Une ressource audio authentique : l’interview de Syd Shelton
Syd Shelton est un photographe britannique qui a participé au mouvement Rock against Racism (RAR) en Grande Bretagne à la fin des années 70 et dans les années 80. Très impliqué dans le projet, il a aussi participé en tant que graphiste à l’élaboration du magazine du mouvement, Temporary Hoarding. Son travail est entré dans les collections permanentes de la Tate Gallery, du Victoria & Albert Museum et de la National Portrait Gallery. Ses photographies sont exposées au 106 à Rouen du 12 mars au 30 mai 2025 :
https://www.le106.com/evenements/2025/rock-against-racism-un-mouvement-britannique-1976—1981.html
L’interview étant riche et les propos développés, les parties en gras peuvent être extraites du document et utilisées comme « citations » en fonction du niveau des élèves et des objectifs visés. La ressource a pour vocation à faire l’objet d’une compréhension orale.
[1] Could you tell us what Rock Against Racism was ?
It’s a great question, really, what it was…Rock Against Racism…because at the time none of us knew really what it was at all. But it started really... I was living in Sydney in Australia for four years, and it started around the time when I came back in late 1976, and it was a result of Eric Clapton making the most outrageous racist remarks from his concerts in Birmingham, where he called for all black people to be sent back home, and it was really quite outrageous especially considering the fact that he was having…enjoying a big hit at the time with I Shot the Sheriff - Bob Marley’s song - and all his music was really inspired by black music. As a result of this, Red Saunders, a photographer friend of mine, we’re still friends and have been friends for nearly 50 years…he was inspired to write a letter to the left-wing press but also to the music press, which was very important at that time because every young person got all their information about gigs and events through the music press. It was our weekly dose of…joy, if you like, NME in particular. They wrote this letter calling out Eric Clapton and saying, ‘Come on Eric, surely you realise half your music is black, and who shot the sheriff Eric ? Because it sure as hell wasn’t you !’ and they called for a setting up of a rank-and-file musicians organisation called ‘Rock Against Racism’ and the result was phenomenal. They got hundreds and hundreds of letters, people saying ‘I’m in for this’, among musicians, punters, all sorts of people responded…very…and the show was on the road from almost day one and and the first gig was organized in a pub in East London with Carol Grimes, an old R&B singer.
[2] So Rock against Racism was a tour ?
No, it was it was a group of us and there was only, when I say a group, it was maybe, it varied between seven and a dozen people and we organised over the five years between 1976 and 1981 we organised over 500 gigs and seven massive carnivals and really it poodled along for the first year as small gigs in pubs but then an event took place which was of great significance and that was the Intimidatory March by the National Front through Lewisham in South London which was a multicultural and very successfully multicultural area of inner-city London. The march was called the Anti-Mugging March which had become a byword for anybody who was young, black and male mostly and the police used it constantly as a means of intimidation and harassment. The people of South London really were getting fed up with this and especially as in May 1977 the police raided 21 houses and arrested young people, the youngest being 14 years old.
[3] At that point you seized the opportunity to organize a larger event ?
We seized the opportunity to go to Lewisham and to support the local community, of which tens of thousands turned out. The police came on that day for a battle and a quarter of the entire Metropolitan Police was there and their entire mounted division - the cavalry - and it really was scores-to-be-settled day. The local youth really felt like they had nothing to lose anymore and they just went for it and they brought out riot shields for the first time in mainland Britain, although we’d seen them in Northern Ireland but not in mainland Britain. And as a result of the events of that day which became known as the Battle of Lewisham, a group of left-wing Labour MPs, trade unionists, even football managers - like Brian Clough who was manager of Nottingham Forest at that time-, came together to form an organisation called the Anti-Nazi League. The Anti-Nazi League worked alongside Rock Against Racism and they were crucially important in the sense that they had financial resources via the trade union movement, which we didn’t have. We were just regular punters with no resources. And we decided that what we wanted to do was a spectacular event, and we decided to do on the eve of the Greater London Council elections in an area where the National Front - the racist National Front - had got 17% of the vote we decided to put on what we called the Carnival Against the Nazis, and the Anti-Nazi League had the idea of doing it on the back of a lorry and we went “no, we want to do an anti-racist Woodstock,” but we wanted to have also this march from Trafalgar Square to Victoria Park which was seven miles - maybe 12 kilometers - a long long march. We organised, I think seven flatbed trucks to be spaced out along the march which were bands like Misty in Roots, The Ruts, The Piranhas, The Mekons all played on these flatbed trucks. So it really wasn’t a march so much as a party. It was a seven mile long street party.
