‘If you think that the complexion of your face
Can hide you from the negro race
No! You can never get away from the fact
If you not white you considered black …’
Later, on an album entitled Curfew Time, he would include the track “Black Power”.
Not surprisingly, with nosey landladies, troublesome mothers-in-law and bedroom transgressions being the same for everyone, the saucier strand of London calypsos captured a sizeable domestic audience. Such innuendo-laced numbers were not so different from the lewd music-hall comedy that lived on in theatre variety shows, which indeed often featured calypsonians. Calypso had no less enthusiastic a following among the educated elements of Britain’s post-war generation, determined not to make the mistakes of their parents. Evolving out of London’s jazz-loving, anti-establishment bohemians, and latching on to aspects of America’s folk revivalism, a UK protest movement was gathering momentum. As they preached peace and revolution from coffee bars in Soho, Fitzrovia and Notting Hill, it was an easy leap for them to ally with victims of institutionalised racial prejudice, whose singing mocked the establishment and spoke of how hard life was for black folk in the capital. In addition, the apparent spontaneity of small-scale live performances of a singer, his guitar and a witty narrative-led song precisely fit the folk-music criteria – Soho’s very underground, beat generation Club du Faubourg frequently featured calypso singers.
After the war, this influential boho crowd contributed greatly to the cultural reshaping of Britain. Forerunners of the hippies, they thought internationally, concerned themselves with philosophy as much as action, and were fundamentally anti-racist. They were responsible for CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), devising the symbol that’s now known as the peace sign (it’s the letters C, N & D in semaphore). On the anti-nuclear Aldermaston marches, from 1958 onwards, it was more or less obligatory to have a pan-round-the-neck steel band. The movement connected with the wave of Caribbean thinkers, writers and trade unionists who settled in London during the 1950s, a disproportionate number of whom were Trinidadian. Cultural heavyweights and social activists such as CLR James, Sam Selvon, Claudia Jones, John La Rose and VS Naipaul all made strong links with London’s modern intellectuals.
West End aristocrats had long since adopted calypso. too. At toney establishments like the Café Royal, the Embassy Club, and the Hurlingham Club in Chelsea, calypso performers became regulars, and they were also in demand for deb balls and Oxbridge bashes. The music had first made its mark on the royal family, with an incident involving the Duke of Edinburgh and Young Tiger at Mayfair’s Orchid Room. When the singer spotted the future Prince Philip, who was engaged to then-Princess Elizabeth, he substituted the lyrics of “Rum & Coca Cola” with some that discussed upcoming nuptials in a less-than-totally-reverent manner. The horrified club manager apologised from the stage and gave Tiger a thorough dressing-down. The next night, however, a much larger royal party turned up, with one request: ‘Sing it again, man!’ This upper-class audience received another fillip in 1955, when Princess Margaret, the Queen’s nightclubbing younger sister, took a Caribbean cruise. With the princess seeking local entertainment at every port of call, the holiday came to be known as her “Calypso Tour”, while the lagoon at Pigeon Point in Tobago was renamed the Nylon Pool after the stockings she removed to dance barefoot on the sand.
Incidentally, the two ends of London’s calypso audience presented something of a sartorial irony. Players at a West Indian club or suburban ballroom wouldn’t have dreamed of taking the stage in anything less than a suit or a dinner jacket – even in the studio, it would be unusual to even loosen the tie. Yet when they played to high society, they were expected to kit themselves out like beachcombers: flowered shirts, cutoff stripey or white trousers, and straw hats that had clearly been chewed by a donkey.
WITH ALL THIS INTELLECTUAL, Oxbridge-educated and patrician support, calypso soon staked a serious claim on the television side of the BBC. There, as the colonies’ most fully formed musical expression, it was a shoe-in when exotic music and dance was called for. Calypso’s earliest regular showing was on the hour-long, Friday-night variety show, Kaleidoscope, transmitted from London’s Alexandra Palace, from 1946 until 1953. Calypsonians would feature amid the antiques experts on Collectors’ Corner, the Amazing Memory Man and the whodunit drama segment. Set against today’s tightly-formatted TV, such a line-up seems astonishing, but in the 1940s and 1950s Britain still had a flourishing music-hall circuit where practically anything went, and on TV, ‘variety’ meant exactly that.
