Sounds Like London

by Lloyd Bradley

  ‘Once the disco thing started happening that made a lot of difference, because here we are, musicians coming from the sixties with all that tradition, all that energy from the music that was coming from everywhere, and they throw disco at us! I’ve always been dead against that mentality – the sheep mentality – when everybody sounds the same, and there was no individuality in the music when disco came along. Before that if you hear Pickett you know it’s Pickett, if you hear Otis you know it’s Otis … they all had an individual sound. But then suddenly we’re fighting a battle because the record companies all want disco music, they’re saying to us “You’re a black band, why don’t you do something that sounds like that?”

  ‘It was one of the reasons the band split up, because some of them wanted to go that way. I definitely didn’t, I wanted to keep the original energy going … I’m still here!’

  Some funk bands did make the switch. Gonzalez adapted very smoothly, and had their biggest hit in 1979 with “I Haven’t Stopped Dancing Yet”; similarly the Olympic Runners had “Sir Dancealot” and “Get It While You Can”. Otherwise there were a few other successes – Bob Dylan used Kokomo on sessions for his Desire album, and Cymande had quite a career in the US. That said, while outfits like the Breakfast Band and Morrissey-Mullen formed the bridge to London’s new wave of jazz/funk, little London funk made an impact after the Equals’ churning, Eddy Grant-penned “Funky Like A Train” in 1976.

  ALTHOUGH LONDON’S FUNK ERA seemed to come and go relatively quickly, two by-products that it left behind proved significant in the early days of the march of the city’s black music towards self-empowerment. As we’ll see, Eddy’s Coach House set-up provided a template for many who came later, and inspired a great deal more – it was not unusual for black acts to set their sights simply on ‘being like Eddy’. It also served as a vivid illustration of what was and wasn’t possible; even if Coach House recording studios and production facilities were viable, Eddy admits that perhaps he went one step too far in creating his own pressing plant, primarily for his Ice Records label’s product:

  ‘Setting up the studio was one thing … you can’t imagine what it was like trying to find out how to build a recording studio when there isn’t one – it was like Columbus stepping over the horizon. I always had available to me somebody else’s recording studio, and when I left the Equals I no longer had that, but nobody will tell me [how to build a studio] because then I wouldn’t be using their studio. But we built it.

  ‘When it became critical was with the pressing plant, because the bastards at the major companies would use my plant for their overruns – Christmas is coming or Elvis’s birthday or something. They would use my facility and wouldn’t want to pay; there was a particular time when the music business was in such terrible straits that they wouldn’t pay me. So I had on the one hand the brothers who couldn’t pay me, and on the other hand the white companies who wouldn’t pay me. And on top of that I had the white companies that were providing vinyl and the other necessities, like if a stamper broke or one of the extruders broke or something, they wanted cash for it – I had to pay cash for everything. So I was fighting an impossible war.’

  Although he didn’t keep the pressing plant as long as the rest of his Stamford Hill set-up, the whole exercise demonstrated how important it was to gain control over what you were doing.

  Root also felt the way forward was greater control, but looked at it from an inside-the-existing-business point of view. On one side he saw black music being squeezed by disco, and venues vanishing; on the other, artists unable to take advantage of the recording side because so few understood the business they were in. They weren’t maximising their publishing; they weren’t collecting all the monies due to them; they were signing restrictive contracts with record and management companies; and often they didn’t have the money or the wherewithal to get professional advice. It’s not much different for a lot of young white bands, but black bands feel it more acutely as they tend to have a limited range of industry options. In 1985, together with Byron Lye-Fook – Omar’s dad, who had been in Root and Jenny – Root founded the Black Music Association. Launched on the same day as Live Aid – and gaining a fair bit of PR mileage as the aid-for-Africa concert had virtually no black presence – the organisation was dedicated to educating black musicians as to their rights within the business, not only in the UK but across the Caribbean and Africa too.