[4] Who were the headliners at the show ?
The show, the headliners, the main headliner was Tom Robinson Band, they were on last, and Steel Pulse, a great reggae band from Birmingham, and X-Ray Spex - Poly Styrene we all remember sadly died a few years ago - and The Clash. The Clash were late coming to the party, as it were, they were not on the original poster or original bill, but they did ring us up and say, or Bernie Rhodes, their manager, rang up and said, “my lads want to do this gig”, and we had a meeting with them in Red Saunders Studio in Soho, and they agreed to do it and they were the hottest band in town. You know, they really were. We knew once the Clash were on board, the gig was going to work. And it really was... we expected and we had a PA which... Eel Pie, Pete Townsend from The Who, and Eel Pie lent us the PA for nothing. We got someone called Starhire who built the stage for nothing. We all did everything for nothing because there was no money involved, but it was an extraordinary day, which no one who was there will ever forget and we expected 20,000 people and it ended up with a hundred thousand and ninety percent of them marched the whole seven miles, which was quite fantastic.
[5] Do you feel like RAR achieved something ?
Well, it achieved many things, but one of the things which I think is its greatest achievement, I suppose, is Two-Tone. And why I say that is because in 1976 black bands played in black clubs to black audiences, white bands played at white venues to white audiences. And although there was no formal segregation, of course, we’re not talking about apartheid, but there was a separation. And our aim in Rock Against Racism was to bring, in particular, the two genres of music, punk and UK reggae, together. And the chemistry was explosive.
[6] This mix of music and genres, was this a symbol and, if so, a symbol of what ?
It was a symbol of a desire and a natural desire for most young people to be multicultural and multiracial. Most people who formed the bands like The Clash or The Ruts or The Mekons or Steel Pulse or Black Slate or whatever, came from the estates and the working class communities of cities all over Britain. And in those communities, in the main, racism was not a part of their daily life. They’d grown up in schools together, they were mates. As Segs - the bass player from the Ruts - said to me, he thought when he first heard the word ‘racism’ it was something to do with running. It never occurred to them that racism was an idea which had any credence whatsoever because for them some of their mates were black, some of their mates were white and it was that bringing together, which RAR did, which enabled the movement of Two-Tone. Gerry Damers said to me many years ago from the Specials that Two-Tone took on the baton. It was a relay race. Racism never disappears. You have to fight it all your life. But in that relay, Two-Tone took the baton in 1981 from Rock Against Racism and carried on the fight. And I think that’s absolutely true.
[7] Why was there a RAR magazine : was it a necessity to have your own media, to control your own narrative ?
