![]() Afterwards, it tumbles into the miners’ strike of 1984-5, and the arrival of a collective of musicians who had cut their teeth in the punk era, and now wanted to do something never tried before: to take music into the arena of formal politics with a new vehicle called Red Wedge, linked to the Labour party, but chiefly aimed at assisting the fight against Thatcher. The 2 Tone story – full of personal conflict and the era’s omnipresent violence, but also a very moving sense of idealism and simple joy – forms this book’s middle third. Though it had the same lifespan as many of the smash-and-grab punk bands that rallied to its flag, Rock Against Racism’s essential mindset quickly found another outlet in 2 Tone, the movement and record label founded by Coventry vicar’s son Jerry Dammers, of the Specials. “For a while we managed to create, in our noisy, messy, unconventional way,” he said, “an emotional alternative to nationalism and patriotism, a celebration of a different kind of pride and solidarity.” Coachloads of punks came the 25 miles from Norwich: a picture of two of them, attired in the obligatory chains and scrawled-on shirts, attests to achievements captured in a quote from the late activist David Widgery. The two organisations’ high watermark came in April 1978 with a “carnival” in Victoria Park, east London, which filled up with tens of thousands of people who had marched seven miles from Trafalgar Square: watch YouTube footage of the performance by the Clash, and you get a sense of the righteous energy that was coursing around.īut as all this went on, there was also action out in the fields – as proved by memories of a show in the unlikely confines of the West Runton Pavilion in Cromer, Norfolk, featuring the Leeds “neo-Marxist funk” group Gang of Four, and Misty In Roots, the trailblazing reggae band from Southall, west London. The people involved in RAR and the ANL made a point of physically getting in the way of the neo-fascists whose candidates were routinely polling over 15% in local elections (“Whenever we did anything, those red thugs were there,” said one National Front leader). ![]() Music fans in 1977 at a Rock Against Racism gig in Stockwell. Activists rooted in the Socialist Workers Party then founded the Anti-Nazi League and gave an essentially cultural initiative a hard political edge and to the evident amazement of the people involved, everything took off, at speed. Around this swirled two musical developments: punk rock, and the decisive arrival of the culture of reggae, both Jamaican and British. Next, a photographer named Red Saunders decided to both avenge Clapton’s stupidity and take on the ascendant National Front by putting on concerts under the banner of Rock Against Racism (RAR), whose most basic statement was the presence on its bills of both black and white musicians. Everything starts in August 1976, when the revered English guitarist Eric Clapton decided to sprinkle a concert in Birmingham with drunken statements of support for that eloquent bigot Enoch Powell (“I’d had a few before I went on, and one foreigner had pinched my missus’ bum,” Clapton later explained). ![]() Its cast of characters maps out a series of happenings that were always going to be most effectively evoked via direct quotation. Walls Come Tumbling Down (the title is taken from a 1985 call-to-arms by Paul Weller’s group the Style Council, which reached number six in the singles chart) is an oral history. And as I took in a story that stretches between the late 1970s and the end of the 80s, the Britain of 2016 – the Brexit vote, the years of resentment that fed into it, and the acts of hate that have happened since – inevitably blurred into what I was reading. My copy of Walls Come Tumbling Down had arrived just as reporters were being dispatched to Harlow, in Essex, to report on the murder of a 39-year-old man from Poland called Arkadiusz Jóźwik. I read those words on the same day that police in Milton Keynes announced that they were looking for a man who had “racially insulted” a pregnant woman, before kicking her in the stomach and causing her to lose her child. It’s totally different from the Little England that Thatcher tried to hold on to.” “Look at Britain now: it’s a society where racism is absolutely frowned on where gay marriage is accepted. “Thatcher might have won elections, but culturally we won,” he says. I n the penultimate paragraph of this triumphant book, the writer and radio presenter Robert Elms casts his eyes back over four decades of British history, and comes to an equally triumphant conclusion.
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