Supporting Spartacus and Sukuya

updated 24 Dec 2018 - venue pics and info
updated 22 January 2022 - added large poster

in aid of the Notting Hill Carnival defendants

The Clash were due to play and were advertised in aid of the Notting Hill Carnival defendants. Bernard Rhodes recenty sold a poster from the gig. The International Times reports the band as being there but not having played.

"The Clash didn’t actually play, though they were at the gig"

Online or archived PDF

Wilf Walker’s punky reggae party at Acklam Hall began on October 15 with the Black Defence Committee Notting Hill branch benefit ‘in aid of Carnival defendants’; featuring Spartacus R (from the disco group Osibisa who had a hit earlier in the year with ‘Sunshine Day’), the Sukuya steel band, and ‘Clash’ who were billed (with no ‘The’) but didn’t actually play, though they were at the gig.

A vintage poster from the Clash benefit gig in support of the Carnival Defendants

Link

A vintage poster from the Clash benefit gig in support of the Carnival Defendants on the 15th of October 1976, at the Acklam Hall in Ladbroke Grove, London. It belongs to Bernie Rhodes & is for auction at Bonhams Auction.

The Bernard Rhodes Collection.

Bernard Rhodes comments: "This is an extremely rare mid-1970s' poster (possibly the only one remaining), as relevant today as when printed. It documents The Clash contributing towards defending black peoples' basic rights. On a lighter note, the main policeman looks like an angry Paul McCartney!"

Poster - Acklam Hall, Benefit Carnival

NOTTING HILL CARNIVAL RIOTS
1976 Carnival Police Clash

Link or archived PDF

In 1976, as Darcus Howe’s militant Carnival committee and the Golborne 100 group (led by George Clark, the 1967 Summer Project saint-turned-anti-Carnival sinner) joined the fray, as well as the Clash there were 1,500 white men in uniform in Notting Hill. In the Armagideon Times fanzine ‘Story of the Clash’, Joe Strummer recalled getting caught up in the first incident under the Westway. After a group of ‘blue helmets sticking up like a conga line’ went through the crowd, one was hit by a can, immediately followed by a hail of cans:

‘The crowd drew back suddenly and the Notting Hill riot of 1976 was sparked. We were thrown back, women and children too, against a fence which sagged back dangerously over a drop.

I can clearly see Bernie Rhodes, even now, frozen at the centre of a massive painting by Rabelais or Michelangelo… as around him a full riot breaks out and 200 screaming people running in every direction. The screaming started it all. Those fat black ladies started screaming the minute it broke out, soon there was fighting 10 blocks in every direction.’ Joe later recalled failing to set a car alight with a box of matches along Thorpe Close.

Don Letts 'blackmarketclash' photo

Meanwhile on Portobello Road, Don Letts (the future Clash associate film director) was walking into pop history towards Acklam Road – passing the Black People’s Information Centre sound-system/disco unit, hippies looking out of the upstairs windows of numbers 305 to 9, and a line of policemen – as Rocco Macaulay began taking his famous series of pictures of the next charge. Macaulay’s shot of police reaching the Westway, where the black youths had gathered (now the Portobello Green arcade) duly became the back cover of ‘The Clash’ album and the ‘White Riot’ tour backdrop projection. Don Letts’ Wild West 10 walk first appeared on the sleeve of the ‘Black Market Clash’ mini-LP in 1980.

As the riot raged under the Westway, alongside hoardings sprayed with ‘Same thing day after day – Tube – Work… How much more can you take’, with the youths being driven up Tavistock Road towards All Saints Road, in what could be an apocryphal report a drunk staggered between the police and youth lines, causing hostilities to temporarily cease until he stumbled off over a wall. Later that night, Joe Strummer, Paul Simonon and Sid Vicious were warned off by a black woman when they attempted to enter the West Indian Metro youth club on Tavistock Road.

Don Letts - famous photo

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Tabloid papers

The Sun’s ‘Carnival of Terror’ feature included the Sun ‘man on the spot’ reporting on ‘How I was kicked at Black Disco’ – Acklam Hall under the Westway (on the site of 12 Acklam Road/Neighbourhood nightclub). The reggae promoter Wilf Walker remembers Acklam Road in ’76 as a spiritual awakening of black Britain: “It was incredible in those days to be in a sea of black faces. As a black person, that kind of solidarity we don’t experience anymore… We described it as a demo of solidarity and peace within the black community. I can’t imagine what it would have been like for white people… ’76 showed the strength of feeling, reggae was raging in those days, young blacks weren’t into being happy natives, putting on a silly costume and dancing in the street, in the same street where we were getting done for sus every day.”

Carnival Defence Committee

Wilf Walker’s Acklam Hall punky reggae party began with a Black Defence Committee benefit ‘in aid of Carnival defendants’; featuring Spartacus R (from Osibisa), the Sukuya steel band, and ‘Clash’ were billed (with no ‘The’) but didn’t actually play. As Joe Strummer told the NME, “It wasn’t our riot, though we felt like one.” Although the Clash already existed, it can be argued that they were a pop culture echo of the 1976 riot, like Absolute Beginners was of 1958.

Marcus Gray calls it ‘the catalyst that brought to the surface a lot of disparate elements already present’ in the group. Not least, they got into reggae, feeding dub effects, ‘heavy manners’ stencil graffiti and the apocalyptic Rasta rhetoric into the mix.

The NME reggae buff Penny Reel cites the Dennis Brown tracks ‘Wolf and Leopard’, ‘Whip them Jah’ and ‘Have No Fear’ as portents of ‘War inna Babylon’, played by Lloyd Coxsone under the Westway and Observer Hi-fi on Kensington Park Road (outside the newly opened original Rough Trade shop) in ’76. In the reggae riot response, the Pioneers lamented the ‘Riot in Notting Hill’ on Trojan, the Trenchtown label came up with ‘Police Try Fe Mash Up Jah Jah Children’ by Mike Durane, and the Morpheus label had their own militant take on ‘Police and Thieves’, ‘Police and Youth in the Grove’/‘Babylon A Button Ladbroke Dub’ by Have Sound Will Travel (promoted with a punky riot headline flyer). Aswad had already recorded ‘Three Babylon’ (‘Three Babylon tried to make I and I run, they come to have fun with their long truncheons’) about a police incident under the Westway before the ’76 riot.

Poster

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