Sounds Like London

by Lloyd Bradley

  ‘… Manchester, Manchester United

  A bunch of bouncing Busby Babes

  They deserve to be knighted …’

  In recent seasons, Connor’s original recording has been spun before home games at Old Trafford, and taken up by the crowd as a chant.

  ‘CALYPSO’ COMES FROM THE WORD ‘KAISO’, an exclamation of encouragement in the Hausa language, widely spoken in West Africa. Pronounced kye-ee-soh, it meant ‘Go on! Continue!’ Plantation slaves, who were forbidden to speak to each other in the fields and thus communicated by singing, would shout it to each other as mutual support. The rhythms of many African songs are comparable with basic calypso, and were homogenised into a single form in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, adopting a few Europeanisms and instruments along the way. Jamaican mento, which retains the most original instrumentation, remains the closest to what originally came over. Kaiso-based music was prevalent throughout the West Indies, but became known as calypso in Trinidad because, so legend has it, Europeans on that island wouldn’t make the effort to pronounce the word properly.

  Developing a strong narrative bent among the slaves, who used it to mock slave masters, comment on everyday life, tell tall tales and have some bawdy fun, kaiso evolved into the combination of satire, protest, innuendo, social commentary and observational comedy we know today. The sharpest calypsonians were contemporary griots, as influential as they were informative. Champions of the underclass, they frequently took the colonial government to task, and criticised the social invasion that accompanied the setting up of American bases on Trinidad during the war. Inevitably the authorities responded: songs were banned, and singers prevented from performing. Despite being exclusively based in New York, the calypso recording industry found itself officially censored – producers at the American record companies had to submit their recordings of Trinidadian singers to British government officials on the island who would – or, as was mostly the case, would not – sanction their release. Contentious titles included “The Censoring Of Calypso Makes Us Glad” – a hilarious piece of sarcasm by Lord Executor that was, of course, banned. In the face of such harassment, many singers opted for life in the UK.

  BY THE TIME THE WINDRUSH DOCKED, calypso was popular enough in London to offer all sorts of opportunities. For Kitch and Beginner, it was more a case of how soon would a gig find them than how soon would they find a gig. They were celebrated artists all over the Caribbean, who were happy to front an orchestra playing big-band arrangements, but could also hold their own interacting with boisterous audiences in small clubs, backed by local players, or accompany themselves on guitar on a variety bill in music halls or between orchestra sets in a ballroom. It was not unusual for a star of Kitch’s calibre to dash around the West End playing sets in three or four clubs in a signle night.

  One much-told story tells that, days after landing in England and in search of a gig, Kitch began to perform solo in a London pub, where the customers were so outraged that their noisy protests almost reduced him to tears. Supposedly, the disgruntled drinkers’ problem lay in the fact that they ‘couldn’t understand a fucking word’ of the songs. The story continues that Kitch had to risk similar humiliation in several other pubs before anybody would take any notice. While this may or may not be an urban myth, it sounds highly unlikely. Kitch arrived as a big star and didn’t need to scratch around looking for work; it’s unlikely any pub landlord without a reasonably sized West Indian clientele would have let him through the door, let alone put him on stage; and what makes a good calypsonian great is his diction and very correct use of English.

  The real problem with this tale is that it crops up time and time again, and is taken to represent the truth. As such it has come to define the relationship between London and the Windrush generation of West Indian arrivals. It depicts Lord Kitchener as some exotic alien, plaintively trying to impress a host who was going to bully him for a while before reluctantly accepting that he might have something of some small value. It epitomises the idea that West Indian immigrants were in London under sufferance, had precious little sense of self worth, and existed only in relation to white English people. That might explain why it gets repeated so often, yet questioned so rarely.