  The timing was fortuitous, because the GLC had just commissioned a report on London’s black music industry and found it to be particularly lacking on the business side. Between them and Camden Council, the BMA raised enough grant money to get going the ball rolling. Root remembers:

  ‘After F.B.I. split up, I had a bit of knowledge about the industry from them and Root and Jenny, and I wanted to find out a bit more. It didn’t make any sense to me at all that so many of us were just making music, with no knowledge of the business that we were in. You hear all these stories about how so-and-so didn’t get that or so-and-so didn’t get this, so the primary purpose of the BMA was to educate musicians about their rights. We figured if we could do that then they would up their game as far as the business side of things went.

  ‘It was modelled on the old American organisation that had Miles Davis and Stevie Wonder in it, and we started going to [mainstream] music business seminars ourselves, to find out what it was they knew that we didn’t! The first one we went to cost £600 per person, and there was the BPI, PRS, the Musicians’ Union, the Music Publishers Association and PPL, all sitting on this panel, and they charging that sort of money! I said to Byron, “This is designed to keep musicians out!” So we went to all of those organisations and we explained what the BMA was, and we asked them to send representatives to our seminars. Which they did, and that kicked it off straight away.

  ‘The BMA ran courses on every aspect of the music business – journalism, marketing, management, manufacture, PR … And we’d negotiate with record companies for artists, get them legal or accounting help, look over their contracts and give them any help they needed. What we really wanted to do was to get musicians to start looking at their careers as long-term things, and the only way they could do that was if they understood every aspect of it and could prepare for the future. At one point we had over six hundred members.’

  One of those members who benefited hugely from the BMA was, not surprisingly, Omar. Root and Byron negotiated a deal for him that saw his debut album There’s Nothing Like This come out on their own Kongo label, and sell over thirty thousand copies, which put them in a very strong position to negotiate with the major labels for it and any singles.

  EDDY RELOCATED TO BARBADOS around thirty years ago, where he built a state-of-the-art studio and accommodation complex that’s used by some of the biggest names in music. He still records and tours, pretty much to his own schedule, but his real energies go into promoting ringbang, a fundamental pan-Caribbean black musical style that dates back to slavery. Found in the basis of the region’s different genres – mento, rhumba, kaiso and so on – the music allowed the different styles, and therefore different people, to communicate. It is, Grant believes, an important aspect of the Caribbean and its diaspora:

  ‘I spent my time trying to make musical statements that are good for people, and ringbang is good for people – it’s good for us black people in particular. I didn’t make it as a racist thing, though. Just like how the Japanese or the Chinese would make karate or talk about Zen, it comes from them and they’re proud of it, but it’s for everybody. Ringbang comes from us and I’m proud of it, it’s about stretching the borders of what is good for us.’

  Root has remained much closer to home. He continues to run the BMA and Kongo Music, and remains totally true to his beliefs with one of the funkiest scenes in London – every Sunday night, at the Prince of Wales just off Kilburn High Road, whichever veteran funkateers are in town and fancy a jam turn up and play. Regular participants include Tim Cansfield, Mick Eve, Richard Bailey, Wi
nston Delandro and Mel Gaynor; the funk they create is little short of astonishing and admission is free. And even better than that, during the half-time break, on really good nights, the landlady brings out platters of complementary fried chicken.

  2

  Nobody’s going anywhere

  ‘We were the second generation of black

  people over here and did what came

  naturally to us. Whatever had been thrown

  into our pot went into making lovers’ rock.’

  Janet Kay, Queen of lovers’ rock

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Whole World Loves a Lovers

  Lovers’ rock sells reggae to Jamaica

  IN JULY 1979, AFTER JANET KAY had performed her hit single “Silly Games” on Top of the Pops, the Guinness Book of Records hailed her achievement as the ‘First British Female Reggae Singer to top the UK charts’. In fact, they’d got a bit ahead of themselves – the single peaked at number two. Kay herself wasn’t nearly so carried away. The next day she phoned Rank Xerox’s offices in Wembley, where she worked in the personnel department, to ask if it would be all right if she came in a bit late: ‘I was on Top of the Pops last night’, was the excuse. ‘And I’m a bit tired.’ Her bemused boss gave her the whole day off.

