“Don’t pretend to like the Clash, you lying Tory fuckbrain!”: Clash fan to Boris Johnson (X).

FOR SOME of us, punk wasn’t a matter of life or death; it was much more important than that. 

It was never just the songs or the clothes, epic as both could be — it was the politics at punk’s heart that really changed us. I’m far from the only child to get her first anti-racist and socialist lessons in the vinyl classrooms of teachers like Mr Joe Strummer. A generation of anti-fascists grew up fighting the British Movement and National Front at gigs, as well as rallies.

But this vital component of punk isn’t always taken as seriously as it could be. Punk is often assessed as merely an interesting moment in music and youth culture, but politically, lightweight: art-student posturing with little lasting ideological impact.  

New feature-length documentary, On Resistance Street, doesn’t make this mistake. It recognises punk’s contribution part in the resistance of a generation. As former Jamaican film commissioner Kim-Marie Spence, now of Queen Mary’s University Belfast, puts it in the film: “Every revolution contains many small revolutions.” And punk’s is far from over.  

The main creative brains behind the documentary, Richard David and Robin Banks, know whereof they speak, because they were there. David’s life was changed by a backstage conversation with Joe Strummer when on tour with the Clash; Banks’s importance to the band is immortalised in his lifelong friend Mick Jones’s anthemic Stay Free.

Like punk itself, the Resistance Street project began in a burst of righteous anger. In 2019, then PM — and living, shambling antithesis of everything punk stood for — Boris Johnson claimed The Clash were one of his all-time favourite bands. 

A visceral shudder of revulsion tore through the old punk cohort. 

One fan tweeted: “David Cameron liked The Jam, Boris Johnson likes The Clash. Do any of these chinless fucks even listen to the lyrics? Next Jacob Rees-Mogg will be telling us how he loves NWA…” 

Another was more succinct: “Don’t pretend to like the Clash, you lying Tory fuckbrain.” 

Banks and David felt the same, and knew some former band members did too. A volley of outraged phone calls led to one conclusion — they had to speak out. This wasn’t a trivial matter, as it might seem on the surface, but part of the right’s culture wars — and it needed opposing. 
As Robin Banks later put it: “Radical culture had to make a stand again.”

David concurs: “We did what Joe taught us: we didn’t wait for someone to speak for us, we threw ourselves into the fight.”

First, the troops were gathered. Clash Against the Right (Now Clash Fans Against the Right) was formed, initially as a series of social media groups set up to connect an international membership of fans, which would include senior trade unionists, musicians and journalists.   

Soon there were US, Irish and Latin American “branches” too. As a member of the British arm I can say that these were, miraculously, nothing like the usual Facebook groups devoted to bands, which all too easily default to boys’ clubs, endlessly debating musical minutiae. 

CFATR, by contrast, quickly shuts down misogyny and other dodgy views: and instead of talking shops, the groups are springboards for real-world activism. 

Members have worked together to support member and activist Fernando Luna in his fight to unionise a Mexico City workforce. From Buffalo, New York, member Dan Gniewecki (a full-time organiser heavily involved in the Starbucks’ unionisation) advised Luna. The workers won their fight — and Luna himself was elected president of the new union that resulted. In 2023, Luna met The Clash’s Paul Simonon in Mexico and told him the incredible story.   

From there, the “Resistance Street” project grew and grew. It includes a monthly radio show on Portobello Radio, going out live from the heart of Clash territory in the shadow of the Westway, of which I’m an occasional co-presenter. 

It’s also staged all-day events in London, Liverpool and Belfast, featuring musicians, poets and political speakers. 

Production on the On Resistance Street film began in 2021. Filmed in the US, Northern Ireland and Britain, it’s a comprehensive and fascinating history of music’s long battle against racism and fascism, and situates punk within much older traditions, of which many may not be aware. 

Crucially, it proves that punk’s core beliefs, born on “council estates, football terraces, art colleges and schools” still motivate activists today. 

Opening with the nasal whine of pro-Nazi traitor William “Lord Haw Haw” Joyce, the first scenes trace the development of the ongoing  existential threat that is British fascism.  

As loathsome fascist sprite Tommy Robinson grabs the headlines once again in late 2023, returning from his villa in Tenerife to stir up hate for cash, effectively at the behest of Suella Braverman, this is all-too pertinent.

As the film runs through key moments in musical resistance, we learn, via research from associate producer and author Rick Blackman, just how early the Musicians Union opposed racism: this was union policy form 1947, and the MU was one of the first organisations to demand a boycott of apartheid South Africa. 