  The reality was that, to a large degree, Londoners didn’t know what to expect from the new arrivals or what to do with them. West Indians who endured that period speak of attitudes that varied between openly welcome, outright hostile and completely indifferent in pretty much equal measure. In the years during and immediately after the war, native Londoners made very little attempt to engage with the new arrivals. That wasn’t simply a matter of racism, although there was no shortage of that. It was more the case that the city, being naturally insular, was still recovering from the Luftwaffe onslaught and the wider implications of being at war. West Indians contributed to this lack of engagement, too. Few believed that they needed to instigate any kind of relationship with the host country, as they didn’t think they’d be here very long – maybe five years, certainly no more than ten. The worker recruitment drives across the Caribbean – London Transport in Barbados, British Rail in Jamaica, and the newly formed NHS everywhere – sold the adventure on the notion of rebuilding the Mother Country after the war, and then, job done, going home with pockets bulging with cash. Although it was rare for anybody to go home quickly, the dream was so cherished that among this generation the notion of a black British identity didn’t even begin to form. Their emotions buoyed by the Independence Fever that washed through the Caribbean from the late 1950s onwards, Jamaicans saw themselves as Jamaicans, Kitticians as Kitticians, and so forth. That said, it’s important to remember that while such nationalism promoted a certain amount of inter-island antagonism, and different nationalities tended to live and primarily socialise among their fellow countrymen, everyone was aware that they all had much more in common than they did keeping them apart. After all, it wasn’t as though most Londoners cared whether you were a Grenadian, a St Lucian or a Dominican; generally all that registered was a black face and an unfamiliar accent.

  Lord Kitchener, seen here with a double bass, was an accomplished musician as well as a singer.

  In such an environment, calypso was massively important to the new arrivals, who felt an understandable sense of disconnect with the West Indies they’d left behind. Hearing a new song was like getting a letter from home. It didn’t even matter that ‘home’ would always be Trinidad, the fact that it was Caribbean tended to override inter-island rivalries. Calypso’s traditions of wordplay and story-telling were embedded all over the West Indies, so a house party that spun calypso records, or a pub featuring a lyrically clever singer, would put you back in touch with who you were.

  Almost exclusively experienced live – what records were available were imported from Trinidad, which had an established music industry – calypso functioned much like kaiso, secretly mocking those in power. The sharper wordsmiths would comment on London life and London people with in-jokes and slang that kept things pretty much closed off from anyone apart from themselves and their own crowds. The music owed its popularity to more than just its amusement value; it played a vital role in retaining a keen sense of self in difficult times. Immigrants performing for immigrants, the original London calypso singers would appear as support acts in venues like the Paramount, while also headlining in smaller West Indian clubs and turning up during popular Friday night and Sunday lunchtime sessions in such pubs as the Queens in Brixton or the Colherne in Earls Court. While every bit as exciting and ad hoc as you might find in Port of Spain, however, this was pretty much the original Caribbean form frozen in aspic with very little evolution. Ironically, that lack of reinvention became increasingly significant, as more and more West Indians came to accept that they weren’t going home for anything longer than a visit, and such snapshots from the islands meant so much more.

  AS THE 1950s ROLLED AROUND, the big-time London music business began to take calypso seriously. Recording calypso
in London was nothing particularly new; as far back as the 1930s, Decca and Regal Zonophone had cut sides by the likes of Sam Manning, Lionel Belasco and Rudolph Dunbar. These were for export only, however, and treated as novelties by the domestic operations. From 1935 onwards, Decca UK tried to release calypso recorded in New York by its American division, but even stars like Attila the Hun, Roaring Lion and Growling Tiger failed to ignite sales. Releases were discontinued in 1937, and all titles deleted in 1940.

  By the time the Windrush arrived, most calypso recording was happening on a below-the-radar scene, which put Kitch and Beginner in the studio almost as soon as they arrived. Both cut tunes for London’s most successful calypso label, Hummingbird Records, run by expat Trinidadian businessman Renco Simmons (Trinidad is also known as ‘the Land of the Hummingbird’). Simmons would hire RG Jones’ studio in south London and record well-known calypsonians who were either living in London or passing through. He’d then get records pressed in London primarily for export to Trinidad, with supplementary sales in the capital. Back home, he retailed his records through Hylton Rhyner’s, a chain of tailor’s shops that also sold calypso records (there’s still a Rhyner’s Records in Port of Spain). In London he’d place them in the network of black-owned grocers, cafes and barbers, which had been beyond Decca’s distribution arm.

