Rock Against Racism: Music, Community and the Fight Against the National Front

A challenge to the music world

Rock Against Racism began in 1976, when a racist outburst by Eric Clapton at a Birmingham concert prompted a response from photographer Red Saunders and fellow campaigners. Their letter to the music press proposed an organised challenge to racism within music. Replies turned the proposal into a network. By November, an early Rock Against Racism gig had taken place at the Princess Alice pub in east London. The campaign’s paper, Temporary Hoarding, also appeared that year. These beginnings were modest compared with the outdoor carnivals that later made RAR famous. ¹

The campaign made an argument about who popular music belonged to. Enjoying music associated with Black performers could not be treated as proof that prejudice had disappeared from the industry or its audiences. RAR asked musicians and listeners to take a public position. Its activity soon included punk, reggae and other styles, bringing people together around an explicit purpose. During 1977, local groups developed, giving that purpose a continuing presence beyond a single concert or a letter of protest. ¹

The work behind a gig

British Culture Archive’s account of Saunders identifies other people involved in the founding letter: Roger Huddle and political theatre performers Jo Wreford and Pete Bruno. Their skills and contacts mattered as the campaign moved into organising events. Carol Grimes and the London Boogie Band appeared at the Princess Alice, while local trade union contacts helped with security. The event therefore depended on relationships between performers, political organisers and people prepared to undertake practical work. ²

Venues, sound equipment, printing, transport and security all had to be found with limited money. Volunteers drew on personal and political networks, while local groups organised their own programmes within a shared anti-racist position. This arrangement allowed a gig to address circumstances in its own area. It also placed substantial responsibility on people whose names rarely appeared above a stage. A national movement became possible through repeated local decisions: booking a room, contacting musicians, circulating publicity and making sure an audience could gather. ²

Steel Pulse speaking from Handsworth

Black musicians brought their own understanding of Britain to this work. In a February 1978 interview with Black Music, Steel Pulse discussed writing about life in Handsworth, Birmingham. Their repertoire included Rocking Against Racism, and they described taking part in demonstrations against the National Front. Their music drew on Jamaican reggae while responding to the place where they lived. Britain supplied subjects and musical influences; it was not simply a setting in which an imported style was reproduced. ³

The same interview complicates an easy story of harmonious punk and reggae unity. David Hinds and his bandmates objected to the label ‘Jah Punk’. Although the association had brought attention, they believed it had confused some Black listeners about their identity as a reggae band. They also resisted being reduced to a party-political description, emphasising the problems they wanted to address and their work as entertainers. Collaboration did not mean surrendering artistic independence. Steel Pulse could share an anti-racist platform while challenging the language through which the music press presented them. ³

Local organising in Leeds

Leeds provides a useful view of RAR before the famous London carnival. Leeds Libraries records that Paul Furness and fellow organisers established a local RAR club in 1977. Early performances took place in a prefabricated building behind Leeds Polytechnic before moving to Chapeltown. Furness remembered a small organising group, including Socialist Workers Party members, which deliberately made the events political. The campaign grew through people already involved in local arguments and organisations, as well as through music fans. ⁴

The library’s account draws on the alternative newspaper Leeds Other Paper and participants’ memories of intimidation by the far right. Music venues themselves were contested spaces. At the F Club in March 1978, a newspaper correspondent reported fascist disruption during a performance by the Mekons. Later that year, local advertisements announced regular weekly RAR gigs. This evidence gives the movement a different rhythm from the national anniversary story: repeated club nights, local publicity and attempts to keep performing when opponents sought to silence or frighten people. ⁴

Designing a movement people could recognise

Temporary Hoarding gave the campaign a form that could circulate between events. Research by design historian Rebecca Binns highlights Ruth Gregory’s contribution to its visual language. The paper drew on punk, earlier radical publishing and artistic traditions including Dada and Constructivism. Its makers tried to communicate through the language of youth culture, making political material approachable without removing its arguments. Gregory’s work belongs alongside the better-known names on concert bills when considering how RAR reached its audience. ⁵

