the SWP.

Roger Sabin notes that there was a perception of RAR’s use of punk bands as inauthentic, and

RAR was stereotyped as “‘middle-class,’ ‘hippie,’ and ‘for students.’”172 Considering the roots of RAR, this wasn’t an inaccurate description. Punks persistently opined about outside efforts to appropriate the culture (“We are being exploited right, left and centre when we used to be SO

AWARE!” bemoaned one commentator in the fanzine Bethnal Street Talk).173 The SWP could have easily been compared to any number of outside forces and groups, from the NF to the music press, who had attempted to latch onto the culture for their own interests.

Furthermore, punk’s ‘think for yourself,’ DIY spirit in many ways clashed with the strictly ideological politics of the SWP. Crass, in the song “White Punks On Hope,” called RAR a “marxist con,” and declared: “they won’t change nothing with their fashionable talk / All their

171! “No Wittman No Cry,” Flicks 4, 1977, 34.

!172 Sabin, “‘I Won’t Let That Dago By,’” 206.

!173 “Views on the New Wave,” Bethnal Street Talk, November 1, 1977, 8.

!79 RAR badges and their protest walk / Thousands of white men standing in a park / Objecting to racism’s like a candle in the dark / Black man’s got his problems and his way to deal with it / So

don’t fool yourself you’re helping with your white liberal shit.”174 Even punk’s earliest proponent of the left, Joe Strummer said the SWP could “fuck off, the wankers, that’s just

dogma. I don’t want no dogma.”175 Also notably, RAR paid its performers, and RAR performers like Art Attacks and the Vibrators openly admitted they performed not necessarily for the cause

but for the pay.176 In remembering RAR, the campaign’s organizers have a tendency to overstate the movement’s impact, as well as its relationship to punk. In fact, criticism of RAR and the

SWP was fairly common, and its important not to overstate its influence on punk culture.

It is difficult to ascertain if RAR had any significant impact on British racial politics beyond punk. Despite the more exaggerated claims of some of RAR’s founders and more zealous advocates, RAR was not necessarily responsible for the decline of the NF in the early 1980s. To extrapolate RAR’s influence on punk culture to national politics requires ignoring the election of

Margaret Thatcher, whose rhetoric and hard-line stance on immigration in many ways reflected that of Enoch Powell or the NF, as in one interview where she warned of England being

!174 Crass, “White Punks on Hope,” Genius, accessed April 14, 2018, https://genius.com/Crass- white-punks-on-hope-lyrics.

175! Mark Farrar, ‘Is it More than Rock ‘n’ Roll?’, The Leveller, July/August 1977, 17, quoted in Matthew Worley, “Shot By Both Sides,’” 345.

!176 Sabin, “‘I Won’t Let That Dago By,’” 206.

!177 , interview by Gordon Burns, World In Action, Grenada TV, January 27, 1978, accessed April 25, 2018, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/103485.

!80 “swamped by people with a different culture.”177 RAR was undoubtedly an important social movement, but it is difficult to extrapolate it’s influence in formal politics.

Neither did RAR completely disassociate punk music with white supremacist and far- right politics. Skrewdriver and smaller bands like the Dentists, the Ventz, and the 4-Skins developed an explicitly racist sub-genre of punk, sometimes referred to as . In the

1980s, the NF decided to launch their own youth outreach program using punk music.

Coordinating with the aforementioned bands, the NF relaunched Rock Against Communism in

1982 and founded White Noise Records in 1983. These bands never achieved mainstream success, as major labels were reluctant to promote music with obvious associations with Nazism, but still established a momentous underground racist punk movement that spread throughout

England and to the European mainland and the United States.

Nevertheless, right-wing punk is very obviously a fringe movement within the subculture, and punk music has been used by countless bands to promote left-wing and liberal politics. RAR cannot accurately be said to be responsible for this trend, but it played an important role in pushing punk along this trajectory by acting as a mouthpiece and effectively promoting a vision of punk culture as anti-racist. In a context of political crisis, and racial division, RAR encouraged a predominantly, and by some measures definitively, white culture to include people and musicians of color. For white working-class youth raised on anti-immigrant prejudices, racism was the path of least resistance—the obvious choice. In the face of celebrated musicians who more than willing to side with an increasingly confident right-wing, RAR

!81 challenged common sense and claimed punk, and British popular music more generally, as an inclusive, not exclusive culture.

!82 CONCLUSION

When RAR staged its final carnival in 1981, a show in Leeds headlined by the Specials, racism and anti-immigrant prejudice remained a sad reality for black and Asian Englanders. The

NF had not faded from the political spotlight and still regularly staged marches throughout

England. Tensions between the Black and white community continued to boil. In April, 1981, four nights of violent confrontations between black residents and police in —later dubbed the Brixton riots—brutally illustrated the realities of race in England. Violent attacks on Black people still occurred with disturbing regularity across the country; even Lynval Golding of the

Specials was violently attacked twice in racially-motivated incidents between 1980 and 1982.

But if RAR failed to change British society at large, it had made its mark on British punk culture. RAR was able to harness the political energy of punk and help direct it away from the influence of the racist right-wing. If punk, as a white, working-class culture at one point provided fertile breeding ground for racist politics during a time of political upheaval in Britain, by the

1980s, the regressive aspects of the culture had been pushed to the fringe. In the face of attempts by the NF to appeal to punk culture in order to establish a base of youth support, RAR assisted in defining punk’s ambiguous politics along the lines that the Clash once envisioned: “against…all

that racist, fascist, racialist, patriotism type of fanaticism.”178 Compare the trajectory of punk to that of the once anti-racist and multi-cultural skinhead culture, and it is clear that this path was

!178 Joe Strummer, quoted in Barry Miles, The Clash (London: Omnibus, 1981), 8.

!83 anything but inevitable. The prominence of the swastika as a symbol of punk culture was called into question and dropped from the culture. Likewise, bands espousing racist rhetoric became isolated within the culture, while RAR veterans like the Specials, Gang of Four, and the Clash rose to prominence on the backs of anti-racist messages and leftist politics. RAR also inspired a number of subsequent grassroots campaigns that used punk music to promote leftist political causes, including and Red Wedge in Britain and Rock Against Reagan in the United States.

Reflecting on punk’s legacy in 1986, the music journalist Charles Schaar Murray emphasized the importance of punk’s alliance with reggae music: “punk’s chosen black music was reggae, which unlike the blues which had inspired the sixties stars, was played by local blacks who were the punks’ contemporaries. Punk adopted reggae and brought it home for tea…

the effects of that alliance are punk’s third great contribution.”179 Placing punk’s white revolt alongside the spirit of Black resistance articulated in reggae gave the music a powerful new significance, and its form of cultural rebellion a political specificity aligned with the interests of

Black Englanders. This alliance was in no small way an effect of RAR uniting the genres onstage in hundreds of concerts in the late 1970s.

In RAR’s founding statement, Red Saunders stated the intention to reclaim rock as “a real

progressive culture” by fighting “the racist poison in rock music.”180 With respect to punk, RAR can be considered mostly successful in accomplishing this goal. For all its limitations, RAR

!179 Charles Schaar Murray, “I fought the biz and the biz won: Punk ten years on.” New Musical Express, 1 February 1986. In Shots From the Hip: Notes from the counterculture (Suffolk: Aaaargh! Press, 2014), Kindle.

!180 Red Saunders, Rock Against Racism Letter, in Walls Come Tumbling Down, 6.

!84 created a space where white working-class kids and the children of Black immigrants could rightfully enjoy each other’s cultures together. In 1970s England, where this kind of cross- cultural respect was anything but given, that alone can be seen as a great achievement.

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