Rock Against Racism Rocks the Castle
HIP’s Rod Webb talks to Ruth Gregory co-curator of the Rock Against Racism Exhibition Tour.
It may be the end of an era for St Mary in the Castle when it closes in November this year, but at least it goes out with a defiant flourish. The Rock Against Racism movement is launching its eight-week exhibition tour at the venue with a dose of what they call ‘militant entertainment.’ The energy associated with the RAR movement will be ramped up with an unmissable opening concert, headlined by Neville Staple – whose two-tone band, The Specials, was so deeply involved with the seminal movement.
Ruth Gregory was a driving force behind RAR back in the seventies, as well as creator of their iconic design-work and their zine, Temporary Hoarding. She co-founded RAR-RAP (Rock Against Racism – Research ‘n’ Archive Project) in 2018, with Lucy Whitman (aka Lucy Toothpaste), Kate Webb (aka Irate Kate) and Andy Dark. The aim is “to catalogue the unique archives and develop an analysis which acknowledges RAR as a vital component in making change.” She is rightly proud of what RAR achieved and feels that now is the right time to use the legacy of RAR to ignite a new militancy. She describes the intervening forty years as “like we’ve been asleep,” lulled by false promises. She links how things are today with how they were back in the seventies, saying: “back then we used the big punk refrain, ‘no future, no future for me’. Well, there really is no future now unless we get out there and do something.”
Ruth Gregory
Ruth hopes the tour will contribute to a reawakening of the spirit of the original RAR movement. It starts in Hastings because that’s where Ruth lives now. The exhibition recreates the energy of the movement with a display of posters, photographs and all sorts of other fascinating memorabilia. She is keen to be intergenerational: she feels we are so often compartmentalised, one generation being played off against another. “To me the young and the old are the biggest threat to the system because they’re not embedded in the matrix. They have a freedom, at that stage in life, which allows you to say, ‘what the hell’.”
The ripped and torn graphic design Ruth helped pioneer, has remained iconic through the generations. The exhibition shows how the iconography of RAR took its influences from Russian Constructivism and Punk visual sensibility and, in turn, became deeply influential. The world of advertising and gallery art was always playing catch up. Even today the raw graphics remain powerful. It’s a way of seeing culture as a connective thing, she argues. “Art and music is probably the first thing we ever did as human beings: we could make music, we could draw on the cave walls before we even learned to write. And dance. These three things are the essence of our being.”
Music was at the heart of Rock Against Racism. “Back then in the seventies,” she says, “there were plenty of people on the left who were not interested in music, and it’s pretty much the same now. So RAR was a kind of break-out. That’s what they literally described it as, ‘a jailbreak’. A jailbreak from serious politics. The traditional
left leaders weren’t interested in music and thought what we were doing was completely irrelevant and just about having fun.”
But fun, she believes, is always part of the mix. Fun is also political. Talking about the importance of getting Neville Staple of The Specials (and later Fun Boy Three), she says: “I love The Specials. I love Ghost Town – and isn’t it relevant now?” She says she saw Neville a couple of years ago at a RAR gig in Nottingham and is sure he will get people up on their feet, dancing. Two-tone was, of course, integral to RAR: the idea of black bands and white bands on the same stage was just unheard of then. “Some of the bands couldn’t even travel across London to do a RAR gig without being attacked: they had to go in groups.” It was also much harder for black people to get involved in RAR. Ruth points out, “the fact that they were targeted by the police meant that they were reluctant to go on demonstrations.”
Ruth feels that “if we want to live in a multicultural society then we have to fight for it. The media, the state, the police want us to live in a ‘nice white English world,’ but we have to fight so that all people will be part of this society and will be able to get on with their lives. And live in peace without all these attacks.” If Ruth is right and we have all been asleep, maybe it is time to wake up.
• The concert is on 27 August at St Mary in the Castle and the exhibition runs until 17 October. Tickets available at Eventbrite.
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