  While this enhanced reputations in Trinidad, and catered to West Indian London, it had no wider impact. That all changed when Denis Preston, a suave, charismatic hipster who had been on the London jazz scene since the early 1940s, discovered calypso. Preston, who briefly dubbed himself Saint Denis, was a contributor to Jazz Music magazine and an announcer on the BBC’s Radio Rhythm Club. He was also a groundbreaking independent music producer and a savvy record businessman. It was Preston who pioneered the model of recording artists at his own expense and then leasing the results to record companies. He also hired the fledgling Joe Meek as his engineer, and built Lansdowne Studios in Ladbroke Grove in 1957.

  Preston happened on calypso in 1946, when, as jazz editor of Musical Express – today’s NME, just after it dropped the words ‘Accordion Times &’ and before it added ‘New’ – he was promoting a ragtime concert in London at which Freddie Grant & His West Indian Calypsonians were halfway down the bill. Three years later, when working for Decca in New York, he came across the music again as a favourite of the dance bands in Harlem clubs. Seriously impressed, he convinced EMI’s Parlophone Records on his return to Blighty to get into the calypso business, and took Kitch and Beginner into the company’s prestigious Abbey Road studios early in 1950.

  As an independent recording supervisor – the term ‘producer’ was not yet in use – Preston was not obliged to use the in-house musicians, so he backed each singer with a Cyril Blake group. Astute enough to realise that these artists understood the genre better than he did, and enough of a jazz fan to respect musicianship, he simply let them get on with it, and sat back digging the crazy sounds. Preston’s calypso sessions during the next few years faithfully reproduced the sounds of the capital’s nightclubs and black ballrooms – big- and small-band arrangements; usually percussion-heavy and Latin-jazz-based; mostly liltingly sophisticated, sometimes disarmingly rustic, yet always beautifully sung. His intelligent and deferential approach succeeded on several levels.

  Requirements in the Caribbean were little different from those of expats in London, so these high-quality recordings – featuring stars like Bill Rogers and Roaring Lion as well as Kitch and Beginner, often performing songs that had been previously recorded elsewhere, and spared modification by mainstream record companies, went down very well in the West Indies. The subject matter, too, remained traditional with such bawdy lyrics as Roaring Lion’s “Ugly Woman”:

  ‘If you want to be happy and live a king’s life

  Never make a pretty woman your wife …

  From a logical point of view

  Always have a woman uglier than you …’ or “Tick! Tick! (The Story of the Lost Watch)” – a hilariously ludicrous story of a woman who steals a watch and hides it in her vagina:

  ‘What a confusion

  A fellow lost his watch in the railway station

  A girl named Imelda was suspected of being the burglar

  She had no purse, no pockets in her clothes

  Where she had this watch hidden, goodness knows …’

  While satisfying EMI’s primary objective, to compete with US companies selling calypso records in the Caribbean, these recordings simultaneously had the edge over the imports in the London market, as the singers referenced their new home. On “The Underground Train”, Lord Kitchener sang of the perils of getting distracted on the Tube:

  ‘Never me again, to get back on the underground train

  I jump in the train, sit down on a seat relaxing mi brain

  I started to admire a young lady’s face

  Through the admiration I passed the place

  To tell you the truth I was in a mush

  When I find myself at Shepherds Bush …’

  Meanwhile Beginner’s commentary on the 1950 election result, “General Election”, came complete with a stylistic explanation as an introduction:

  ‘Me, Lord Beginner, make this calypso in the style of the old minor calypso which we sing in Trinidad since many years.’

  At much the same time, EMI chanced upon another lucrative sales opportunity for calypso: the UK mainstream pop market. An audience with no previous interest in calypso – Johnnie Ray, Tony Bennett or Rosemary Clooney was where it was at – had been introduced to it by the dance orchestras, and was now buying it on EMI’s readily accessible gramophone records. Other British record companies raced to add calypso to their release schedules. Not the London version, though, or even the original imported direct from Trinidad; the major labels opted for American calypso, made in America by Americans.

