Jerry Dammers

How did you get involved in fighting for the freedom of people in another part of the world?

I got involved through Peter Hain's 1969–1970 campaign against the Springboks rugby tour. I was about fifteen, and I wanted to get some of my school friends to go to this demo, so I stuck little printed stickers around the school. In the end, three of us took part. Before that, I was aware of the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and I was against apartheid, but I hadn't been involved in demos.

In the sixties music was very political. There was the Vietnam War, Bob Dylan and all those artists. The music was partly how I got involved in left-wing politics. After The Specials, who did "Ghost Town" and then went their separate ways, I carried the band on with different people, under the name Special AKA.

I was also writing, and I'd written a little instrumental tune on the piano. I was messing about with it in the street when I met an old school friend who I hadn't seen for years. Maybe he remembered I'd campaigned against apartheid at school, because he said, 'Did you know there's a sixty-fifth anniversary birthday concert about Nelson Mandela at Alexandra Palace in North London?'

I'd never heard of Nelson Mandela at the time, but I thought, 'Okay, I'll go along'. The concert was organized by Julian Bahula, a South African exiled musician living in London who had written a song about Mandela, and there were various people performing, including Hugh Masekela.

After the concert, I went home and turned to this music I'd been writing, which was vaguely African sounding. I put words to it based on what I'd learned about Mandela at the concert. It was like Julian Bahula was passing the message onto me, and then I was in a position to pass it onto more people in this country. It was musician to musician; artist to artist.

That's how I organized British Artists Againt Apartheid. It was purely artists against apartheid, artist to artist. Musicians have an understanding between them. When other people get involved, it becomes more difficult. When Dali Tambo asked me to organize British Artists Against Apartheid after "Free Nelson Mandela" had become a hit, I was able to approach other artists who knew about me and trusted me because of that song. Maybe I was able to influence them to get involved, more easily than a political activist could have.

That day at Clapham Common is the proudest day of my life. It was incredible. There were 250,000 people there. I don't think I'd ever seen a crowd that big from the stage, and it was a very mixed Black and white crowd. It wasn't elitist in any way. It felt really powerful, like something was changing – and it was. We were on the cusp of a change that was coming. The prime minister at the time, Margaret Thatcher, couldn't ignore the size of it and the popularity of the cause. Even a politician like her had to change her attitude, because she could see there were votes in it.

How did it make you feel knowing you had played a role in that?

I was very proud of my contribution, but it's important to realize that the music and what I did is tiny compared with the struggle of people inside South Africa and people who died. What people like me did is nothing, really. I've always said that struggles like that are like clockwork; the biggest cogs and the smallest cogs are equally important. Anybody who tries to do anything to support the cause is just as important as people that history regards as having made an important contribution. Nelson Mandela said, 'Any attempt to support our struggle is welcome'. That's the crucial thing: an attempt.

One thing I sometimes cite is the power of music. If you watch Woodstock when Country Joe and the Fish sing their song about Vietnam and you see 300,000 people stand up and applaud, you can actually see it happening. If anyone in that crowd wasn't against the Vietnam War, by the end of the song they were. What music does is consolidate an idea and bring people together. There wouldn't have been a person in the whole of Woodstock who stayed sitting down for that song. It was an illustration of politics and music.

I'd like to give credit to all those artists who supported the cause when they didn't have to, and who went on to Wembley Stadium. After Dali Tambo asked me to organize British Artists Against Apartheid, we did a series of concerts with the Pogues, Elvis Costello, Salif Keita, Billy Bragg, Madness, Working Week, New Order, the Communards, Terrence Trent Derby, the Smiths, Lloyd Cole, Smiley Culture.

Then we did a massive free concert on Clapham Common, which was also an anti-apartheid demonstration. Peter Gabriel, Hugh Masekela, Big Audio Dynamite, the Style Council, Sting, Sade, Billy Bragg again, Gary Camp, "Free Nelson Mandela", Tony Blackburn. Tony Blackburn was on Radio London doing the Soul Show in the mornings, and he plugged that concert every day for months. If one person involved the Black community on that day more than anybody else, it was Tony Blackburn. It was a really mixed crowd on the day, which was down to Tony Blackburn to a certain extent.