The World

Brace yourself for the wave of 1968 nostalgia that will hit us next month – the anniversary of the May events in Paris. All those soixante-huitards will be strutting their stuff in the papers. Who knows Le Monde may even consent to start publishing again?

Well I’m not a soixante-huitard – more like a soixante-dix huitard. And I’m pleased to see that we 1978ers are also getting our small moment of nostalgic glory. This weekend they are re-staging the famous (well, quite famous) “Rock Against Racism” concert that took place in Victoria Park in Hackney in 1978. There was a big article last weekend in the Observer about the original concert.

I finally managed to impress my daughter by informing her that I had been at the original concert back in 1978. She is 14 – the same age as I was in 1978 - and is planning to go to the re-union concert this weekend. (I have been forbidden from coming along, even though I would quite like to.)

This weekend’s concert is much more of a production than the original event in 1978. Back then, there was only one stage – and no tickets. On Saturday, there will be three stages, security checks, tickets etc. But some of the same bands are appearing – The Tom Robinson Band, Polly Styrene; bits of The Clash. (Joe Strummer will not be playing, on account of being dead.)

The mythology around the original concert is that Britain was in the grip of a wave of racism – and that the concert mobilised the young against nascent fascism. I can’t say that I really noticed the racist wave of 1978 in Britain – although I suppose my parents were immigrants from South Africa, so these things are all relative.

Still, I do think that 1978 marked a turning point of sorts. Britain had a kind of raw, depressed, crumbling feeling back then. The following year, Margaret Thatcher was elected and things began to change. I think the Britain of 2008 is recognisably the same country as the one that Thatcher moulded and governed. But the seventies really were a different era.