  ASTONISHING AS IT MAY SOUND, calypso – or at least, a strictly white-bread version thereof – was a major force in US popular music of the 1950s. As a mainstream-friendly fad, calypso had been kicked off when Trinidad-stationed US servicemen brought it home after the war. The biggest US pop hit of 1945, the Andrews Sisters’ “Rum & Coca-Cola”, was a plagiarised version of a Trinidadian hit by Lord Invader and Lionel Belasco, from two years earlier. Despite being banned by some radio networks – because it mentioned an alcoholic beverage, not because it’s actually a song about prostitution – the record sold 2.5 million copies.

  In the US, as in the UK, calypso rhythms were taken up by orchestras in ballrooms and on the radio, as part of the trend for South American experimentation. Things consolidated in 1947, when the calypso-powered, big-budget musical Caribbean Carnival became a long-running Broadway success. Into the 1950s, and boosted by the emerging American/Caribbean tourist industry, calypso became a big part of US pop music. Amid widespread disapproval of the new ‘degenerate’ teenage soundtrack of rock’n’roll, many in the music industry wishfully imagined that calypso might prove a serious rival.

  Dozens of calypso records came out in the US during the first half of the decade. High-profile artists – black and white alike, and including Rosemary Clooney, Louis Jordan and Ella Fitzgerald – covered Trinidadian favourites. Nightclubs opted for tropical decor and names like the Calypso Hut or the Island Rooms, while all manner of crooners invested in flowered shirts and frayed straw hats. TV variety shows incorporated calypso-themed numbers as a matter of course, while sitcoms wrote bursts of calypso into scripts. Hollywood too got in on the act, creating low-budget, teen-oriented movies like Bop Girl Goes Calypso, Calypso Joe (starring a young Angie Dickinson) and Calypso Heatwave. The latter featured Maya Angelou – yes, that Maya Angelou – who, prior to her literary calling and social activism, had a career as a calypso singer and dancer. Indeed, she took her stage name because Marguerite Johnson was deemed insufficiently exotic.

  Another improbable pop-calypsonian was the man who would later be addressed as Louis Farrakhan, National Representative of the Na
tion of Islam. Back in the 1950s, while still Louis Eugene Walcott, the Brooklyn-born former child-prodigy violinist turned his musical talent to singing, and recorded six well-received calypso albums under the soubriquet The Charmer. He was no stranger to controversy then, either. His 1953 hit “Is She Is Or Is She Ain’t?” – also released in the UK – told of George Jorgensen Jr, the first sex-change celebrity, who hit the US talk-show circuit after having the surgery in Denmark:

  ‘With this modern surgery

  They changed him from a he to a she

  But behind that lipstick, rouge and paint

  I got to know is she is or is she ain’t? …’

  Almost as remarkable was screen tough-guy Robert Mitchum’s 1957 album Calypso – Is Like So. It’s not noteworthy simply because he made it – everybody was making calypso albums by then – but because Mitchum, an accomplished singer and songwriter, insisted on making genuine, as opposed to watered-down, calypso. He recorded the album in Tobago, where he had discovered the music while filming 1957’s Fire Down Below, co-starring Edric Connor. Mitchum used local musicians, and studied the island’s inflections and colloquialisms to incorporate them into his vocals. Although his album didn’t sell nearly as well as Jamaican American Harry Belafonte’s 1956 Calypso, it remains one of the few US offerings that Caribbean calypsonians respect. Belafonte’s album, incidentally, which included “The Banana Boat Song (Day-O)”, was the world’s first-ever million-selling LP, and represented the peak of American calypso. Hardly surprisingly it began to wane when, later that year, a 21-year-old Elvis Presley appeared on the Milton Berle Show in front of forty million viewers. Suddenly, lilting Caribbean rhythms were no longer quite cutting it with the kids.