In 1950, Trinidadian dancer and choreographer Boscoe Holder had his calypso music and dance extravaganza, Bal Creole, screened not once but twice, in June and August. All TV was live back then, so it couldn’t be repeated, and was performed again. Similarly, the Caribbean Cabaret series featured Holder and his wife Sheila Clarke; lords Kitchener and Beginner; Edric Connor; steel bands; and all manner of London’s West Indian musicians. There were also specials, loaded with Britain’s black talent, like It’s Fun To Dance, We Got Rhythm and Bongo, in 1951, 1955 and 1958 respectively, the last of which was produced by former Sadler’s Wells ballerina Margaret Dale.
In 1957, the Beeb screened the second series of The Winifred Atwell Show after outbidding ITV who had broadcast the first ten episodes of the variety series. Trinidadian Atwell had arrived in London in 1946 to study classical piano at the Royal Academy of Music, where she became the first woman to gain that establishment’s highest grading. At the same time, she became one of the brightest stars of the capital’s concert hall circuit as she supported herself by playing ragtime jazz and boogie-woogie. Such was the success of what began as a sideline, she became the first black artist to have a number one hit and sell a million records in the UK; and she remains the only female instrumentalist to have topped the UK singles charts (with “Let’s Have A Party” in 1954). Atwell’s playing will be familiar to British snooker fans of a certain age, as it’s her recording of “Black and White Rag” that was the theme tune for BBC TV’s long-running snooker show Pot Black. She made a follow-up series for the BBC, then took the show to Australia where it was broadcast during 1960 and 1961.
Another early instance of the Beeb’s commitment to multiculturalism came when Young Tiger was broadcast singing his celebratory calypso “I Was There (At The Coronation)”, on the very evening of the event. The speed with which the song went on air saw it lauded by the broadcasters as the perfect example of the calypsonian’s art of improvisation. It didn’t seem to occur to anybody that, as with Kitch’s Tilbury performance, the song had been written in advance – three weeks previously, when Tiger read newspaper reports of the coach’s route, and what Her Majesty what be wearing. How else could Parlophone have had copies in the shops the next day?
WHEN CALYPSO MADE ITS MOST significant impact in the UK, the man responsible was Cy Grant. He had come to England from British Guyana when he joined the RAF in 1941, and served in a bomber crew during the war. After his plane was shot down, he spent two years in a POW camp, classified by the Nazis as ‘of indeterminate race’. He qualified as a barrister on demob, but found employment opportunities limited in London’s institutionally racist legal system. Driven by a fierce sense of social justice, he took acting and singing lessons, and set out to use the performing arts to promote attitude change.
In the wake of immediate success on the folk-singing circuit and regular acting work on TV and stage, Grant was given a television chat show on ATV in 1956. Hosting For Members Only, he’d intersperse his interviews of newsworthy figures with singing and playing the guitar. Grant’s quick intelligence, drama-school diction and rich baritone got him noticed by Tonight, a daily, early-evening BBC show that covered current affairs in an ultra-relaxed fashion – the first flowerings of television satire. Grant was signed up to sing the day’s news highlights as a calypso composed that afternoon, with lyrics co-written by the incisively witty political journalist Bern
ard Levin. These clever, cutting, frequently hilarious songs returned calypso to its slave master-mocking kaiso roots, and it became the accepted language of musical satire.
Cy Grant provided the voice for Captain Scarlet’s Lieutenant Green. Yes, Green was black all along.
A huge hit, this was also the first time a black person had appeared regularly on national television (For Members Only was only shown in a couple of ITV regions). Grant stayed for two years, before quitting in case people thought it was all he could do. In the 1960s Grant scored another first for a black actor, as the voice of Lieutenant Green in the puppet drama Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons.