Well, it was partly to be able to control our own narrative, but it was also to broaden the idea of what prejudice and racism really was, so we could take on issues like homophobia, sexism, and international issues like apartheid which was still rife in South Africa and Zimbabwe, and we could broaden those issues and say hold on a minute it’s not just about the National Front in Coventry or Lewisham or wherever it’s also about this and these prejudices which are being fed by these right-wing organisations are the same group of prejudices which feed homophobia and sexism and all the other prejudices that people have as a part of their right-wing baggage. And so it enabled us through that magazine to broaden the issue. But we also were determined to be both radical in content and form as well, and so we did it as a fold-up magazine which went sometimes down to A4, sometimes A3, and opened up to A1 or AO. So it became a poster - that’s why it was called Temporary Hoarding - and people could put it on their walls and it was… a propaganda for the idea of Rock against Racism, but it was also…it had instructions about how to put on a gig for example we always had included a section called the raw gig guide telling people what a backline was, what…how to organize to put it on your own Rock Against Racism gig, which it really was a DIY organisation, it wasn’t some top-heavy series of instructions. And people would put on gigs in places we’d never even heard of, they’d say, oh we did a RAR gig last night, and we had nothing to do with it whatsoever, but they’d ring up at people and say, can you get us 500 badges we want to sell to them tomorrow and a copy of Temporary Hoarding. It had a momentum of its own, which was what was exciting but it was also helpful because we didn’t want it to be just a London-based organisation and so we did a thing called the Militant Entertainment Tour. At that time the word militant was very much a bogey word which was used in the same way as radicalisation is now used. It was a means by which you could put down any form of resistance. So we called it the Militant Entertainment Tool. We took three bands to three venues. So we started off in Cambridge I think and then Coventry, then Leicester. Then we changed the three bands and each time we also picked up a local band. So there was also a totally unknown local band. Some of them became quite well known in the end, but like the Specials were one of the local bands. And we toured the whole country, but having booked venues in a series of battered old vans which we drove, which broke down frequently, and we repaired on the hoof.
[8] What’s your point of view on the Notting Hill Carnival ?
Yeah, Notting Hill Carnival was something that we’d all gone to and been a part of, felt a part of, I wasn’t involved in the organisation at all, but we’d always loved it, and the police had always seen it as a place, as a focus to arrest as many people as they possibly could and intimidate as many people as they could. So it was always a confrontation as well. [And is it significant for you today ?] Yeah, it’s not as significant as it was because it’s not as rebellious as it was and it was, it was bands like Aswad who became very important Rock against Racism bands who were one of the main bands at the at the Notting Hill Carnival and who drove a lot of other bands around that time. So there was a big link with the carnival, but it was and that’s why we called it the carnivals against the Nazis because we wanted to take on that…that mantle.
[9] Could you tell us about the work you did in Belfast in the 1970s ?
Yeah, I haven’t been to Belfast since those days and well, it’s actually…the last time I went was in 1985, I did go in 85 cos I did a book with 50 other photographers called Ireland : A Week in the Life of a Nation, but I went to Belfast largely as a side initiative if you like from Rock against Racism because I was appalled at the racism against Irish people, which was unspoken racism in many ways. People would go, ‘oh, no, I’m not racist, but it’s just the paddies would get on my nerves’ or something like that. And it was there all the time and it’s one of Britain’s oldest racisms, it’s been around a long time. And in particular, the Republican population was vilified and demonized and I wanted to go along and humanize or find out, really as well - it was a voyage of discovery to a large extent - I had never been before, and I slept on people’s floors, and the first time I spent a week, and the second time I spent five days or something, it was in 77 and 79, and I was met with the most fantastic hospitality and kindness and generosity from the Republican community in fact, but it also felt to me very much autobiographical because I’d been brought up in the north of England in the 1950s, much earlier, but Republican West Belfast was very much like Pontefract where I was brought up in the 1950s and it reminded me… I saw people and I thought and that’s my dad, that’s my mother, that’s me and it really felt very…I felt comfortable there. And I saw … I mean it was the height of the Troubles, and I saw a lot of incidents which I wasn’t interested in photographing because other people like Chris Steele-Perkins and Don McCullin were doing great work at photographing the Troubles as it were. And I wanted to photograph the humanity of people and it was…it worked I think to an extent, I published a book called the Falls and, mostly the area I spent my time in the Markets and the Falls, and it was a time of great joy, I enjoyed it immensely. It’s interesting …I always wore a Rock against Racism badge when I was there, which I wore all the time anyway, but most of the young people who were there were more interested in talking about music than they were in the Troubles, they weren’t interested, they were “oh, forget the Troubles, but have you seen The Clash ? Did you actually meet any of them ?” That was the sort of conversation that I had rather than, you know, “we hate the Brits”. Here I am as a Brit in a Republican area and as I said, I was met with such hospitality and I think those pictures helped and still continue to help to put a human face on that human face…
[10] Your work is in the permanent collections of the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery, the V&A. Is it important to you ?
