The year rock found the power to unite

In 1978, race relations in Britain were in crisis. The National Front was gathering power and immigrants lived in fear of violence. But that year also saw the rise of a campaign aimed at halting the tide of hatred with music - a grassroots movement culminating in a march across London and an open-air concert in the East End. On the eve of a festival marking the 30th anniversary of that remarkable day, we remember the birth of Rock Against Racism

On 30 April 1978, a crowd gathered in Victoria Park in London's East End. They had come from all over the country - 42 coaches from Glasgow, 15 from Sheffield, an entire trainload from Manchester - marching across London from Trafalgar Square to attend a special all-day concert headlined by Tom Robinson and the Clash. The day had been organised by 'Rock Against Racism', a grassroots political movement that used music to campaign against the looming electoral threat of the National Front. To mark the anniversary of the concert, as well as to highlight the continuing struggle against racism, another all-day music concert is being staged next week.

Many of those who will gather in Victoria Park next Sunday to watch the Good, the Bad and the Queen, Hard-Fi, the View and the others on the bill were not even born 30 years ago. But for those who attended the original concert in 1978 it was a show that changed their lives and helped change Britain. Rock Against Racism radicalised a generation, it showed that music could do more than just entertain: it could make a difference. By demonstrating the power of music to effect change it inspired Live Aid and its supporters claim it helped destroy the National Front. It was the triumphant climax to a story that began two years earlier, following one hot August night in Birmingham.

It was 5 August 1976 and Eric Clapton was drunk, angry and on stage at the Birmingham Odeon. 'Enoch was right,' he told the audience, 'I think we should send them all back.' Britain was, he complained, in danger of becoming 'a black colony' and a vote for controversial Tory politician Enoch Powell whom he described as a prophet was needed to 'keep Britain white'. Although the irony was possibly lost on Clapton, the Odeon in Birmingham is on New Street, minutes from the Midland Hotel where eight years earlier Powell had made his infamous 'Rivers of Blood' speech. But if the coincidence was curious, the hypocrisy was breathtaking: Clapton's career was based on appropriating black music, and he had recently had a hit with Bob Marley's 'I Shot the Sheriff'.

In usual circumstances his comments would have been merely ill advised, but it was the social and political context which made Clapton's intervention so chilling. The National Front had won 40 per cent of the votes in the spring elections in Blackburn. One month earlier an Asian teenager, Gurdip Singh Chaggar, had been murdered by a gang of white youths in Southall. 'One down - a million to go' was the response to the killing from John Kingsley Read of the National Front. Sid Vicious and Siouxsie Sioux were sporting swastikas as fashion statements. David Bowie, who three months earlier had been photographed apparently giving a Nazi salute in Victoria Station, told Cameron Crowe in the September 1976 edition of Playboy '... yes I believe very strongly in fascism. The only way we can speed up the sort of liberalism that's hanging foul in the air... is a right-wing totally dictatorial tyranny...' In that same interview Bowie claimed that 'Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.' This was Britain then in the sweltering summer of 1976, and in that context Clapton's comments were potentially incendiary.

Red Saunders was a rock photographer and political activist who had been inspired and radicalised by the events of 1968. When he heard Clapton's comments he felt compelled to register his opposition. 'I was outraged,' Saunders tells me. 'I was a fan of the blues and had seen Clapton playing in the Sixties at the Marquee Club, I couldn't believe he could now be saying what he was.' Saunders decided to pen a letter of protest to the music press. In the letter, published in the NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and the Socialist Worker, Saunders and other signatories including his friend Roger Huddle wrote: 'Come on Eric... Own up. Half your music is black. You're rock music's biggest colonist... We want to organise a rank and file movement against the racist poison music... we urge support for Rock against Racism. P.S. Who shot the Sheriff, Eric? It sure as hell wasn't you!' The letter urged those readers wanting to join Rock Against Racism to write to them. Within a fortnight there were more than 600 replies. Three months later, in November 1976, Rock Against Racism held its first ever gig, featuring Carol Grimes, in the Princess Alice pub in east London. 'We had friends who were dockers who had become anti-racist after the Powell speech,' Roger Huddle recalls, 'and they provided the security for the gig because the NF were really active in the area.'

