Walls Come Tumbling Down by Daniel Rachel

Walls Come Tumbling Down charts the formation of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge across two decades where artists and activists joined forces to make music that challenged the inequality around them. Written histories, even the most open-minded and widely-researched, have a natural inclination towards master narratives. They take the complexity and conflict of their given period and smooth it all down into a single, unambiguous storyline. Daniel Rachel’s book rebels against this by telling its tale solely through the testimony of those who were there: drawn from over a hundred interviews with artists, activists and politicians, every word comes straight from the frontlines.

The result is a book that feels more like a documentary film, shot from the middle of the crowd rather than the vantage point of a distanced observer. Punk fought Thatcherism while struggling to deal with its own hard right appeal, reggae stood up to racism while awkwardly holding on to Rastafarian misogyny, rock stars sang anthems against discrimination without acknowledging the prevalent sexism within their own industry. These struggles were never clean cut battles but chaotic melées fought more with good intentions than any master plan and Rachel’s polyphonic style perfectly captures the fragmented, discordant nature of history as it's really lived.

Walls Come Tumbling Down takes moments that have been elevated into pop cultural mythos and drags them back down to street level. [Ross McIndoe]