Review of ‘Walls come tumbling down’, Daniel Rachel, Picador, 2016

Music and politics often intersect but rarely as dramatically as the reaction to a drunk Eric Clapton on stage in Birmingham in August 1976.  Clapton had called for 'wogs' and 'Pakis' to leave the hall and leave the country. Three hundred responded to a letter in New Musical Express protesting against this racist rant and Rock against Racism, RAR, was born. Inspired by RAR, despite racists triggering violence at its gigs, Two Tone music brought black and white musicians together.  Memories of RAR combined with the solidarity generated by the 1984-5 miners’ strike helped create Red Wedge, formed to rally support for Labour in the 1987 general election.  Daniel Rachel brings all three episodes together in a single volume.  Astonishingly, he does this without a word of his own.  The five hundred page account is composed completely using the words of those who took part.  Extracts from well over a hundred interviews, one of whom is the present writer, plus quotes from Paul Weller and Dave Widgery are woven into a single coherent narrative. 

Many music fans take their history seriously, preserving it in all kinds of ways, sometimes, as with the Manchester Digital Music Archive www.mdmarchive.co.uk, to a very high standard.  Music histories are a substantial part of Manchester Central library's local history section. Largely produced outside of academia they are often lively, a few like Dave Haslam's 'Manchester, England', deserve a wide readership. Daniel Rachel's 'Walls come tumbling down' now joins this select list.

However, besides being a book that will be read by musicians and music fans for many years to come, it has a more urgent importance.  With the hard right on the rise in Europe and the US and hundreds of thousands supporting the call to ‘Free Tommy Robinson’, mobilising the many to challenge them is a priority.  Without any illusions in history repeating itself, the story of RAR has a sharp relevance. It is worth remembering how, as David Widgery put it, 'the music provided the creative energy and the focus in what became a battle for the soul of young working class England.'  He added 'But the direct confrontations and the hard-headed political organisations which underpinned them were decisive.'  The two big Carnivals in London, April and September 1978, in Manchester, July 1978, and on a lesser scale elsewhere, brought together many tens of thousands.  It was now cool to be anti racist. This could only happen because the Anti Nazi League, ANL, had become a mass organisation, with tens of thousands of members, branches in every town, many workplaces, most universities and many colleges. Its members distributed millions of leaflets, sold hundreds of thousands of badges, scrubbed out racist graffiti and mobilised against every public appearance the National Front made.  The Battle of Lewisham the previous August saw a couple of thousand anti fascists together with a similar number from the local community succeed in breaking up the National Front march through an area with many black immigrants.  Necessary as this was, such confrontations were not enough.  It needed bigger numbers out on the street celebrating their opposition to racism.  The key to that was music, gigs large and small combining reggae and punk. This in turn was a battle.   To quote Linton Kwesi Johnson, just one of the many valuable quotes Rachel gives us,

Initially we, that is the alliance of the Race Today Collective, the Black Parents Movement and the Black Youth Movement were a little bit suspicious about Rock against Racism because it was an initiative of the Socialist Workers Party who we knew were Trotskyites. And we didn't subscribe to their position on blacks and Asians, who they saw as victims.  Victims are people who don't fight back. We were engaged in the business of fighting back, not only against racism, but for the social justice to transform the society we live in.  That was soon dispelled when one saw the effectiveness of what they were doing. (p77)

Punk too played a central role. Riddled with political contradictions, anti racists had to fight, often physically, for punk’s creative energy to oppose racism. Rachel’s quotes give us this story in rich detail and the follow on with Two Tone. For those who want to fight now, this book is a valuable weapon.

Review of 'Martin Parr: Return to Manchester', Manchester Art Gallery

Almost 50 years ago, the teenage Martin Parr came up north to Manchester Polytechnic where he learnt his trade as a photographer, shooting in black and white, as he was expected to do.  He looked for people, often managing to get close to them. He hung out in the city centre, Piccadilly Gardens, where he found young couples and fans of the Osmonds willing to pose for him.  He explored every Yates’ Wine Lodge in the area on weekday dinner times, often rather sad places. He walked around Moss Side before it was flattened by bulldozers finding ‘Season’s Greetings’ painted in large white letters on a house already half demolished.  He watched others drink and dance and got invited inside people’s homes to take pictures of their families as they sat round the fire. He spent time in places most people never saw, such as the wards at Prestwich mental hospital, where he photographed both patients and staff.  

His course finished he soon moved away coming back every so often to Manchester, recording the changes, the disappearing world of small shops being replaced by the supermarket. At some point  in the eighties he abandoned black and white. From now on he shot only in colour.. So this exhibition is sharply divided. It’s almost as if Manchester changed to being a more colourful place.

Of course it didn’t. The eighties was an awful decade as battles were fought to defend tens of thousands of jobs as the oldest industrial city in the world was de-industrialised. Twenty years later Manchester had become New Labour's favorite city, run by Sir Howard Bernstein, its chief executive till last year, and Sir Richard Leese, the leader of the council.  A model neoliberal city emerged. Today’s skyline shows dozens of cranes, new office towers and blocks of flats, not one ‘affordable’. At the same time it is the second worst local authority in Britain for child poverty.

Parr never found his way to a picket line or a tenants’ meeting. He was never going to upset the great and the good.  Their failures, from the concrete housing monstrosities of the 1960s and 70s, to today’s homeless amid glass and steel palaces are all but absent. This is a huge exhibition with hundreds of pictures, mostly in colour, some wonderfully large, yet much is missing.  Parr tells us he has always been interested in decoration. He gives us lots of clothes, hats, and tattoos. They are often fun to look at but Parr seems content to leave investigating what lies underneath to others. He gives us an everyday, conventional Manchester. He tells us he worked hard to find street parties celebrating the Royal Wedding this summer. If there’s a theme it’s the continuities and changes. Conventions change, We see both St Patrick’s Day Parade and Gay Pride. In looking for colour, we find Parr is always sympathetic to his subjects. He likes a joke as with the kid left in a buggy outside a betting shop.  This is an exhibition whose more contemporary half is designed to entertain, not to ask questions. There’s much more to Manchester than this, not least the city of the late Mark E Smith, My Ex-Classmates' Kids, when he sang ‘They cheat the kids, I cry for them, I cry for me, I cry for thee'.

Socialist Review, December 2018