When Paul Furness read the letter in the NME he was working as a medical records clerk at Leeds General Infirmary. 'Leeds was a dark, depressed city,' Furness told me, 'there was lots of youth unemployment, the Yorkshire Ripper was still loose - so when I read the letter in the NME it was like a breath of fresh air, it was what I had been waiting for.' Buoyed by the enthusiastic response, RAR (Rock Against Racism) began organising concerts which would feature multiracial line-ups sharing the bill. The concerts would end with reggae bands like Aswad and Steel Pulse playing with punk bands such as the Ruts, the Slits and Generation X. Misty in Roots, a Southall-based reggae group played more concerts than any other band for RAR. 'Music can help bring people together,' lead singer Poko tells me. 'When you saw a band like ours jamming with Tom Robinson or Elvis Costello it showed that if you love music we can all live together.'

In Leeds Paul Furness established a RAR club where, every Friday night for 18 months, bands would perform in the common room of Leeds Polytechnic. He tells me of the night he went to see a Tom Robinson concert with three female friends. 'After the gig I went up to him to try and persuade him to play at the RAR club,' he says 'and as I was talking Tom saw a bunch of guys wearing badges indicating they were gay. He told me he had to talk to them. "Some of us don't wear badges," I told him. He looked at me and said, "Are you gay?" and I said "Yes."' It was the first time that Furness had publicly acknowledged his sexuality. 'What did your three female friends think about you coming out to Tom Robinson?' I ask. 'I just remember them laughing,' he says 'Mind you, all three of them are now lesbians.'

By the following year RAR was publishing its own magazine, Temporary Hoarding. David Widgery's editorial in its first issue was the organisation's first manifesto. 'We want Rebel music, street music,' it declared, 'music that breaks down people's fear of one another. Crisis music. Now music. Music that knows who the real enemy is. Rock Against Racism. Love Music Hate Racism.' The magazine carried concert reviews as well as political advice for organisers. 'I remember that we would get a phone call,' says Saunders, 'and they would say I want to join my nearest RAR group, and we would say where do you live, and they would say Lowestoft, so we'd say: you are now the Lowestoft RAR group. And we would then send them a box of badges and instructions on how to make banners and that would be it.'

The appeal of Rock Against Racism for music fans was that it had recruited the biggest names in the emerging punk culture. By 1977 RAR could claim the support of most of the innovative bands of the time - Stiff Little Fingers, Sham 69, the Tom Robinson Band, Steel Pulse, Misty in Roots and the Clash. The Sex Pistols, although they were booked to play Wigan for RAR, never managed to make it on stage, but John Lydon was unequivocal in his opposition to the National Front, telling one interviewer: 'I despise them. No one should have the right to tell anyone they can't live here because of the colour of their skin or their religion... How could anyone vote for something so ridiculously inhumane?'

'Rock against Racism made it cool to be anti-racist,' says Professor John Street, who has written on the relationship between music and politics. 'Because we had all these bands backing us, we could say that the Nazis are against our music,' says Huddle, 'they want us only to listen to marching bands and Strauss.'

It was a message that resonated with Billy Bragg, then living in Barking and working as a bank messenger. 'I had seen the Clash on the first night of the White Riot tour,' he tells me, 'and I remember thinking that the fascists were against anybody who wanted to be different - once they had dealt with the immigrants then they would move onto the gays and then the punks; before I knew it the music I loved would be repatriated.'

Following success in the spring 1977 elections - where they pushed the Liberals into fourth place in nearly a quarter of constituencies - the NF were threatening to achieve an electoral breakthrough. The Anti-Nazi League - which had formed in 1977 - were keen to hold a joint demonstration with RAR in the spring of 1978 to encourage supporters to vote against the National Front in May's council elections. The Greater London Council - then Conservative-led - gave permission to use Victoria Park, which had been the rallying ground of London's Chartists in 1848. The date was set for Sunday 30 April and the plan was for a carnival in Trafalgar Square followed by an open-air concert in Victoria Park. In Beating Time, David Widgery's history of RAR, he writes that they wanted to turn the day into 'the biggest piece of revolutionary street theatre London had ever seen, a 10th anniversary tribute to the Paris events of May 1968.' By holding the concert in the East End, RAR was declaring its intention of taking the battle into the heart of where the National Front was trying to build support.