As satire grew better established, and comedy ever more biting, it became almost unthinkable not to include a humorously scathing calypso in the mix. The most vividly remembered example formed part of the BBC’s That Was The Week That Was in 1964, which was groundbreaking in its merciless lampooning of political and establishment figures. No one on the programme cared if technicians or studio equipment came into shot, and as the night’s final broadcast it was open-ended, continuing until the team decided to stop. Keith Waterhouse, John Bird, Peter Cook, Dennis Potter, Bill Oddie, Kenneth Tynan, John Betjeman and several future Pythons were on the TW3 team – and so too was Lance Percival. A middle-class white lad from Kent, Percival had spent the mid-1950s in Canada, where he’d achieved fame singing calypsos as Lord Lance – laid-back calypso-style (flowered shirt and stuff) from the neck down, monocle and top hat above. His actual performance was far more conventional, his singing was top class, and Trinidadian calypsonians still talk with reverence about his lyrical talents. Percival’s role on TW3 was to take suggestions shouted from the audience, usually concerning current events, and make up and sing a calypso.
The segment was a major success, and he continued to supplement his career as a comedy actor by singing calypso in cabaret and on TV. In 1965 he notched up the biggest hit by a British calypsonian, when his version of “Shame And Scandal In The Family” reached number 37 in the charts. When Tonight and TW3 were giving calypso its largest British audience, however, the music had for around half a decade ceased to count as a pop style. That wasn’t anything to do with calypso itself, more the environment in which it found itself. By the end of the 1950s, rock’n’roll had pretty much swept away everything in its path, with the likes of Cliff, Adam Faith and Johnny Kidd leading the homegrown wave. When Lance Percival was doing his thing, the Beatles had released three albums, and the Supremes were spearheading the arrival of Motown on British shores.
Calypso’s new popular context even served to work against it, as the public were seeing the genre purely as comedy, not a pop style to be taken seriously. Anywhere outside the satirical environment, that gave it novelty status, a perception heightened by an obviously Caribbean art being delivered by a pasty white boy. To be fair, though, calypso had done itself no favours, as there had been little musical advancement since Rupert Nurse’s sessions at the start of the 1950s.
WHEN, CRUCIALLY, THE JAMAICAN recording industry got underway at the end of the 1950s, JA boogie (the island’s take on R&B) and ska took over London’s West Indian scene. This happened almost overnight, thanks to the Jamaican-owned sound systems that had previously played American R&B, jazz and calypso, and the large Jamaican audience that was poised, waiting for something of its own to dance to. By now, half of all Caribbean immigrants in London were from Jamaica.
A steady stream of Jamaican recordings was already being informally imported into London when Emil Shallit got involved in 1960. Never slow to spot a developing trend in an ethnic market, he launched the Melodisc subsidiary label Blue Beat, dedicated to Jamaican music. Shallit travelled to the island to make deals with the biggest producers for UK rights to their material. He transferred the resources that would otherwise have gone into calypso into ska instead, and marketed it to exactly the same audience. He also hoovered up many of the same players for his London ska sessions. Suddenly ska became the official soundtrack of black London; and entirely understandably, many Trinidadian calypsonians, Kitch included, went home for good when their island gained its independence in 1962.
EVEN THOUGH IT CEASED TO HAVE MUCH SWAY beyond specialist circles, London calypso did not die out. When soca – a modern, danceable fusion of soul and calypso – emerged during the 1970s, the music got a considerable boost in the capital. The London Calypso Tent at the Notting Hill Carnival, and the junior calypso competitions held during Black History Month, remain lively affairs. The Association of British Calypsonians, formed in 1991, maintains links and exchange programmes with the Caribbean. Calypso in twenty-first-century London has evolved into a far more world-embracing scene, with performers likely to have roots from anywhere in the Caribbean or even Africa, and its subject matter tends to deal with global rather than parochial concerns.
While calypso may not have made as deep an impression as reggae or funk, the very fact that it established itself as part of mainstream British entertainment marked a historic cultural moment. It represented the first time in the United Kingdom that an immigrant group had expressed its relationship with its new home in song, and developed a style that had absorbed that environment. For the first time too, an imported musical style made a significant impact on the domestic music industry. Calypso had not merely existed in immigrant or left-field environments, speaking more about ‘back home’ than ‘new home’. In a two-way process, both host and arrival musical cultures had borrowed from each other with a healthy degree of respect.
