Review: WHITE RIOT

In the decades since '70s it can be easily forgotten how political British punk was. As one who took part in the Big One back in 1977 I am now well placed to push my pince-nez back and bellow: "these young yobbos who play three chords and get their hair all spiky and say they're punks. We never said we were punks! Never had to .... young .... punks ....." and trail off to get the night's Milo in the kitchen. But I recall with heat the power of the Rock Against Racism movement in the UK. I was comfy in Queensland as part of the extended Euro invasion force and didn't even see the issue where I was. But in Britain they had a neo fascism whose numbers were swelling and getting louder just as the punks were rising. The problem was that it could get difficult to tell them apart.

There are early mentions in this documentary of icons from the time erring in this, Sid and Siouxsie are caught wearing swastikas and Bowie's cocaine-addled bullshit about needing a dictator (and Eric Clapton's rant from God knows where). Hell, tried it myself when I landed in a new town without friends (guess what, that went as soon as I got a social life). While the first two in that list were going for shock value and never espoused any Hitlerism, Bowie and Clapton's gaffs only drew the lines sharper. Jimmy Pursey was a worry as his Sham 69 attracted a few young NF punters but even he calls it in the end for the better side of history.

This is the tale of the co-incidence of a modestly-sized cultural movement using home made forces of DIY press and music events and a generation splitting with the previous one on the value of the great clanging nonsense of patriotism. The organisers of the RAR gigs speak lucidly of the problems of getting traction on a movement that might well have seemed trivial at the time to the extent of massive public events. It might not have crushed the National Front but it certainly hit them in their youth recruitment section. It wasn't Woodstock, it was work, a lot of work, and it made a difference.

Now, if you are gagging from my obvious bias toward RAR I'll keep it short. This account not only moves at a clip it does so with high value vintage footage of the likes of The Clash rehearsing, Tom Robinson and Steel Pulse playing at the RAR gigs, as well as the physical work of setting the stages in parks. At first you might take the sight of what someone has just said typed out on the screen but give it a minute and you'll realise that you are not being preached at but invited into a major part of what holds this film and the movement it examines together. If something isn't archival film or a present day talking head it's cut out and pasted on to the screen like the layout of a fanzine. There are even re-enactments (kept wisely low key) where this extends to live action as when a cop bursts into a flat with the black bar of tabloid reporting over his eyes. By the end credits you get the sense you've been exposed to a lot more information than a barrel of interviews.

Rock Against Racism didn't fix the problem but all it claimed to do was highlight it and invite anyone who cared to come and sing along. Sing it does, though, out to this day of ours with gangs of incels bellowing to the kookaburras in the mountains. But they, while they are not ignorable, are the least of our worries with the insidious normalisation the the right have discovered to the tainting of a term like leftism where it was once a description. Do we need a new RAR? Maybe, but more, we need a film like this to remind us of the tools we already have and our concern, our kindness and our wits.

Thank you.

Written, spoken and memorised by ....