On 30th April 1978, the Anti Nazi League/Rock Against Racism (RAR) march and carnival took place in east London's Victoria Park.The succesful and seminal event was repeated in other parts of the UK and was also held in Edinburgh's Craigmillar Park in the summer of 1978.
As seen in the programme,The Freeze also joined the occasion but The Clash never turned up...Another band,The Scars had to hurriedly leave the stage ... : Freeze biker gang?!
11 comments:
What is the exact year for this?
I keep finding both 1978 and 1979...
And the programme does NOT say!
1978 definately.
There was no such thing as a Freeze biker gang!This is an entirely apocryphal story.Robin,who wrote that piece is a decent bloke but his recollection is not the best.His piece on Cindytalk was riddled with fundamental innacuracies.I wrote to the punk77 site with the corrections and also notified Robin.He was happy to be informed of the mistakes.Sorry, but it was a lazy piece.Scars did play and did get abuse from the crowd that day and who knows maybe some people who heckled them liked the Freeze but it wasn't connected to us in any way,shape or form.By and large we and our crowd had a soft spot for Scars.End of story.
Edinburgh in those days was a very cliquey scene and some of the local bands saw us as outsiders for some reason.We were not considered one of the "cool" bands and some folks conducted a silly (& jokey) campaign against us which in my opinion included deriding some of the people who came regularly to watch us play.Back in 1977 our manager Alistair Allison had booked us to play at the Crosskeys hotel in Dalkeith - a town to the south east of Edinburgh.After that gig we found that we had a lot of new friends in and around the mining communities of that area.Some
long-standing friendships were made from that and subsequent gigs around there.These were not Edinburgh trendies who went to the art college,they were down to earth kids who happened to love their music!But because they weren't the above-mentioned trendies they took a hammering from certain local scensters and journos - one even referred to them as "malcontents" in a Freeze review in Sounds.I'm guessing they might have been the ones being referred to as "bikers" but who knows.
Reading that back... the word "campaign" might be too strong a word.Though at the time it felt unnecessary and unwarranted.We were all young,it was maybe just mischief.It affected me,possibly, because i wasn't ever "one of the boys" and wasn't as comfortable with that young male group banter thing.
Silliest part of it was that i was actually a fan of the groups that were making us feel unwelcome.All that stuff though,it must have made me all the keener to get out of Edinburgh and move to London though.
The Scars version of the day:
Craigmillar
They give a wrong year for this then,as most of the other sources say 1978.
Yes,i remember having a conversation with Keith Grant during the Scars set,we agreed that they were encouraging their own reaction.Scars definately belonged to the school of thought that "causing a fuss" gets you more noticed... obviously they were happy with their days work.
Yes it was definately 1978.On Sunday 27th April 2008 there was a free concert at Victoria Park,Hackney, to commemorate the 1978 Anti-Nazi League events.The London gig back in 1978 was held in Victoria Park and that day the Clash did in fact turn up.Some of the Freeze,myself & Keith,included,travelled down from Edinburgh by bus to attend.It was a memorable day.
I don't have clear recollections of this day but the thing that struck me was that is was weird seeing The Freeze outdoors in daylight. To my mind The Freeze was all about indoors, late, with light show and 'that' very over used strobe. It was all a bit bright for me to be honest.
have to agree with you on that.i always felt it was a bit wrong playing during the day.i'm like that with studios too.trying to sing in the daytime is a bit too much like work.we played a few festival gigs in the daylight but i never really enjoyed them and tended not to look for these type of bookings.
It was summer 1978. There are photos of the event in the RARE 1 magazine dated 'Summer 1978'(I'm in one of them....).
Cheers Mairi, i remember that RARE.Remember the Fakes too... :-)
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