After a sustained campaign, by 1958 the colour bar was broken in Mecca ballrooms across Britain. That same year the fascinating Stars Campaign for Interracial Friendship was also formed, by a brilliantly eclectic mix of actors, musicians and artists. 

The steadfast courage of Britain’s black community in the face of racist mob attacks in Notting Hill helped inspire the Stars’ Campaign, which had some unlikely heroes as well as celebrated ones: not just Cleo Laine and Paul Robeson, but Lonnie Donegan and Frank Sinatra. 

On Resistance Street reminds us too that while Thatcherism’s joyless, loveless individualism deliberately and brutally destroyed communities, punk created its own, which would stand against all the demons Thatcherism reinvigorated: racism, fascism and rabid free-market capitalism. 

“No such thing as society,” said Thatcher, but many of us much preferred Strummer’s “without people you’re nothing, that’s my spiel.” 

Next, The Clash’s London’s Burning blazes brilliantly across the sound track (which is as good as you’d hope) as the film turns to activists Red Sanders and Roger Huddle’s disgust at “rock god” Eric Clapton’s appalling public racist rant of 1976, which resulted in the formation of Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League. 

There are a glorious wealth of contributors — David and Banks’s contact books must read like a rock and roll anthology. Musicians like Paul Simonon, members of the Pistols, Steel Pulse, Aswad, Stiff Little Fingers, The Men They Couldn’t Hang, The Levellers, The Defects, The Outcasts, Taurus Trakker (featuring Mick Jones’s cousin Martin Muscatt) and more appear, along with East End grime artist Lady Shocker, who speaks eloquently about the need for continuing musical resistance in the social media age.

As well as musicians, trade unionists like Matt Wrack of the FBU, historians and activists speak with wit and passion about what punk meant to them. 

From Belfast (where I flew for the film’s October premiere), local legend Terry Hooley talks about punk and “the Troubles” — the shock of seeing his familiar hometown broken by sudden violence and segregation. 

“I still believe the whole country was having a nervous breakdown,” Hooley says, while recounting how his own attempted abduction by gunmen lead, not to capitulation, but the founding of his iconic Belfast record shop and label Good Vibrations.  

On Resistance Street emphasises the influence of punk in turning large swathes of a generation away from the resurgent far right.   

Strummer’s powerful statement — “We’re anti-fascist, we’re anti-violence, we're anti-racist and we’re pro-creative”— is still often quoted, but few knew at the time how much it meant to him personally as well as politically. Neonazi indoctrination had ruined his older brother’s life, which ended in suicide. 

Strummer had the guts to show warmth and sensitivity as well as cool: equally important — if more shocking to the spitters, mosh-pitters and gleefully outraged press — was his belief that “punk rock means exemplary manners to your fellow human beings.” We must, Strummer insisted,  be better than our class enemies, never sinking to their level — while also never forgetting they WERE the enemy.

Reggae musician Mykaell Riley, now professor of bass culture at Westminster University, speaks brilliantly about the vital multicultural facet of the 1970s “punky reggae party” — young black and white musicians worked together, fought the National Front together, toured together. These were violent times — when Riley and Steel Pulse were approached by gangs of skinheads, it was 50/50 if they wanted an autograph or a fight. 

Steel Pulse’s tour van was once shot at. It took some courage to keep going but lead to a beautiful musical harvest: two-tone and the ska revival all grew from this moment.  

On Resistance Street doesn’t end with punk’s heyday, but brings us right up to date, considering today’s noxious far-right zeitgeist: Trump, Bannon and the alt-right, and the ever-grifting Tommy Robinson. 

All in all, this film is not just an important cultural artefact in itself, which will be used and quoted by academics as well as musicians for years to come — it’s also a passionate rallying cry. It left me cheering, and echoing, Terry Hooley’s heartfelt “Just show me where the barricades are!”
It’s more important than ever that we all stay, and fight, On Resistance Street. 

On Resistance Street’s London premiere screening will be at the Gate Picturehouse Cinema in Notting Hill on Wednesday April 17 2024 at 8.15pm, followed by a Q&A session chaired by Louise Raw with Richard David and Robin Banks, Paul Simmonds of The Men They Couldn’t Hang, Mykaell Riley and Rick Blackman. Tickets will available shortly.

For screening inquiries contact Toby Holdsworth at: www.musicfilmnetwork.com.