Gig 070-071 Tom Robinson Band, Stiff Little Fingers / Carnival Against the Nazis II

Gig 070
Tom Robinson Band / Stiff Little Fingers
Oxford New Theatre
23 September 1978
Gig 071
Carnival Against the Nazis 2
Brockwell Park, Brixton
24 September 1978

 
When an act graduated from college gigs to the New Theatre they’d pretty much made it, inasmuch as they had reached a mass audience; from here they might go on to even greater things – or conversely they might have already peaked. Sadly for the Tom Robinson Band, who now had a chart album and a high profile in the media but would never have another hit, the latter fate awaited. As mentioned in Gigs 41 and 55, Tom was impressive in so many ways: brave, principled, radical, an advocate for gay rights who refused to comply with the prevalent stereotypes: Tom absolutely didn’t do camp. Problem is, if we’re being honest, camp was part of rock’n’roll from before the start, and lyrical allusiveness, sartorial flash and physical sensuality was integral to the experience. In this sense Little Richard wasn’t a world away from Larry Grayson but – for all the right reasons – Tom most certainly was. The core of TRB’s appeal was passionate righteous polemic, which is great until it fairly quickly starts to wear thin, and by the time of this gig that process had started. TRB were fearless in addressing themes which other artists avoided, in the most unambiguous terms, yet further down the line there develops a sense of grievance box-ticking – the feminist song, the racial solidarity song, the police oppression song, and why haven’t you written a song about Northern Ireland? The effect is like being beaten over the head with a rolled-up copy of the Socialist Worker, albeit by the world’s nicest militant revolutionary. Beyond that, it was all a little bit, well, plodding. Tom’s direct approach precluded the subtlety of his hero and mentor Ray Davies, and thus could never allow the exquisite lightness of touch which produced songs such as David Watts and See My Friend; and obviously disco, the most popular (if not explicit) musical expression of gay culture at the time, was out of the question – the only moment of levity was the silly music-hall singalong Martin (‘I had to punch a few policemen before I got nicked!’ Tom, you sooooo didn’t.). Just a few weeks later disco would burst emphatically out of the closet, Sylvester’s Mighty Real and The Village People’s YMCA all over the UK charts.
 
More interesting for me was support act Stiff Little Fingers from Belfast, who quite reasonably had written a song (several, as it turned out) about The Troubles, and whose debut single Suspect Device was a splendid righteous racket. Much has been written about how punk acted as a unifying force for the youth of Northern Ireland in the late 1970s, who had considerably greater reason to resent their elders than most of us in mainland Britain; SLF were the first from that scene to gain mainstream attention (thanks largely, as so often, to John Peel) and also, as far as I’m aware, the only group who wrote about the situation (Boney M don’t count). The New Theatre really wasn’t the right place for them but they made the best of it, blasting out about 40 minutes of relentless melodic guitar- and larynx-shredding tunes, while singer Jake Burns was bemused charm itself between songs. This was very much up my alley and I couldn’t wait to see them again. As it turned out I didn’t have to wait very long.
 
The Carnival Against the Nazis in Hackney back in April (Gig 59) had been a life-changing experience and I wasn’t about to miss the next instalment. This time, with my punk pal and bandmate Mark, I got up early and drove to London in my shaky olive-green mini. It occurs to me that I was allowed a crazy amount of freedom, but by that time I’d been working full-time for two years, had a reasonable income for an 18-year-old, and so long as I clocked in at the factory every working day and put in a shift, my parents didn’t seem to worry too much; besides, I’m fairly sure I didn’t tell them I was going to spend the day hanging out in Brixton with leftist agitators and Rastafarians. We parked somewhere near Hyde Park and went to the midday rally in Trafalgar Square, where among the first speakers were Tom Robinson, brave and engaging as always, and Arthur Scargill, who was hectoring and a bit boring; finding common ground between gay rights, the anti-racist struggle and the industrial working class felt like considerably more of a stretch then than it might now, so props to Tom and Arthur, I guess. Then we hit the road for the very long walk to Brixton, accompanied by various acts precariously performing on the back of flatbed trucks, one of whom may well have been The Ruts. Prior to this year I had very rarely visited London, just drifting through the nondescript and at the time quite impoverished neighbourhoods south of the river felt strangely exhilarating. As we moved along Railton Road we were saluted from the upper balcony of a terraced house by outrageously attired young men trading as Brixton Queens Against the Nazis, and it felt right; perhaps because of  what was at stake, taking a stand against some of the most unappealing and violent elements in society, this was a much more convivial atmosphere than that at Reading a couple of weeks previously, where any manifestation of deviance risked provoking a serious kicking. Common cause trumped tribal antipathy; no flying cans of wee either.
 