Three weeks before the carnival, two parcel bombs were delivered by the neo-Nazi organisation Column 88 to the headquarters of the Communist Party and the trade union Nupe. On 21 April, nine days before the carnival, 10-year-old Kennith Singh was stabbed to death yards from his east London home. The killers - who were never found - left eight stab wounds in the back of his head.

Film-maker Gurinder Chadha was living above her parents' shop in Norbury, south London. 'Being in a shop we were very vulnerable because the next person who walked in could beat you up,' she recalls. 'I was really into RAR. When I heard about the carnival I was determined to go, but my parents said there was no way.'

In the week of the carnival Johnny Mathis appeared on Top of the Pops and Brian and Michael had been at number one for three weeks with Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs. The only mention of the concert in London's Evening Standard was tucked away on page 25, below Celia Brayfield's 'On the Town' column, the last entry for the weekend's gig guide. In the early hours of Sunday morning Paul Furness left Leeds on his way to London. 'I have a vivid memory of seeing all these coaches with colourful RAR posters,' he tells me 'and the closer we came to London the more coaches there were.' In Victoria Park, sodden from the rain that had lashed down all week, Anti-Nazi League activists had spent the previous night sleeping on the stage to protect it from being attacked by the National Front.

In Trafalgar Square 10,000 people had gathered, the crowd growing as it began to make its way to east London. 'Trafalgar Square was raked with colour,' David Widgery recorded. 'Yellow ANL roundels, punk pink Rock Against Racism stars, Day-Glo flags oscillating in approval to the speeches.' It's worth looking at archive footage of the day in Alan Miles's documentary Who Shot the Sheriff? where its possible to get at least a flavour of what that day must have been like: steel drummers on the back of flat bed trucks, huge papier-mache head of NF leaders and Hitler (made by Peter Fluck and Roger Law who later went on to create Spitting Image) and lots of lots of banners. 'Scottish young Communists' read one, 'Gay Switchboard' read another, while a third said in both defiance and hope, 'Queer jew boy socialist seeks a better world.'

Having rained all night and morning, the sun then broke through at 1.30pm. 'I was in Victoria Park and when I introduced the first act, X-Ray Spex, there were only a few hundred people in the park,' recalls Roger Huddle, 'but by the second song the march had arrived.' Throughout the afternoon they came, punks spilling out of coaches in leather and safety pins to join vicars, hippies and trade unionists. By the evening upwards of 80,000 were in Victoria Park to see the Clash take to the stage. In archive footage the entire park appears to throb in a pulsating pogo, a metronomic bounce. Among them was Gurinder Chadha, who had told her parents she was going shopping in Croydon but had sneaked into the concert on her own. 'The whole of the park was jumping up and down to the Clash,' Chadha tells me. 'It was an incredibly emotional moment because for the first time I felt that I was surrounded by people who were on my side. That was the first time I thought that something had changed in Britain forever.'

In the following week's local elections the National Front failed to secure any seats and its level of support fell. In July Rock Against Racism staged a carnival in Manchester featuring Steel Pulse and the Buzzcocks. It was followed in September with a second London concert in Brixton's Brockwell Park with Stiff Little Fingers, Aswad and Elvis Costello. By the end of 1978 RAR had organised 300 local concerts and five carnivals. In the run up to the 1979 election it staged a 'Militant Entertainment Tour' featuring 40 bands at 23 concerts covering more than 2,000 miles on the road.

