With a Rock against Racism relaunch in the offing, Mark Perryman remembers being there the first time round

In the wake of this summer's racist riots, a 'relaunch' of Rock against Racism by the campaign Love Music Hate Racism is being planned. Great news for those of us who were schoolkids against the nazis the first time around. But without getting all dialectically correct, it’s vital to understand the conditions that made RAR such a rip-it-all-up-and-start-again success back then, and ask ourselves what would make it work now, almost half a century later, and with hardly anything like it in between.          

I can still remember the day if it was yesterday, Sunday 30 April 1978. Me, Jeremy Turner, Ashley Stark, and Deborah Tween in the Surrey commuter belt village of Tadworth. It was early, we had a bus to catch, then the Northern Line from its southernmost tip, Morden, before a couple of changes to Bethnal Green.

Off we went, me with A-Z in hand, to pick our way through unfamiliar surroundings to what we realised was the wrong end of Victoria Park. A boating lake? Surely this wasn’t the place for a carnival? But then we saw it, a huge, rather ramshackle stage, with people pouring into the area in front of it from every direction. We’d arrived!

No, we hadn’t gone on the march. I was in the Upper Sixth at the local comprehensive, De Burgh, the others from the year below me. We were musos, every week we devoured the New Musical Express which with a rather brilliant mix of the political and the cultural had been carrying news of the growth of Rock against Racism, known to everyone as ‘RAR’ alongside breathlessly enthusiastic reporting of the emergence of punk – the two of course were related.

This was Nazism!

Meanwhile on the news the National Front were kicking their way into the headlines. Every march became a violent confrontation between the NF and the recently formed Anti-Nazi League, ANL. This was horrible, this was Nazism – wasn’t that what our parents and grandparents fought to defeat?

The others were there more for the music and the urban adventure. What a line-up! And it was free. But we were nervous too, as we had picked our way through Hackney to the park we were convinced we’d be set upon by Nazi thugs round every corner. Nervous? Scared rigid in my case. So going on the march was a bit beyond the scale of our commitment and what was marching for any way?

Of course when I saw that huge, joyful, powerfully surging crowd arrive all the way from Trafalgar Square with enormous paper maché heads of NF leaders John Tyndall and Martin Webster at the front, I immediately regretted not joining in, and I’m not sure my political credibility has ever recovered since!

Waiting for the music to start, we wandered round the stalls. Most didn’t interest us, socialist this, revolutionary that, communist the other. It was the dayglo RAR stickers I was after, and anything with that brilliant ANL arrow on too please, comrade, as I soon learned to say.

Somewhere along the line I was pestered by a particularly persistent member of the Revolutionary Communist Party into buying a scarcely readable pamphlet on why Labour was an imperialist party. I think I’ve still got it, that single tract that came closest to putting me off the Left for life – sorry, comrades – and was the first one I ever shelled out for. Every other word an ism or an ist, nobody any good but the followers of the one true faith, the certainty in being right, those who were wrong wererisible…..blimey, was this what I was getting into?

Then thankfully, the music kicked in. There was this bloke up on stage in a boiler suit who seemed to be running proceedings, but he was totally unlike any figure of authority I’d ever come across before. He was a livewire of infectious enthusiasm, he made us all, whether on stage or in the crowd, hardened politico or slightly wayward sixth-formers from Surrey, feel like we belonged.

Polly Styrene belting out Oh Bondage, Up Yours! helped too. I’m not sure I even knew what bondage was back then, but that saxophone riff and a young woman screaming the words into the microphone was more than enough for the crowd to erupt. I’d never seen anything like it, a seething mass of intermingled bodies throwing themselves into the air seemingly without a care in the world.

Except we did care. These bands were the voices of our moment, The Tom Robinson Band, The Clash, Steel Pulse, Misty and Roots, Patrick Fitzgerald. They wrote songs about what we cared about, against the NF, for the kind of place we felt Britain and the world could be but without all those isms and ists.

After Victoria Park my teenage contribution to this was pestering the ANL office for supplies of their leaflets. Up and down the roads of my Surrey village (Banstead) I’d go popping the leaflets though letterboxes, and 'Never Again' stickers up on every bus stop. Quite what the locals thought goodness only knows. Either the place was about to be invaded by Nazi thugs or their rampaging opponents, possibly both. Still it made me feel like I was doing something. I’d been inspired. I’d become politically active, as I soon learned to describe myself.

This was fun!

But what made RAR so special, for me at any rate, was that it was fun. There was even a RAR badge that turned NF into No Fun. They, the Nazis, were against the multicultural Britain we were becoming, and behind their miserable mask of was something even worse, Nazism.

In the late 1970s there remained a generation, like my parents, framed by the war, the Second World War. It hadn’t yet become the stuff of make-believe nostalgia and ritualised ceremony, it was part of daily family lives. And so when the ANL stuck the word nazi on the racist NF, we had won and the other lot lost.

We also learned that you didn’t have to be a nazi to be a racist. Wrap it up in the so-called respectability of warning against our culture being ‘swamped’, describing our nation’s borders as reaching ‘breaking point’ or predicting a community will be a ‘tinderbox’ because of immigration and it’s no longer nazi, just plain nasty and wrong.

RAR absolutely convinced me that effective collective action against all this means involves most of all those who otherwise might not think of themselves as ‘political’ – not part of existing campaigns, but a politics that is popular. It is a lesson that too much of the Left, which I've been part of ever since that first carnival, never fails to forget. We revel instead in the cult of the activist, we privilege the most committed, the dedicated.

This was a mass movement!

What RAR constructed instead was a politics no longer restricted to these hardened souls, but a mass movement rooted in community and locality, mixing ramshackle organisation and glorious spontaneity with the ability and imagination to pull off free carnivals that attracted tens of thousands and tours that covered pretty much the entire country.

All of this was the creation of a musical generational moment – punk – with an essential reggae mix. And when RAR ended in the early 1980s 2-Tone kind of took over with the bands' line-ups, music, dance moves rocking against racism writ so large we no longer needed to spell it out. And yet this summer, racist riots and a political discourse that can barely find a good word for immigration and asylum, anti-racism, multiculturalism and multifaith.  

In his superb book Beating Time: Riot 'n' Race 'n' Rock 'n Roll (out of print, but to properly understand RAR please beg, steal, or borrow a copy) one of the founders of Rock against Racism, David Widgery, described it as:

A rank-and-file movement of the ordinary, the unknown and the unkempt outside of conventional politics, inspired by a mixture of socialism, punk rock and common humanity got together and organised to change things.

And you know what? Having dusted off all my nostalgia, masquerading as a political strategy, and finding someone far hipper to today's beat than me to delete 'punk rock' and insert the 2024 equivalent, that's pretty much just the kind of movement needed if any Rock against Racism 'relaunch' is to succeed.

The Rock against Racism 2024 T-shirt is available from Philosophy Football here

An earlier version of  this article was originally published in Roger Huddle and Red Saunders (Eds): Reminiscences of RAR: Rocking against Racism 1976-1982