The Southall Riot

THE SOUTHALL RIOT

Away from Stonehenge during that summer of 1981, a tour was about to take place featuring the so-called cream of the current Punk crop. Given the name 'Apocalypse Now', the nationwide series of gigs would be a showcase for The Exploited, Discharge, Anti-Pasti, and Chron Gen; offering an ideal opportunity for fans to see all these bands in one fell swoop.

Touted as the Eighties equivalent of the Sex Pistols' 'Anarchy' tour, the gigs were to pass (unlike said Anarchy tour) without any major incidents, bannings or cancellations but served effectively to underline just how different this second wave of Punk was to the first wave.

This new wave of new Punk was appealing almost exclusively to working class teenagers and was shorn of any pretensions of artiness or musical sophistication. Musically it was far faster, more brutal and much more political than anything that had gone before. This was Punk born from, baptised in and influenced by nothing else but Punk. As Gene October of old school Punk band Chelsea observed: this was the real hard stuff.

To most music journalists it was inexplicable. Punk was growing ever more popular with even the most derivative of bands attracting large audiences to their gigs and selling huge numbers of records. Only one journalist out of all the music newspapers would champion, support and promote this second generation of Punk and that was Garry Bushell of Sounds newspaper.

Though ultra-critical and damning of Crass and Discharge, Bushell was an ardent enthusiast for what was then being styled as 'street Punk'. Conscious of the failure of The Clash to live up to their aspirations, Bushell had turned his attention upon Clash-inspired bands such as Sham 69, Menace, and the UK Subs before focussing on the bands that those very groups themselves were inspiring.

Bushell was a very good writer and soon gained a position of prominence within Sounds, becoming the main features editor; giving him carte blanche to write of the music and bands he clearly loved. To emphasise the difference between this new breed of Punk bands and their predecessors, Bushell began categorising and labelling them according to each style of Punk he judged them to be playing.

Oi! was initially an umbrella name given to cover a large part of this new Punk scene but quickly came to define just the Cockney Rejects branch where the bands dressed in casual skinhead garb and played a type of Punk Rock not unlike that of Sham 69 at their stomping best.

Bushell (like Crass) was in a powerful and influential position with thousands of readers hanging onto his every word. A good review from him or even just a short mention could introduce a band to a huge audience so it was no surprise that very few bands initially objected to being labelled Oi!. A slight problem for some, however, was that this audience comprised a large number of skinheads and with them came the skinhead baggage of violence, machismo, and Right-wing politics.

Fighting with skinheads at gigs was a commonplace occurrence but it was at a gig in Southall, west London, featuring three leading Oi! bands - The Business, Last Resort, and The 4-Skins - that gig-related violence suddenly escalated beyond what anyone thought might be possible.

As fans of the bands started arriving into the area for the gig, almost inevitably trouble started between some of the skinheads and the local Asian residents. Seeing the concert as nothing less than a skinhead invasion of their community, hundreds of Asian youths descended upon the venue to do battle with them.

To keep the two sides apart, police threw a cordon around the venue but in the eyes of the Asians this was simply the police giving protection to the skinhead invaders. From the odd brick and bottle being thrown at the police line, the situation escalated into a full scale riot with Molotov cocktails being thrown at the venue causing those inside to evacuate and for the venue to be eventually burnt down.

In as much as the skinheads were the initial target of the violence, the police quickly took their place with over sixty of them in the end being injured. A photograph of a burnt-out van (belonging to The Business) outside the burning venue was to later become an iconic image.

The media backlash against Oi! was immediate and breathtaking, with many of the bands associated with it being falsely labelled as Nazis, and Garry Bushell (along with Sounds editor Alan Lewis) as being culpable.

Bushell, if anything, was guilty of playing with fire and starting a blaze. Everybody knew that the skinhead image was a violent one and that there was a seam of Right-wing extremism running through the skinhead ranks. Everybody knew that teenagers adopting skinhead as a new fashion were going to adopt the image wholesale, taking on all its traits be they good or bad. Bushell and co were doing very little to challenge any of the most negative of these traits, allowing a propensity for violence, homophobia, machismo and - to a certain extent - racism to flourish unchecked.

At Southall all these chickens came home to roost, dealing a near fatal, knock-out blow to what was potentially a very powerful vehicle for young, working class frustration and protest...