In the general election the NF's 303 candidates averaged just 0.6 per cent of the overall vote. There is an argument that the election of the Conservative government signalled the death knell for the National Front. Far-right parties thrive under Labour governments; the NF were strongest during the mid-Seventies, a time of great disillusionment with a Labour government seen as economically incompetent. Margaret Thatcher had already expressed her concern that Britain was being 'swamped by people of a different culture', a barely coded come-on to the extreme right. But even if some NF votes went to the Conservatives, it is not the full explanation of the drop in NF support.

'There is a danger in believing that politics is all top down,' explains Ian Goodyer, who is writing a book on RAR, 'that Thatcher just pulled the rug from under the racists' feet, but the truth is that by 1979 Rock Against Racism and the ANL had thoroughly discredited the National Front.' Before RAR, the NF had staged intimidatory marches in areas with large immigrant communities, but once RAR began to demonstrate that they could put thousands on the street in opposition to them, the NF were forced to retreat. 'We isolated them at work and we isolated them at the colleges,' claims Roger Huddle, 'and by the end of it they were a spent force mentally and politically. I don't want to overstate what we did, but I am sick to death of understating it.'

Thirty years on and it is not difficult to identify the legacy of Rock Against Racism. That influence was both political and musical. 'It built a circuit of gigs and concerts on which a lot of bands cut their teeth,' explains Ian Goodyer. 'And these small gigs relied on the people in the grassroots getting involved.' Such people include Paul Furness, whose RAR club in Leeds staged the only Rock Against Racism concert featuring Joy Division. The strategy of encouraging black and white bands to jam together paved the way for the ska revival, 2-Tone and multi-racial bands such as the Beat (who, according to Red Saunders, first met in Victoria Park) and the Specials.

'We started out at the same time as RAR,' Specials founder Jerry Dammers tells me, 'so it was all part of the same thing and for me it was no good being anti-racist if you didn't involve black people, so what the Specials tried to do was create something that was more integrated.'

Rock Against Racism also demonstrated that it was possible to use pop culture to highlight political causes. It was this that inspired Dammers, Billy Bragg, Tom Robinson and Paul Weller to set up Red Wedge, an anti-Thatcher popular movement in the run up to the 1987 general election. Like RAR, Red Wedge featured musicians touring in support of a cause, but unlike RAR it was explicitly party political: it aimed to help defeat the Conservative government. But in the 1987 general election Labour's youth vote decreased.

Where RAR and Red Wedge were about raising awareness, Live Aid was about raising funds. While there are some parallels - rocks stars performing in a large outdoor venue for a good cause - the Live Aid and later Live 8 concerts were very different in their ambitions to Rock Against Racism. Three months after the 1978 concert in Victoria Park, Bob Geldof, then lead singer of The Boomtown Rats, told Sounds magazine he did not believe in political rallies, adding 'I think all revolutions are meaningless'. The Live Aid and Live 8 concerts were huge spectacles designed for a mass television audience; the audience members were witnesses, not activists. Live 8 did advertise itself as being about 'justice, not charity' but the level of participation demanded was modest: a text message to register concern, a click on an on-line petition. Rock against Racism was a grassroots movement which encouraged members to campaign and challenge those in power; Live 8 relied on stars such as Bono and Geldof cajoling and flattering the powerful, hence Bono's appearance at a Labour Party conference where he dubbed Gordon Brown and Tony Blair the Lennon and McCartney of global development.

As for Rock Against Racism, the organisation disbanded in July 1981 with a final carnival in Leeds that was headlined by the Specials. Looking into the crowd, Neville Staple from the band remarked: 'It's like a zebra crossing, black and white, black and white as far as you can see.'

And that, you might think, would be the end of the story. Except that the story of Rock Against Racism, like the story of racism itself, is not yet over. On 4 May 1978, the week after the Victoria Park carnival and the same day as the National Front were beaten in the local elections, a 25-year-old Asian man Altab Ali was murdered in London's Whitechapel Road on his way home from a religious festival. The following month Ishaque Ali was murdered in Hackney.