For me on a very personal level, as a young art student I came down to London to see an exhibition at the Tate gallery called “A decade of paintings” in 1966, which blew my mind, it was full of people like Jasper Johns and Willem De Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg all the Greats of American art at that time. I came down three times and I would be saying to myself then, what’s your ambition if anybody have asked me, and I’d say to have something hanging at the Tate gallery. And, so, I’m very proud of that. And I’m very proud that they’ve been used in ways which put the argument. They’re not put down as sort of pretty, historical images, or nostalgic. They’re put down as confrontational images of resistance, which is what I’d like, how I like to see my work has been. I see myself as a photographic activist, not just a photographer. Photographers are not impartial, objective observers of the world, they’re all subjective viewers. And it’s with that in mind, constantly, that when I’m photographing, I’m thinking politically and I’m thinking how is this gonna be received and is it gonna be seen in the greater scheme of things and the struggle. And it’s really, still, when I’m photographing, still always important, people, how do I portray working-class people with dignity and it’s…I see myself, well I am from the working-class, but I see myself as a working-class photographer in the sense that I support working-class people and I’m not, well I’m quite opposed to the sort of photography which takes the mickey out of working-class people, you know when somebody squashes an ice-cream near their face - and there’s lots of photographers willing to - and I’m not interested in that, I’m interested more in the dignity of people.
Les liens avec les thématiques culturelles des programmes
Les liens avec les thématiques culturelles des programmes sont les suivants :
● Rencontre avec d’autres cultures (cycle 4)
● Voyages et migrations (cycle 4)
● Vivre entre générations (2nde)
● La création et le rapport aux arts (2nde)
● Le village, le quartier, la ville (2nde)
● Le passé dans le présent (2nde)
● Identité et échanges (cycle terminal)
● Art et pouvoir (cycle terminal)
● Fictions et réalités (cycle terminal)
● Diversité et inclusion (cycle terminal)
● Territoire et mémoire (cycle terminal)
Spécialités :
● LLCER - Rencontres - La relation entre l’individu et le groupe
● LLCER - Arts et débats d’idées
● LLCER - Voyages, territoires, frontières
● LLCER - Expression et construction de soi
● LLCER-AMC - Représentations - Faire entendre sa voix : représentation et participation / Informer et s’informer
● LLCER-AMC - Environnements en mutation - repenser la ville
● LLCER-AMC - Relation au monde - Puissance et influence / Héritage commun et diversité
Conclusion
L’article proposé s’inscrit dans une dynamique de projets culturels développée dans l’Académie de Normandie. Les ressources proposées par M. Locoge visent à initier l’exploration de nouveaux thèmes culturels au sein des classes grâce à l’utilisation de nouveaux documents, la variété des thématiques abordées permettant en effet d’enrichir la compétence culturelle des élèves.
Pour aller plus loin :
Site personnel du photographe : www.sydshelton.net/
Photos de Syd Shelton dans les collections de la Tate :
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/shelton-west-runton-pavilion-rock-against-racism-militant-entertainment-tour-1979-p21036
Photos de Syd Shelton dans les collections du V&A :
https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1260718/fans-at-the-northern-carnival-photograph-shelton-syd/
Photos de Syd Shelton dans les collections de la National Portrait Gallery :
https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw304579/Darcus-Howe-Anti-National-Front-Demonstration-Lewisham?LinkID=mp166690&role=art&rNo=0
Pour les projets culturels avec le 106 : Nassera Benfadel / Chargée de l’Action Culturelle /
nassera.benfadel@le106.com / 02 32 10 88 67
https://www.le106.com/evenements/2025/rock-against-racism-un-mouvement-britannique-1976—1981.html
Rock against Racism Playlist : https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3uFuHtLLuVw0aCmPyikZVf?si=1QQ8HbIvTQumfLQkRZFd1w
Crédits et remerciements : le logo "Langues et Cultures" a été réalisé par les élèves de DN MADE du lycée Jeanne d’Arc à Rouen, encadrés par leur professeure Mme Stéphanie Bouvet.