White Riot

“Do we have any for­eign­ers in the audi­ence tonight? If so, please put up your hands. Wogs I mean, I’m look­ing at you […] Wher­ev­er you all are, I think you should all just leave. Not just leave the hall, leave our coun­try.” That was Eric Clap­ton address­ing his fans at a gig in Birm­ing­ham on 5 August, 1976.

It was rock’s ​‘Rivers of Blood’ moment; indeed the for­mer Cream front­man urged the crowd that night to sup­port Enoch Pow­ell. Clapton’s racist tirade was as shock­ing 40 years ago as it is now, yet such rhetoric con­tin­ues to be used by con­tem­po­rary pub­lic fig­ures, stok­ing racial ten­sions in a nation built on the fal­la­cy of white exceptionalism.

The response in ​’76 was swift. ​‘Rock Against Racism’ had been con­ceived some months ear­li­er, but it was Clapton’s rant which ulti­mate­ly led Red Saun­ders, Roger Hud­dle, Jo Wre­ford and Pete Bruno to stand up to the rise of far-right populism.

Rubi­ka Shah’s inci­sive doc­u­men­tary chron­i­cles the his­to­ry of RAR from its ear­ly days as a grass-roots protest move­ment, putting on fundrais­ing gigs across the coun­try and launch­ing a punk fanzine, to its pin­na­cle in the spring of ​’78 when more than 100,000 peo­ple marched from Trafal­gar Square to Tow­er Ham­lets in East Lon­don, where the Nation­al Front had won 17 per cent of the vote at the recent byelection.

Much of the sec­ond half of the film cen­tres around The Clash’s per­for­mance at the now leg­endary open-air con­cert in Vic­to­ria Park, and there’s great archive footage of the sup­port acts from that day too: Steel Pulse, X‑Ray Spex, the Tom Robin­son Band and Sham 69’s Jim­my Pursey. Var­i­ous talk­ing heads asso­ci­at­ed with the occa­sion reflect on its lega­cy, adding invalu­able insight while serv­ing up a few choice soundbites.

But Shah’s mas­ter­stroke is the inclu­sion of slo­gans used by fas­cist groups of the time, some of which fea­ture remark­ably sim­i­lar lan­guage to mod­ern cam­paigns by pro-Brex­it par­ties. Just as beats were used to fight big­otry, it’s good to see film being used to the same ends today.