According to the Institute of Race Relations there have been more than 65 murders in Britain since 1991 with a suspected or known racial motive. And yet with notable exceptions - Stephen Lawrence, Anthony Walker - there is little attention paid to these killings. Meanwhile, as East Europeans and white Britons also face race attacks, racism itself has become less black and white. 'I talk to my brothers and other black friends,' says film-maker and DJ Don Letts 'and they are complaining about the Poles and I say to them, brethren - that was us 40 years ago.'

The dark days of NF marches may be history but the threat from the BNP is, some claim, even greater. As in the mid-Seventies there is economic uncertainty and scepticism about immigration, but today it is coupled with apprehension about multiculturalism and a BNP that has worked hard to disassociate itself from the thuggish image of the National Front. 'In some ways the BNP are stronger than the NF,' says Jerry Dammers. 'There is a bland fascism that is very dangerous and it's creeping into the mainstream.'

In 2002 Rock Against Racism was revived but renamed Love Music Hate Racism. In their offices near Victoria station national organiser Lee Billingham told me that LMHR sees itself as the direct descendant of RAR. 'Love Music Hate Racism is a RAR slogan,' he tells me. 'We're the same grassroots movement. These days the fascists wear suits and the disillusionment with mainstream politics is even worse.' The organisation is behind next Sunday's 30th anniversary concert in Victoria Park with the Good, the Bad and the Queen (which features former Clash guitarist Paul Simonon), Hard-Fi, Bishi, Jay Sean and many others. The need for a popular movement against racism might still exist but does music still contain the power to inspire and enthuse? 'Music gets political when there are new ideas in music,' says Jerry Dammers, who will be playing a DJ set next week, '...punk was innovative, so was ska, and that was why bands such as the Specials and the Clash could be political.'

If today's bands are no longer so interested in kick-starting a revolution, audiences, too, often seem to regard music as just another form of entertainment, to be downloaded as a ringtone. 'They used to say don't trust anyone over 30,' says Don Letts, 'but today I don't trust anyone under 30 - let's be blunt: today's young are spoilt motherfuckers.'

Letts, however, has not met Carolynn Hansen and Frances Smith, two 18-year-old students who are part of the new generation of anti-racist activists. The girls live in Barking in east London and are studying at the same school that Billy Bragg attended four decades earlier; they seem to have inherited some of his political fervour. Both fans of the Libertines and Babyshambles, they were drawn into LMHR because of Pete Doherty's involvement. Babyshambles had been due to headline next Sunday's event, until Doherty was incarcerated once again for drug offences. 'It was the music that got us interested,' Carolynn tells me, 'but then we got into the ethos of what LMHR is about.' The girls have been handing out flyers in their classes, they help out in the LMHR offices and on the day they will be at Victoria Park at eight in the morning helping put the stalls up.

I wanted to know why they cared so much, this generation whom we are often told are apathetic. 'But some people are incredibly politically aware,' protests Frances, 'and with things like MySpace and Facebook it's much easier for those of us who do care to organise things.' But what, I asked, about those who say the music of Babyshambles, say, is not explicitly political like Billy Bragg or the Clash. Does that not matter? 'Music is incredibly important in my life,' says Carolynn, 'that's why I was drawn to this cause, but even if the message is not in the song, if the artist portrays it in their interviews or by getting involved, then the fans are going to think its worth looking into.'

I leave the girls and head to the Groucho Club in Soho where I meet Drew McConnell, the bassist for Babyshambles. With Doherty in prison McConnell is assembling an all-star super-group, featuring his own band Helsinki and special guests, to play at the anniversary gig. 'I wasn't even born at the time of the first carnival,' he tells me, 'but when I found out that the BNP had started a record company and were handing out CDs outside schools with racist music I just felt offended. That they were using music of all things.' McConnell, along with other bands, decided to record an alternative CD, which the NME helped to distribute with support from teachers. McConnell tells me of messages he reads that are sent to the band's MySpace site from young fans who say they would not have known about LMHR and would not have become active were it not for the band's involvement. 'I feel honoured to be involved in LMHR,' he says. 'The 1978 carnival is something that is etched into history for ever.'

