Political unrest and economic failure, punkish spirit and hyper-racial tensions: this was the reality of Britain in the 1970s
. Out of its fiery embers rose the grassroots political movement 'Rock against Racism' , an activist organisation that married music and activism in a powerful union against the tone deaf, right-wing views of an increasingly National Front supporting country.
At the time, Bowie was making headlines for his discriminative outbursts: "Britain is ready for a fascist leader". While a drunken Eric Clapton stormed the stage at his 1976 Birmingham gig slurring, "Enoch was right. I think we should send them all back." Public eruptions like these were common place. Police brutality was rife, and white far-right supporters brandished the union jack like a tacky souvenir on one of their many pied-piper marches.
"It is bizarre isn't it? When we were making that film, we were thinking about how 40 years before the '70s there'd been WWII - the Holocaust and the attrocities caused by the Nazis – and how all that kind of language and those ideas were coming back," commented Shah. "But over the last few years there's been quite a landmark moment for race relations because of Brexit, and Trump legitimising certain ideas – so there is a weird parallel.
I started making it around five years ago with Ed Gibbs who is co-creator, he produced it but we wrote and developed it together. We found the story and thought someone must have told it already! But then we found out it hadn't really been covered yet. We were really excited about this counter-culture movement and moment that actually happened in British Popular culture, which really drove us on to tell the story.
What was at the heart of Rock Against Racism was putting on gigs and having Black and white artists play together, and having them on equal billing. They paid everybody, they understood that musicians need to be paid - there wasn't any of these chairty gigs. And the music was able to communicate to a lot of young people. Music is the currency of communication, it's the language that we use - so I think RAR were able to tap into that.
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