If you want a quintessential “It wouldn’t happen now” story, try this. Two months before Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in May 1979, a national Militant Entertainment Tour was organised by Rock Against Racism. On 20 March 1979, it came to the West Runton Pavilion near Cromer, the (very) small town on the coastal edge of East Anglia.
The bill mixed the black and white musicians in three bands then at their artistic peak – the post-punk maestros Gang of Four, the punk-reggae hybridists The Ruts, and Misty in Roots, the renowned reggae collective from Southall in west London – and thereby made a stark symbolic point: that the multiracial nature of large swathes of the UK was not to be decried or attacked, but actively celebrated. The UK was then – and some of this may sound familiar – in a bitter, polarised state, seemingly locked into deep economic problems, amid rising fear about the neo-fascist National Front. The previous year, Thatcher had said – and this may feel familiar, too – that British people “were really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.” Amid such a grim political atmosphere, RAR and the musicians who supported it felt duty-bound to try pulling their audiences away from such toxicity, and point out that what we now call diversity was something to be celebrated.
Nearly half a century on, the lack of any comparable cultural response to this country’s equally unsettling current state seems quite remarkable. There is, then, a vacant cultural-political space – and look what has now come along to fill it. GB News, that bracingly rightwing TV channel whose regular faces include Nigel Farage, the Reform MP Lee Anderson and the party’s failed byelection candidate Matt Goodwin, is about to launch a music radio station.
According to its promotional blurb, it will be “dedicated exclusively to artists from Great Britain and Northern Ireland”, with tagline “all British, all day”. By way of further explanation, one of its presenters, the black GB News host Nana Akua, says that “It’s easy to forget how this country has shaped the global music landscape” – a strange point instantly disproved by a mention of any number of artists (such as those four fairly successful fellas from Liverpool). But here, perhaps, is the strangest thing of all: according to GB Media, every track on the station’s playlist will be an “artist from Great Britain or Northern Ireland, or where the main proportion of the band is British.” This sparks no end of questions.
Does anyone in the ordinary world actually perceive music like this? Will someone frantically be employed to sift through Wikipedia, finding out whether this or that band fits the “main proportion” criterion? What will happen in the case of, say, the Gallagher brothers, who self-identify as Irish – and should, therefore, be excluded for the same reasons as U2, CMAT and Fontaines DC?
Should the Jimi Hendrix Experience be ruled in or out, given that the two supporting members of the trio were respectively from Ealing and Folkestone? And to get into the real nitty-gritty, how exactly are the programmers defining “British”? We all know the jaw-dropping conversations taking place in GB News-adjacent circles about national identity.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
