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13th December 2006Jerry Dammers hits against racism
Jerry Dammers was the founder and keyboard player of the Coventry-based ska band, The Specials (later changed to The Special A.K.A.). He also contributed in founding the 2 Tone record label, which helped to popularize the new ska sound in the 1980s. He became a noted anti-apartheid campaigner, writing the song "Free Nelson Mandela" about the jailed South African ANC leader; plus organizing the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute concert, which was broadcast worldwide from London's Wembley Stadium, on June 11, 1988. That same year, he briefly played with Madness on their single "I Pronounce You" and its attendant album.
This concert was both a birthday celebration and perhaps the biggest protest for an imprisoned person to date. 72,000 people were at Wembley Stadium and more than 600 million television viewers from 60 countries watched the broadcast, placing it alongside Live Aid as the most successful televised musical events of the 1980s.
For more information on Love Music Hate Racism and how to get involved, check www.lovemusichateracism.com. More information on this story is available here More information on Nelson Mandela, check here. 
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The
highly respected anti-racist song writer/musician and DJ Jerry Dammers
was in Glasgow on Tuesday to provide a DJ set at the Madness concert in
the SECC. Dammers stopped by the SRTRC offices to lend his support for
the campaign and to ask for Scottish bands, DJs and promoters to get involved
with Love Music Hate Racism by putting on anti-racist concerts in their
home towns.
The
Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute was a concert event held on June
11, 1988 at the Wembley Stadium, London. It is also known as Freedomfest,
Free Nelson Mandela Concert, or Mandela Day.
The
origins of the concert dated back two years, to 1986, with the formation
in Britain of Artists Against Apartheid. The organisers, Jerry Dammers
and Dali Tambo, invited a host of artists to take part in a Freedom Festival
on Clapham Common, in London. The march to Clapham Common before the concert
was supported by 100,000 people representing almost all sections of British
society. At the height of the afternoon, 250,000 were gathered on the
Common to listen to the artists express their solidarity with the people
of Namibia and South Africa through their words and music, and to hear
the representatives of the ANC, of SWAPO and of the British Anti-Apartheid
Movement.
Membership
of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement doubled in little more than a month.
The name of Nelson Mandela is now better known in Britain than those of
many British politicians. The Freedom March, culminating in the demonstration
in London, was warmly received throughout the length of the country. Thousands
of people became actively involved in the struggle for the first time.