The publication also widened the conversation beyond a declaration against racial prejudice. Binns identifies coverage of policing, feminism, apartheid, Northern Ireland and colonialism. These subjects connected what happened at a concert with the institutions and conflicts shaping people’s lives. Design was part of that editorial work: the arrangement of photographs, lettering and arguments helped determine what a reader noticed and how the paper could be used. Recognising it prevents the movement’s history from becoming a list of performers alone. ⁵

A surviving object at London Museum shows this relationship between print and performance particularly clearly. Temporary Carnival, produced for the April 1978 march and concert at Victoria Park, cost ten pence and unfolded into a large montage poster. The programme could be read at the event and displayed afterwards. Its format joined information, images of musicians and political statements in an inexpensive object. The campaign’s message could therefore occupy the same physical space as music posters and other material collected by fans. A concert finished at a particular hour; the printed object remained available to read, discuss or pass on. It is a small piece of evidence for the care with which publicity was made to serve more than one purpose. ⁶

The procession to Victoria Park

On 30 April 1978, RAR and the Anti-Nazi League brought tens of thousands of people together for a march from Trafalgar Square to Victoria Park. Photographer and organiser Syd Shelton later explained that the procession was conceived as part of the musical event. Organisers booked seven flatbed trucks for bands, including Misty in Roots, the Watch and the Piranhas. The journey through London had its own performances, rather than functioning only as transport to the final stage. ^{6 7}

Shelton remembered coaches arriving from places including Birmingham, Newcastle, Manchester and Yorkshire, as well as Scottish participants who had travelled early. His account places a national network inside the familiar London photographs. Those crowds required advance arrangements and journeys begun far from the park. Music gave the march an atmosphere that differed from a conventional succession of speeches, while its route made opposition to racism visible in public streets. The scale mattered, but so did the decision to combine demonstration and celebration throughout the day. ⁷

For Mykaell Riley, a founding member of Steel Pulse, the occasion is also a memory of performing. Recalling the carnival in 2022, he described the excitement of seeing the audience continue to grow. Steel Pulse appeared alongside acts including the Clash and the Tom Robinson Band. Riley’s recollection makes the Black musicians central to the event’s creation: their performance helped produce the experience subsequently remembered by the crowd. He also reflected on the way music could change relationships and perspectives. That is a participant’s assessment of the carnival’s reach, rather than a measurable claim that everyone who attended left with identical views. The occasion offered a shared encounter; what people subsequently did with it remained a further political question. ⁸

A northern carnival in Manchester

On 15 July 1978, Manchester hosted the Northern Carnival Against Nazis, organised by RAR and the Anti-Nazi League. Photographer Thomas Blower recorded a march from Strangeways to Alexandra Park, with musicians again performing from lorries. Steel Pulse and the Buzzcocks were among the bands on the programme. So were China Street and Exodus, a reggae band from Moss Side later known as X-O-Dus. The event combined nationally recognised performers with musicians rooted in Manchester’s own Black community. ⁹

This local presence changes the meaning of a national campaign. Manchester was not simply receiving a London production. The carnival used its own streets, park and musical relationships, while sharing a political purpose with events elsewhere. Blower’s photographs preserve the march and audience alongside the performers. They allow the northern carnival to be remembered as an event made by many participants, rather than as an extra date attached to the history of Victoria Park. Its scale and programme also show why RAR needs to be understood across more than one city. ⁹

Southall and the lives behind the music

Misty in Roots embodied another connection between music and community organising. The Southall-based roots reggae band worked through a collective, and its relationships extended to the punk band the Ruts through the People Unite cooperative. Royal Albert Hall’s performer archive records that Clarence Baker, a member of the collective, was severely injured by the police Special Patrol Group during the 1979 Southall protest against the National Front. The Ruts subsequently honoured him in their song Jah War. ¹⁰

This history gives a concrete meaning to musical solidarity. The people collaborating on records and stages could also be affected by the same confrontation outside a venue. Baker’s injury was not a distant issue selected for an abstract message. It involved someone within an existing network of work and friendship. The musical response carried that relationship into another form. Following such connections helps explain why reggae and punk cooperation could become sustained political activity, while avoiding the assumption that sharing a bill automatically created unity between every audience or performer. ¹⁰