No doubt it helped that Sham 69 had been removed from the line-up, due to concern that the arrival of hundreds of neo-nazi skinheads in such a neighbourhood might well be a recipe for disaster, a completely justified decision if Reading was anything to go by. Personally I was quite happy as I’d rather have root-canal surgery without anaesthetic than listen to that witless neanderthal racket, quite apart from the presence of their goons. Instead, as we walked into Brockwell Park, what we heard was Stiff Little Fingers. Hurrah! It wasn’t their crowd, hardly anyone had heard of them, I thought they were even better than the previous night in Oxford. Still, it was a sunny afternoon in a South London park, much better suited to reggae than to punk thrash, and Misty in Roots were a good fit. Less pop-oriented than Aswad, John Peel had described their sound as having an almost medieval quality of ceremonial stateliness; I’d suggest something almost prehistorically elemental about them, the slow low-end groove evoking the world coming into being, a sound to accompany The Creation itself, should that be your thing. An artistic parallel might be drawn with the 19^th century poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins; the sense was that, as with Hopkins’ work, this was a devotional project existing outside of commercial concerns. Community activists in Southall, my understanding is that Misty in Roots were strict Rastafarians, living by a code that predated and superseded the froth of pop culture, and while coming from a different tradition their music shared a common attitude with the ecstatic jazz described by critic Val Wilmer as ‘serious as your life’. As we basked in the late-summer sun, they sang of ‘brimstone, fire, death in a Sodom and Gomorrah’; something for everyone really.Unsurprisingly, and unlike the other acts on the bill, they never appeared on Top of the Pops. 
 
Next up was Elvis Costello and the Attractions, frankly the biggest name on the bill and the reason most people were there, but hang on, who’s this? Oh bloody hell it’s Jimmy Pursey – I was quite happy with brimstone and fire, thanks. I should be fair and concede that it was brave of him to tie his colours to the anti-nazi mast when so many of his followers were violent racists, and at least this time he didn’t sing. Didn’t make much sense either, but then he never did. I should add that there were in fact a fair number of skinheads present, true to the original skins’ affinity with working-class Jamaican culture and happy to align themselves with the cause. Around this moment a rumour circulated about an NF counter-rally taking place in East London, and the prospect of a rumble sent a frisson through the crowd. In fact it later emerged that the whole thing was a damp squib, barely a hundred bigoted clods outnumbered by police.
 
And then its Costello, opening with the sombre Night Rally, an untypically direct message about the far-right threat which still resonates today: ‘You think they’re so dumb, you think they’re so funny…’ Not exactly festival stuff though. The group whipped through the set, mainly drawn from the This Year’s Model album, as if they were in a hurry to be somewhere else. A new tune called Oliver’s Army was showcased about halfway through. As a songwriter EC was operating in a different league to his contemporaries (see Gig 057) but his verbose eloquence, aversion to choruses and tetchy persona didn’t really work in this environment. Much more appropriate were Aswad, who I liked a lot (see Gig 028) but it was getting late, we were a long way from home and I had to clock on at 8am the next morning so we drifted down the hill to Brixton tube station. Less momentous than the Victoria Park carnival (see Gig 059), it had nonetheless been another significant statement and I’m glad I was a small part of it.