A mere fifteen years after the Windrush docked, this truly marked the beginnings of Britain as a culturally multicultural society. It indicated an acceptance for new arrivals on a social level, and a genuine curiosity as to what they had to offer. That didn’t end with calypso. The fact that the more genuine side of the music had shown itself to have domestic appeal set something of a precedent. Ever since then, the British, and Londoners above all, have shown a consistent appetite for imported music, provided it has some meaning and substance.
The success of calypso served as a blueprint for the musical integrations that were to occur over the next fifty or so years. And that in turn says a great deal about attitudes towards ‘newcomers’ in the capital. As one of those two celebrated Windrush passengers predicted in his 1952 recording, “Mix Up Matrimony”:
‘With racial segregation I can see universally
Fading gradually …’
CHAPTER TWO
‘Are They Going to Play Music on Dustbins?’
How London learned to love the steel pan
TUCKED AWAY BENEATH THE WESTWAY, just up from Latimer Road tube, the Maxilla Social Club is everything you’d expect, early evening in an old-school working men’s club. The television, nestled among the darts trophies above wood panelling straight from the 1970s, is showing a football match with the sound off, while the two or three old geezers sitting on bar stools contemplate their competitively priced pints and don’t say very much. The other end of this medium-sized hall, though, is a riot of sound and activity. Maxilla doubles as the rehearsal space for Nostalgia Steel Orchestra, and with a week to go until the Notting Hill Carnival, this is a crucial time in their calendar. As the musicians warm up, and settle into their groove, you realise that, at quarters this close, there’s little as thrilling as a big, inspired steel band in full flow.
The second thing that strikes you is Nostalgia’s demography: more or less equally male and female; just over fifty percent white, about forty percent black, with a smattering of other ethnic types; and an age range that extends from teen to pensionable. In other words, a remarkably accurate cross-section of the immediate area, between the Westway and Holland Park, with White City to the west and Ladbroke Grove to the east. It’s a vivid example of London’s capacity to absorb foreign culture with the minimum of fuss. An instrument that wouldn’t be everyone’s immediate choice, is Caribbean to the point of cliché, and is relatively young – among the mere handful invented as late as t
he twentieth century – has quietly seeped into London’s soundtrack. Not merely as some sort of island-invoking soundbed for calypsonians, either, but as an art form in its own right.
Calypso and steel band have been kept apart in this book because despite their shared Trinidadian origins, their histories are almost entirely distinct. In classic uptown/downtown style, the two coexisted for years in mutual musical animosity. Steel pan was seen as trifling, a DIY ghetto extension of Port of Spain’s violent street gangs, while calypso’s associations with jazz and nightclubs were judged the height of sophistication. Not until 1946, with steel pan fan Lord Kitchener’s calypso “Yes, I Heard The Beat Of A Steel Pan”, did calypso even acknowledge the existence of steel bands.
Having come together out of the Russ Henderson Steel Band in 1964, Nostalgia are the longest-standing steel band in the capital, and they’re the only big band that still performs in the traditional ‘pan round the neck’ manner. In their initial manifestation, they had the idea, one August bank holiday, to take a children’s street festival on walkabout around the roads of Notting Hill. Over the years, they’ve become so London that they played a prominent part in the Opening Ceremony for the 2012 Olympics.
Nostalgia apart, though, the fact that the steel pan has established itself so deeply as part of life in Britain actually says as much about the British themselves as it does about the players who put it there. Of course, it hasn’t always been such a mutual admiration society.
The Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra making their debut at the Festival of Britain in 1951. The bemused-looking audience needed convincing that music could be made on what looked like scrap iron.
‘WHEN WE CAME OUT AND PUT OUR PANS around our necks, people started to laugh at us, pointing and shouting “What are you going to do with those dustbins?”’
Sounds Like London Page 5