  Although both Janet and her distinctive pop-reggae style appeared to have come from nowhere, young men and women who called themselves ‘black British’ had by this point been creating and consuming massive quantities of light, soulful reggae for more than half a decade. Having started in the capital, lovers’ rock reggae, as the genre came to be known, had spread to cities like Birmingham, Leeds and Bristol, and indeed anywhere with a sizeable second-generation black population. While a significant proportion of the records commented on black life in London, the most common subject matter was young love in all its guises, and the melodies owed almost as much to the sounds of Philadelphia and Detroit as to Kingston, Jamaica.

  Over the course of the 1970s, lovers’ rock had developed quietly, and pretty much independently of the higher-profile ‘roots’ end of reggae. Centred primarily on sound systems, it evolved organically as the music that best reflected the concerns and preoccupations of those youngsters.

  That a music form could thrive for so long, so far removed from any mainstream spotlight, is not totally surprising – such things have happened time and time again among London’s various tribes. Quite why it evolved, however, given that Jamaican music provided its fundamental building blocks, is remarkable. To a significant degree, lovers’ rock originated in the widespread dissatisfaction of its audience with what was going on elsewhere in reggae.

  WHILE IT MIGHT NOW SEEM downright churlish, a large proportion of black teenagers – whom you’d expect to have formed the primary audience for reggae – became disgruntled during the mid-1970s. This, after all, was the time when such giants of the music as Culture, the Mighty Diamonds, Augustus Pablo, U-Roy, Max Romeo, Johnny Clarke, Big Youth and Burning Spear strode the studios; Lee Perry was at the peak of his powers on the bridge of the Black Ark; and Bob Marley was honing his output down into Exodus, which Time magazine was to proclaim ‘Album of the Century’.

  It was reggae’s Golden Era, a jamboree of roots, culture and creativity brought to prominence when the left-field edge of the rock audience embraced the sounds and social consciousness of Jamaican music.

  Much like Afro-rock, as described in chapter four, roots reggae first found mass favour in the universities – indeed Osibisa played a considerable part in opening the ears of the rock crowd to ethnic styles. With its student-friendly combination of militancy, marijuana and danceability, roots reggae was a reggae movement that could be taken seriously. That it shifted into the wider mainstream as a partner-in-disaffection to punk was entirely predictable.

  The Queen of Lovers’ rock, Janet Kay, circa “Silly Games”.

  Even if reggae at the time enjoyed its highest-ever status, the truth behind the enthusiastic acclaim of the UK music press was that many sons and daughters of the Caribbean simply couldn’t relate to those records. Their disconnect with what was ostensibly ‘their music’ provides a vivid example of how the relationship of black music to black Britain has always been too complex to be taken for granted.

  Even if the UK at large tended to view its black population as a single homogenous group, several different black youth tribes were emerging in the 1970s, each under the radar but easily identifiable to anyone in the know. Just like white kids, really. With black Britain undergoing the most significant shift in its demographics since the early days of mass immigration, the notion of a one-size-fits-all playlist was becoming less relevant than ever. A sizeable wave of black teenagers, born in the UK, was coming of age. These were the first black Britons to approach their lives from a social perspective that related to the Caribbean or Africa as well as Great Britain, and saw their blackness as being qualified by both. Exposed to cultural influences ranging across a broad cross-colonial spectrum, and of course to the US as well, via TV, this generation was characterised by a huge internal diversity. Jamaican music was especially prominent in the mix, and formed the basis of the first totally British black music.

  SKA AND ITS PREDECESSOR, JA BOOGIE – the late-1950s’ Jamaican take on US R&B – fetched up in the UK at the start of the 1960s, almost immediately after it established itself in Jamaica. Independence Fever was mounting in London, with the Union flag due to be lowered on the island for the last time in 1962, and national pride among Jamaican expats was running high. As increasing numbers of Jamaican records began to arrive in London, to be sold in all manner of black-owned commercial establishments, Jamaicans embraced their music with a patriotic gusto that kicked calypso, R&B and jazz off their turntables, to become black London’s soundtrack of choice.