Tours and support for defence campaigns

RAR’s surviving 1979 timeline records further work beyond the great carnivals. Its Militant Entertainment tour travelled through places including Cambridge, Coventry, Sheffield, Edinburgh, Stirling, Aberdeen, Cardiff, Llanelli, Exeter and Plymouth. The geographical spread included smaller venues and towns as well as major cities. Touring enabled musicians and campaigners to connect local activity with a wider network, without requiring every supporter to travel to London. ¹¹

The same record lists two Southall Kids Are Innocent benefits at London’s Rainbow. Their programmes included Misty in Roots and the Ruts at one concert, and the Clash and Aswad at another. Later in the year, the Dance and Defend northern tour raised support for defence campaigns in Leicester, West Bromwich and Southall. These details show a movement responding to particular needs after the applause had ended. A benefit had an intended use for the money it raised, and a tour could link audiences to campaigns outside their own neighbourhood. Music became a means of sustaining commitments between major demonstrations. ¹¹

A badge and the pressure for change

A red and yellow RAR badge in Hackney Museum’s collection offers a smaller view of public commitment. Alongside the object, the museum preserves testimony from local activist Ian Rathbone, who worked with Bangladeshi organisations in Brick Lane. He remembered attacks on residents, threats to homes and repeated efforts to make the authorities respond. In his account, public events such as RAR helped bring attention to dangers that communities were already confronting. ¹²

Rathbone stressed repetition: concerns had to be raised again and again. His testimony places the concerts within a longer struggle, involving people whose daily work did not take place on a stage. It also cautions against assigning all subsequent change to one organisation. RAR helped make an argument publicly, alongside other campaigns and forms of resistance. The badge makes sense within that world. Worn in ordinary life, it could identify a position beyond the duration of a concert, although an object by itself cannot tell us everything its owner believed or did. ¹²

What the surviving record allows us to see

Syd Shelton’s photographs, presented by Autograph, bring performers and audiences back into the same history. The collection includes Matumbi in Bethnal Green, Misty in Roots in Southall, touring musicians and fans at the 1981 Leeds carnival. It also includes street portraits and other images that place the concerts within their social surroundings. Shelton was involved in the movement and helped design Temporary Hoarding; he was recording a world in which he participated. His pictures offer a viewpoint, not a complete or detached record of every event. ¹³

Taken together, these materials reveal several kinds of political work. A band could write from Black British experience, a designer could make an argument legible, and a local organiser could give people somewhere to assemble. Their contributions did not become interchangeable because they supported the same campaign. RAR’s significance lies in the relationships built between them and in the opportunities those relationships created. Its history is strongest when the celebrated crowd remains connected to the musicians, volunteers and communities that made it possible. ¹³

Sources

[1] Bishopsgate Institute. From the Archives Punk Fanzines Temporary Hoarding and Drastic Measures; 21 October 2022.

[2] British Culture Archive. Red Saunders and Rock Against Racism 1976–1982; 17 April 2020.

[3] Black Music February 1978 reproduced in Andy Brouwer's Steel Pulse archive. Rocking Against Racism by Chris May Contemporary interview with Steel Pulse; February 1978.

[4] Leeds Libraries The Secret Library. Rock Against Racism; 25 October 2019 updated 30 July 2025.

[5] Rebecca Binns Journal of Design History via University of the Arts London. Not the Same Old Show An Exploration of Ruth Gregory's Iconic Designs for Temporary Hoarding 1977–81 Public abstract and repository description; 25 September 2026.

[6] London Museum. Temporary Carnival Object 2003.5/54; Object dated 1978.

[7] Fred Perry Subculture. Remembering Rock Against Racism with Syd Shelton Interview by James Anderson; September 2022.

[8] University of Westminster. Dr Mykaell Riley for The Guardian on Rock Against Racism; 21 October 2022.

[9] British Culture Archive. Rock Against Racism Northern Carnival 1978 Thomas Blower; Series first published 2021.

[10] Royal Albert Hall Archives. Misty in Roots Performer record DS/UK/14260.

[11] Rock Against Racism Archive. 1979 Timeline of RAR events and Temporary Hoarding.

[12] Hackney Museum. Badge Rock Against Racism Object 2024.183 and testimony of Ian Rathbone.

[13] Autograph. Syd Shelton Rock Against Racism Online gallery and curatorial captions.

Sources checked on 22 October 2026.