This summer, in the last weekend of June, Eric Clapton will headline two shows in London and Leeds, the locations for the first and last Rock against Racism carnivals. While David Bowie had distanced himself from his pro-Nazi remarks, Clapton has not only never apologised for his outburst, but has continued to praise Powell; only last December on The South Bank Show he reiterated his support for the man and four years ago he told Uncut magazine that Powell had been 'outrageously brave'. In fact the truly 'outrageously brave' ones were those who spoke up against the hate mongers and stood up for a vision of a liberal and tolerant Britain; apathy and cynicism is easy, but Rock Against Racism was gloriously uncynical.

'We provided hope to punk culture,' says Roger Huddle. 'Without RAR, punk would have been only about hopelessness and nihilism.' Rock Against Racism, the activists, artists and audience, also provided hope to the Asians and blacks who might have feared that the entire nation was against them. 'Before Rock against Racism there was a sense that it was OK to be racist,' says Gurinder Chadha, 'but with RAR we got to see that there were others willing to speak out against racism and talk about a different kind of Britain.'

Thirty years after the Victoria Park carnival the story of Rock Against Racism is only fleetingly mentioned in most histories of punk, but that does not diminish its extraordinary achievement. It's an achievement that can perhaps only be gauged by imagining how else things might have been had Red Saunders not been moved to write that letter, had courageous souls like Roger Huddle, Paul Furness and the rest not joined the movement: Eric Clapton would have got away with making racist comments, the National Front would have continued to march into immigrant areas stirring up hatred, winning votes and seats and the course of British politics could have been very different.

Let the last word go to Red Saunders: 'The lesson from Rock Against Racism,' he tells me, 'is that we can all intervene, make a difference and change things: nothing is inevitable.'

· Love Music Hate Racism's carnival takes place on 27 April in Victoria Park, London E3. For full details see lmhr.org.uk/about/rock.html

Black and white unite

Tom Robinson recalls: 'At the time the National Front were gaining electoral ground. Suddenly instead of getting three leaflets through your letterbox during the local elections, you'd get four: left, centre left, right and Nazi. It was as stark as that. And the NF were becoming bolder in their attempts to intimidate immigrants with marches and violence.

'The Tom Robinson Band had been keen supporters of Rock Against Racism - playing small gigs right from our earliest days. From the outset RAR was a grassroots movement, avoiding stars and celebrities. There was a sense of solidarity among groups like X-Ray Spex, Steel Pulse and my band TRB, who all played RAR gigs in the early days before any of us were famous. The thing I remember about that particular gig at the Alexandra Palace was the performance of Alex Harvey. He just commanded the stage and he performed an extraordinary version of Bob Marley's "Small Axe" [with the refrain 'If you are the big tree/ We are the small axe']. He divided the audience in two with one side singing "big tree" and the other "small axe" and summed up our struggle with those two simple phrases.

'What mattered was the fact that we all took part in an astonishing celebration of music, fun, justice and the politics of tolerance. The struggle for a more just and civilised society is an ongoing fight that each generation has to carry forward.'

Speaking out against the NF

Darcus Howe says: 'The atmosphere felt sharp. You knew you were making a stance. It was crucial: I lived in the area, I had got married there and my first daughter was born there, so I was part of the community. The National Front had come trying to terrorise us.

'The police put up barriers and cordoned us off so it ended up like a meeting in a park. The gathering was largely black people supported by young white activists. The slogan was "Don't let them pass".

'I was asked to speak right there on the spot. I was not on the list of speakers but [RAR campaigner] David Widgery said: "Give that man the megaphone." I always spoke in dulcet tones like a preacher from the pulpit. I said: "They haven't come here to mobilise us to support them, they come here to terrorise." I delivered rhetoric about standing up, about the fact that black people in America were standing up and rhetoric about Africa.

'The major thing in my mind was, "Come what may, we are here to stay." Today it sounds ridiculous to say that but in those days it was the era of the campaign for repatriation and if the government weren't going to do it, the National Front were going to do it. But in the end, they dropped their flags and ran away.'

Observer