Oh Eric no!

[pepperlandgirl]

This Observer article talks about Britain's Rock Against Racism movement. It's a really extraordinary article about something I was woefully ignorant of. But it also made it so I can basically never enjoy Eric Clapton's music again.

It was 5 August 1976 and Eric Clapton was drunk, angry and on stage at the Birmingham Odeon. 'Enoch was right,' he told the audience, 'I think we should send them all back.' Britain was, he complained, in danger of becoming 'a black colony' and a vote for controversial Tory politician Enoch Powell whom he described as a prophet was needed to 'keep Britain white'. Although the irony was possibly lost on Clapton, the Odeon in Birmingham is on New Street, minutes from the Midland Hotel where eight years earlier Powell had made his infamous 'Rivers of Blood' speech. But if the coincidence was curious, the hypocrisy was breathtaking: Clapton's career was based on appropriating black music, and he had recently had a hit with Bob Marley's 'I Shot the Sheriff'.

In usual circumstances his comments would have been merely ill advised, but it was the social and political context which made Clapton's intervention so chilling. The National Front had won 40 per cent of the votes in the spring elections in Blackburn. One month earlier an Asian teenager, Gurdip Singh Chaggar, had been murdered by a gang of white youths in Southall. 'One down - a million to go' was the response to the killing from John Kingsley Read of the National Front. Sid Vicious and Siouxsie Sioux were sporting swastikas as fashion statements. David Bowie, who three months earlier had been photographed apparently giving a Nazi salute in Victoria Station, told Cameron Crowe in the September 1976 edition of Playboy '... yes I believe very strongly in fascism. The only way we can speed up the sort of liberalism that's hanging foul in the air... is a right-wing totally dictatorial tyranny...' In that same interview Bowie claimed that 'Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.' This was Britain then in the sweltering summer of 1976, and in that context Clapton's comments were potentially incendiary.

Clapton never apologized for his comments, and basically stood by them. What a shithead.

Comments

[liliaeth]

I was more shocked about the bits on David Bowie.

[pepperlandgirl4.livejournal.com]

I had heard that he had made those comments before. But I am slightly more inclined to be forgiving because Bowie said a lot of shit to get a reaction. Plus, he apologized for those comments and made an effort to distance himself--and then married Iman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iman_%28model%29) and made contributions to the legal fund for the Jena 6. Clapton, as you could see from the end of the article, never made any attempt at redemption.

[voguevixen.livejournal.com]

Yes, this sounds like something Bowie would say to be "shocking" and "out there."

The whole thing about white Europe is it's very small and nervous to this day about integration. There's still a lot of racism both outright and underwraps that would seem quite blatant to us here in the US. One of my husband's co-workers workers worked a couple years in Paris for the company and said the French government actually offers white women a tax incentive to have babies. They don't want to (in many cases) because they'd rather have a job, etc and don't want to be tied down. This was as recent as a few years ago and it sounds like somthing out of the dark ages!

[lokifan]

Er, I'm pretty sure that's not just white women - and it's due to worry about an aging population, not immigration. France still isn't doing all that well, though.

I had actually heard that about Clapton. Much eww.