Views with Many Members of Punk’S First Wave, Remains One of the Best Histories of British Punk Culture

White Man (In Hammersmith Palais): Punk, Immigration, and the Politics of Race in 1970s England _______________________________ A Thesis Presented to The Honors Tutorial College Ohio University _______________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in History _______________________________ By Sam Benezra May 2018 This thesis has been approved by The Honors Tutorial College and the Department of History ______________________________________ Dr. Kevin Mattson Professor, History Thesis Advisor ______________________________________ Dr. Miriam Shadis Honors Tutorial College, Director of Studies History ______________________________________ 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 RIOT:” PUNK AND THE FAR RIGHT Chapter Three………………………………………………………………………………..… 57 ROCK AGAINST RACISM: 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 London and Liverpool to conduct research at the British Library and Liverpool John Moores University. !2 INTRODUCTION In April 1978, the Clash, the premier punk band in England since the recent break-up of the Sex Pistols, stepped onto a makeshift stage in Victoria Park. Behind them, a banner read, large and clear, “Rock Against Racism.” 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 concert 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 concerts 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 riots. By the late 1960s, anti-immigrant !1 David Widgery, 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 Enoch Powell 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 skinheads—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, Birmingham, UK, April 20, 1968), The Daily Telegraph, 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 reggae 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 culture in different directions. The persistent presence of far-right groups around punk suggested a very real possibility that punk could become, as skinhead 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 Subculture: The Meaning of Style, a critical examination of post-war youth subcultures 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 Jon Savage’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 Rolling Stone 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

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