  Beyond the sheer number of records being made, or the size of the potential audience, the key component in this Caribbean musical shift was the sound systems. Trinidadians may have made an instant impact in London, introducing calypso as a ready-made musical culture, but to get it to the ordinary people they had to rely on the sound systems, and those were almost exclusively controlled by Jamaicans.

  A distinctive product of the Jamaican ghettos, sound systems were invented in West Kingston in the late 1940s as a way to provide exciting entertainment for the masses who could not afford orchestral dances or radios. Pioneering sound-system owners like Coxsone, Duke Reid and Prince Buster used powerful amplification and banks of massive speaker cabinets to put on open-air dances that became the focal point of downtown life. Competition between sound systems was so intense that continual musical innovation was the only way to survive. To ensure that the crowds kept coming back, the operators had to identify what their clientele wanted before they even knew it themselves, then serve up hot new tunes that would be guaranteed to go down well. What distinguished the top systems from the rest was their ability to play obscure R&B dance records, sourced from shopping trips all over the eastern United States. For a sound system to get hold of a song that a rival outfit had previously been spinning as theirs alone, was a cause for wild celebration.

  When the American music business shifted, and the smoother sounds of soul began to replace R&B, the music favoured in Jamaica began to disappear. The bigger soundmen responded by hiring local musicians to record their own approximation of R&B – JA boogie. Thus, prompted by the need to maintain their supplies of exclusive tunes, and keep their dances unique, the sound-system owners became Jamaica’s first large-scale record producers. In other words, Jamaica had a fully operational music business before it had any of its own music.

  Naturally, things didn’t stay that way for long. With so much desire to keep the music evolving, the producers experimented with tempo and sound changes or vocal techniques. It didn’t take long for JA boogie to become ska, for ska to become rock steady, and so forth. Every shift in Jamaican music, indeed – reggae, deejay, dub, dancehall, ragga – originated with operators trying out new ideas on the sou
nd systems. They’d record direct onto one-off acetate discs in the afternoon, and air them at the dance that night, where audience reaction was noisy, instant and determined everything. If a tune went down well, the soundman would try more of the same, refining the productions as he went along; if it didn’t, it would never be heard of again.

  It was merely a matter of time before these enterprising souls started to look beyond their own dances. Tunes that were particularly well received were soon being pressed up on vinyl. At first this would be for jukeboxes in bars and cafes, but as the number of gramophones on the island increased, they started to put records on public sale. The best way for producers to publicise their new releases being at their dances, the sound systems remained at the centre of the Jamaican music business. Apart, obviously, from the open-air element, that way of doing things was imported into the UK all but unchanged.

  LONDON’S FIRST JAMAICAN-STYLE sound systems were built not long after the first Jamaican sound-system operators arrived in the 1950s. Ironically, even though so much of the equipment they’d used in Jamaica was shipped in from the UK – Wharfdale and Eagle speakers, KT88 and KT66 valves from GEC in Holborn – English companies didn’t take their gigantic specifications seriously, and the only person they could find in London to build big enough amplifiers was an African engineer. At first, they played R&B and jazz imported from the US, and calypso recorded in London; then, once the Kingston recording scene got going, they switched to mento and JA boogie brought in by sailors, friends or relatives.

  These soundmen swiftly instituted an underground circuit of blues dances, house parties and shebeens that became a vital aspect of West Indian social life in London. Although Soho, as described in chapter one, held a handful of Jamaican-owned nightclubs, those were out of reach for many recent arrivals, while venturing as far as the West End from, say, Stockwell brought its own set of concerns about personal safety. A few London pubs welcomed Caribbean customers, and engaged sound systems at the weekend, but with outright racial hostility never far from the surface, much of the city’s nightlife was effectively closed off to black men. For most ordinary black Londoners, routinely refused entrance to just about all the capital’s regular dancehalls, the only options were unlicensed, pay-on-the-door dances in basements, empty houses, and school halls, where West Indian caretakers would make premises available after hours.