To his surprise, the letter sparked an enthusiastic wave of support. (Over the years, Rod Stewart, Morrissey and Roger Daltrey have expressed similar sentiments, though not necessarily as inflammatory in each case.) Saunders penned an open letter to Clapton challenging his racism and the music press ran with it. Founder Red Saunders, a photographer who had been assigned by NME to photograph the punk phenomenon at live shows, was sufficiently galvanized by Eric Clapton’s infamous onstage anti-immigration rant at a show in Birmingham, England in 1976, where an inebriated Clapton reportedly made openly racist remarks.
#Sham 69 racists rar
Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on UnsplashĪs it turns out, RAR got off the ground as something of a fluke. “Dear Ted,” Webb wrote back, “there is no RAR in Bognor Regis, but you are now Bognor Regis RAR.” At one particularly charming point in the film, RAR central staff member Kate “Irate Kate” Webb recalls a letter from an interested 14-year-old named Ted from the small English town of Bognor Regis. Using punk, reggae, word of mouth, and-crucially-the printing press as their weapons, RAR swept across the British Isles, swelling into a movement propelled on DIY ethics. Rock Against Racism organization (RAR), as they recollect waging a kind of counter-insurgency against the National Front. The film follows its main characters, the founders of the Shah, who also edited the film, trains her lens on the rise of the UK’s National Front party, a self-identifying fascist group that openly embraced Nazi-style rhetoric steeped in virulent xenophobia, racism, and homophobia.
Shah, who somehow manages to capture the dreary, almost colorless landscape of England’s economic depression and imbue it with a sumptuous visual quality, quickly establishes the broader social and historical context for the ideological fault lines that were then starting to cause tremors in the punk community. As director Rubika Shah‘s documentary White Riotunpacks in vivid detail, punks throughout Great Britain had to contend not only with disdain from society at large but, more insidiously, the growing tide of far-right fascist elements within their own ranks.
While it’s easy to get caught up in debates about aesthetic purity when it comes to punk music, it’s important to remember that, in the ’70s, embracing the punk lifestyle often came with a very real threat to life and limb.
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