Tim Westwood – how should the Left respond?

Tim Westwood is facing allegations by multiple women who claim he misused his position in the music industry to take advantage of them. One woman says he had sex with her when she was 14.

By Robin Carmody

I defended Westwood for as long as I did because I feared that, if he went down, I’d go down with him. 

Like him, I had a traditional upbringing – far more culturally bourgeois, I would suspect, than that of most children of manual workers of my generation, largely because of the culture gap between my mother and my father – but fell in love with Black American music and have remained musically open-minded at a point in life when some people think I am “supposed” to close my ears. 

I sensed in criticism of him, back in the intensely ideological Golden Age of Blogging with its battles of words and ideas framed in far more intellectual terms before the explosion of social media, a sort of convergence between elements of the Left and traditional conservatism or even the far-Right: arguments that he should stick to “his own heritage” so as to give Black presenters a chance – arguments that young people in East Anglia should listen exclusively to what we would then have called the music of George W. Bush’s America.

When the boomers’ parents were still around in significant numbers (this is relevant because one of the arguments made against me to justify double standards only made sense when they were) I would argue with Right-wing boomers (this can still be read on Google’s Usenet archive) who denounced him while praising Tony Blackburn without recognising the similarities (both began on unlicensed stations, fell in love with Black American music, did not speak as they were brought up to speak) and be enraged by their blatant smugness, complacency, denial to my generation of a piece of the cake, a seat at the table, of top-level Britishness.

And there are many areas where I still feel like that.  The Rock Right is still far worse than Peter Hitchens.  I would far rather conservatives mock Paul McCartney as an “edgy iconoclast” – as someone who probably supports all the double standards of the new establishment sarcastically said in mockery of Hitchens’ cultural position – than that they use him, as so many of them do, so as to other an artist like Tremz, who has more in common with the Beatles than Oasis ever did, being a Liverpudlian hybridising Black American musical influence of his own time with a uniquely British vocabulary and set of cultural experiences (what were the Beatles if they weren’t that?). 

While I would not use the word “liberal” as a pejorative as willingly as my old cohort Alex Niven does, I agree with him that there were a lot of culture-war battles hiding beneath the surface of a supposed consensus around London 2012 (shattered, I think, by Savilegate – more of that later) which might have remained a stronger force at the time had Britain’s actual participants not done so well so quickly – I experienced them myself as rock fans relished the new elite’s blatant double standards with the usual smug, drawbridge-raising triumphalism – and I certainly agree with him that the mythos of those Games masked the corruption, the venality, the indifference to mass poverty and suffering, the stripping away of the state and its ability to help those living in those conditions, the complete unawareness of how most of us live (not having had the levelling experiences of the two World Wars that the people in the 1950s and early 1960s governments, for all their faults, had experienced) that characterised the government of that time. Cameron’s was the first and still most blatant Rock Right government, legitimised not by ideals or passions but by Will Young, James Blunt and Keane, compared to whom Oasis might have been the Beatles themselves even if, in all the senses that matter, they so blatantly and jarringly weren’t.

But it is clear now, without a moment’s doubt: Westwood was hiding in plain sight for generations.  His shows were a huge part of my life.  When I was a young fogey, his going national – long before I’d have dreamt of listening to him – a few months after we moved from the London commuter belt to the outer shires, which in the words of that year’s most famous B-side I wanted to be “half the world away”, and now the circumstances of waking up one morning able to hear a whole array of radio shows (not that I’d have touched them then), and going to bed that night unable to hear them seem like a full, complete world away from us – seemed to represent a changing BBC’s eating away at the “unchanging countryside” myth which I then so cherished.

For years upon years, after I had changed and then changed one step further, there was an intense love-hate relationship.  Things happened during those shows which I never want to talk about again, except that they had to happen at the time.  It was, I suppose, a form of accelerationism on my part.  I had aligned myself towards a website which pointed out his use on air of phrases like “let’s slap that bitch”, but then I abandoned it as a relic of the time of Public Enemy, of a conception of hip-hop rapidly coming to seem ancient and lost.  When rules and authority seemed to close on him by the mid-2000s, as the apartheid era of British pop crushed the brightness and internationalism of the beginning of that decade, I sighed in quiet rage.

But now I know that there was large-scale exploitation of women built into those shows, clearly codified and expressed on air: I nod along instinctively, my memory jogged in places where I never thought it would be, when I read the testimonies of those who suffered.  I can clearly remember the things that were said and excused.  And then I think of the fact that, by then, Westwood was writing for The Sun, of his dismissal of mainland Europe as a whole (cleverly alluded to by John Peel in 1996 when he was on before Westwood and ended his show with a German-language hip-hop track, as if to infer that Westwood’s Anglospherism wasn’t as much of a break from Smashie & Nicey as it was being presented as being) …

Having to reassess things I thought I knew puts me in a similar place to those for whom pop would remain on its lowest possible level, and for them only natural level, after the likes of Savile or Paul Gadd were exposed: those revelations were a deep and profound shock because it showed the shadow side of their world, their culture, their way of existence and state of being. 

Think of Mark Edwards in The Sunday Times (The Sun with longer words) in 1995, championing Gadd as a bulwark against the Europeanisation of rock to see how easily this position could become part of the broader Murdochian Europhobia.  And once, I believed the same*. 

But in a different age, when the Blairite Elgarisation of the straight-ahead, non-classical-influenced bands of that time such as Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and Free had combined with a new anxiety over “appropriation” to lift much of the old prog stigma, people who viewed James Brown and King Crimson alike with deep suspicion – too Black, too clever, it was all the same for them – responded to Savilegate and what followed with deep retrenchment and inability to respond to or cope with what was right in front of them: to this day, they still fester on certain anorak fora, they still deny those people’s crimes.  I myself, to my eternal shame, thought William Mayne might have been stitched up in 2004 because the atmosphere and national/regional feeling in his work was viewed with suspicion by an elite controlled, I fear I thought at the time, by “Zionists”.  I know how this sort of thing can happen, and if there’s one group of people I’m determined never to become like, it’s the people who close ranks and deny whenever their cultural safety is threatened.

How could these things have happened so comparatively recently?  Admittedly, it was mostly before the great reckoning that began with Savilegate, the next “big” tenth anniversary the nation will face once we’re through the reckoning for the London Olympics and their lack of legacy (which was clear almost immediately after they had finished).  But the new establishment’s inability to get to grips with hip-hop and its offshoots in the way they have got to grips with rock and whiter forms of pop may have played a significant role here.  Certainly, the arguments often used by people like me against Blairite soft-left types – that the way they talk about hip-hop is like still seeing rock’n’roll as scary in 1999, and so on – is a cliché among people like me for a very good reason.  Some of the comments I’m hearing – that there was an “unprofessional” atmosphere surrounding Westwood’s show, that there was a “sexist boys’ club culture” at Radio 1 – seem more redolent of the pre-Bannister station, when the idea of taking the station seriously had yet to be reconciled with public service broadcasting as understood at the top of the BBC.

And while I’ll maintain that Chris Moyles was every bit as strong a perpetrator of a “sexist boys’ club culture” at the station in the 2000s, there’s a definite sense that the establishment, as manifested in senior BBC management, still found the music Westwood was playing beneath them as they had once felt (but no longer did by that time), about all pop and rock music, even the stuff Savile played on Sunday lunchtimes.  That maybe someone at Radio 2, already much changed by that time, or someone in the early years of 6Music, or someone playing landfill “indie” on Radio 1 when the BBC shamelessly responded to Blairite pressure to push it at the expense of Black British music and Eurodance, would have been found out as nobody on the pop side of the BBC could have been in the 1970s and 1980s, but Westwood still couldn’t be.

And yes, I’ll admit, I didn’t want to admit that the music of “good America”, i.e. what we would soon to come to think of as “Obama’s America”, could have such a shadow side, could legitimise this sort of objectification and exploitation.  It was there, so clearly and blatantly, but I did play the “not as bad” card because I didn’t want to seem like a stereotypical Guardianista, only loving hip-hop if they could control it.  I didn’t want to think it could contain elements which were no more progressive than the music of “bad America” which I had been told that Westwood and people in my position should listen to – what we would then have thought of, as I mentioned above, as the America that had created the Iraq war, and what we would now think of as the America (of Trump) that threatened to abandon Ukraine and, at the same time, mobilised actual Nazis (the ‘Proud Boys’ and ‘Oath Keepers’).

Back then, it was still considered acceptable for a working men’s club near me to display the Confederate flag while promoting its country nights, and having been radicalised by the blatant injustices of Florida 2000 and all they led to, and by seeing artists Westwood played burning the Confederate flag in Brooklyn, and reading about the outrageous racism of the Florida police so often glossed up by other parts of the mass entertainment industry, I did have some difficult and tense arguments with my parents on the matter.  But I would have done well to think to myself that those of a similar cultural grounding to myself – English Christianity and Radio 4 and all that – who took from “good America” might not, universally, have been any morally better than the people who went to those country nights were. 

I was, in 2003 and early 2004 at least, so in hock to “good America” against “bad America”, especially with regard to the growth of Southern hip-hop, its rage heightened by being so much closer geographically to the heartlands of the latter, that I assumed anyone who had embraced the former simply could never do wrong.  I did, I suppose, make a similar mistake to those in authority who could have done more to stop some of the grooming gangs than they did, or those on some parts of the Left who cannot even condemn FGM.  I have learnt many things since.

But for every Westwood, not only are there many of the presenters who did grow up in the music’s heartlands, knew it instinctively from early childhood, who have come through at the BBC in recent times and must be defended against those on the Right who would push the BBC into a sort of permanent 1953, there is also a David Rodigan, someone who should have been on national public radio (small letters throughout) decades before he actually was, and who represents a model for people like me of how to address and come to terms with our loves and passions, every bit as much as Westwood represents an anti-model, how easily it can go wrong.  I utterly refute the notion that everyone who came into the music from “outside”, so to speak, is a potential abuser or predator or exploiter.  There are too many good people like me, I know, for anything like that to be true.

And certainly, people brought up with my background who don’t “know our place” as defined by both the far-Left and the far-Right, white and Black extremists and fundamentalists alike, should no more be damned by association with Westwood than those of us who support public ownership of railways, and feel betrayed by what Starmer has recently done, should be considered potential child molesters simply because Savile used to advertise the (then) British Rail.  That would simply be an extension of Neil Clark‘s belief that the social movements of the previous twenty years – presumably opposition to racism, sexism, homophobia &c – which the young, socialist Keir Starmer wanted to bring into a rejuvenated, reborn Labour Party in 1986 represent evil, divisive “identity politics”.

However terrible Westwood’s actions have been, the Red-Browners — who are clearly relishing this moment for all the wrong reasons and who would, if it were someone they felt culturally comfortable with, have been utterly indifferent to the sexual exploitation of young Black women — are no better, for Labour, for the working class or for Britain.

*The Sunday Times championing Paul Gadd did so in 1995 as a bulwark against the Europeanisation of rock in the early-mid 1970s: some readers might not be aware that the paper’s Europhobia on all fronts is specific to its post-1981 ownership, and that in 1973 it supported the Europeanisation of rock through Derek Jewell’s contributions.