No one was making a fortune out of these dances, but the soundmen, who often had day jobs, would play them just to keep the back-home spirit alive. As welcoming and familiar environments, full of people who looked like each other, the dances had the significant effect of bringing expatriates from different islands together. After an unforgiving week at work, a house party complete with curry goat and rice, bottled stout or rum, made it very easy for different nationalities to realise that, in London, they had much more in common than was keeping them apart. Veteran Ladbroke Grove soundman Jah Vego remembers:
‘Ska came over here in a rush! It was like the whole era came in at once, as we got everything that had gone before at the same time. This was because it took the people back home a while to realise there was such a market over here, but it was what so many of us had been waiting for. I am a jazz man, but when ska came it just lick jazz clean out my head. Many people felt the same, because it was something from our own Jamaica, and that meant so much if you was living in England. You could relate to it more. As a deejay on a sound system you could see it, as soon as you start to spin the Jamaican tunes everybody would be up dancing.’
Lloydie Coxsone (right) and his fellow giant of London’s lovers’ rock sound systems, Fatman, get ready for a dance in the early 1980s.
Ska became enormously popular. The mods who came to the Soho clubs where Vego and other Jamaicans were deejaying also enabled it to make inroads into English youth culture. Emil Shallit’s Melodisc set up a ska-dedicated label, Bluebeat, licensing from Kingston and recording ska in London with Georgie Fame as a regular contributor. However, even though Millie’s exuberant “My Boy Lollipop” reached number two in 1964, and Prince Buster’s “Al Capone” went top twenty in 1967, ska never had a sustained impact on British music until Two Tone came along almost twenty years later. Much like calypso, it came and went leaving only a very shallow footprint.
GIVEN THE TIDAL WAVE of superb dance records that flowed out of Jamaica in the 1960s, and the growth of UK sound systems, the island’s music bossed things at street level. So much so, that by the end of the decade, rock steady and reggae had seeped into the working-class end of London youth culture, thanks to black and white kids who grew up together on inner-city estates. Trojan Records, launched in 1968, licensed on a large scale from Jamaica’s booming music business, and several London-based labels recorded reggae over here specifically for the domestic market.
Soon enough, the music was fulfilling its pop potential. In the ‘Trojan Explosion’, at the turn of the decade, Brit-friendly, ‘stringsed-up’ reggae – tracks imported from Jamaica, then remixed to add strings and other sweetening – gained mass acceptance. While reggae classicists often dismiss this jaunty, satin-suited reggae as pretty much worthless – pure pop’n’polyester – acts like Greyhound, Bob & Marcia and Nicky Thomas were in reality a deeply compelling expression of that particular time and place. With their flares, ‘fros and upbeat attitude, in the context of London circa 1970 they were hugely aspirational – remember, at this point in time, if you saw a black face on television you’d shout for the rest of your family to rush to the living room. Glamorous black pop, as valid and as valuable to a lot of youngsters as the Jackson 5 or Chairmen of the Board, this music deserves to be lauded for its success in tailoring a foreign sound to take its place in the wider world, and appeal to those who were brought up with British pop music playing in the background. It was really something of a triumph, albeit a short-lived one.
When the likes of Desmond Dekker, the Upsetters and the Pioneers were making it onto Top of the Pops, so too were the Temptations, the Supremes, Johnny Johnson and the Bandwagon, and Marvin Gaye. Then, once the 1970s rolled around, Shaft ushered in blaxploitation, James Brown’s Sex Machine kick-started a funk revolution, and imported TV shows, building on the success of I Spy and Julia, stopped ignoring African-American actors. When it came to images of cool black people – most of whom weren’t Caribbean, let alone Jamaican – this generation of British youth were spoiled for choice. Visuals played a major role. The attitude in the Jamaican music industry that photography was an unnecessary expense meant that few Londoners had any idea what reggae stars looked like, whereas black American music stars always put effort into presenting an image. For boys and girls alike, hair styles and hats assumed holy-grail status. By the time these kids hit the party circuit, many were looking beyond the sound-system dances. Once roots and culture took over, that disconnect increased all the more. With little apparent room for compromise, this new reggae was all about Jamaica, indeed all about one aspect of being Jamaican – sufferation.
So, while there’s no disputing how musically creative and spiritually directional the magical era of roots reggae proved to be, subject-wise reggae was turning in on itself. Faced with a wide array of black cultural templates, London teenagers did not unequivocally embrace it. Yes, of course they liked reggae, but not this reggae, or not to any great extent. Janet Kay explains:
‘Although I’d grown up hearing reggae music, I’d also grown up watching Top of the Pops, listening to Motown and pop music and the Beatles or Michael Jackson. Acts like the Supremes, Bob & Marcia, or the Jackson 5 were the acts I looked forward to seeing. When I was young, I used to idolise singers like Lulu and Dusty Springfield, because they were who was on TV and the radio. I used to buy all the Motown records, and the Philadelphia Sound, or Earth, Wind & Fire, Deniece Williams and Candi Staton. Anything with nice harmonies and melodies – I could’ve sung soul, but I was handed the opportunity to go into the studio with a reggae singer/producer [Alton Ellis]. Then once I was doing reggae, I wanted to do the sort of reggae that took in my other influences.
‘It was a natural thing, very pure because at the time the singers just went out and did it how they felt. So many of us loved reggae music, but didn’t feel part of the Rastafari movement, of roots and back to Africa. I understood what it was about, but I didn’t feel it related to my life and my surroundings. So it wasn’t as if we had anything to follow, there was no image thing, we were the second generation of black people over here, and we could do what came naturally to us. It was organic, whatever had been thrown into our pot went in to making lovers’ rock.’
Janet’s husband, lovers’ rock icon and successful actor Victor Romero Evans, expands:
‘We had a lot of different musical influences, and those of us that recorded, we all could’ve been soul singers … could’ve been anything. All we wanted was to sing as good as our heroes, and in my case that was Teddy Pendergrass and Marvin Gaye as much as John Holt or Dennis Brown or Slim Smith. But because of the predominance of Jamaican culture in London, at the time of my generation and my parents’ generation, reggae was the dominant music. Even though my parents are from St Lucia, when they had a party the music would be reggae. There was so much of it out there.
‘Although lovers’ rock was our interpretation of what we heard all around us, also it was influenced an awful lot by where we were and who we were. Like Janet says, although we could appreciate the sufferation that was being sung about, it didn’t really strike a chord – we were young and falling in love. That’s what so much of the soul and pop music was about, and so it was a kind of reggae pop that lovers’ rock came out of.’
Janet continues:
‘That’s why Motown was probably the biggest influence on that first generation of lovers’ rock singers, bigger than the reggae at the time. Because Motown songs were about us – falling in love, having our hearts broken – so they appealed so much to us as young kids, growing up and finding our ways in the world.’
This separation between the sounds of sufferation that were coming out of Jamaica, and the lush love songs being listened to in London, makes a fitting metaphor for what was going on in life in general. When Janet talks of ‘finding our ways in the world’, she could be referring to the social evolution then taking place between the first and second generations in Britain, as the seeds of a black middle/professional clas
s were beginning to germinate.
Although, economically speaking, the first half of the 1970s is usually remembered for the oil crisis, the three-day week and the stock market crashing, for the sons and daughters of the first big wave of Caribbean immigration it was nonetheless shot through with a fair degree of optimism. True, Britain was never any sort of land of milk and honey – and police harassment was at a level best considered routine – but back then a British education was still worth something and, even if employment opportunities were far from equal, with so much yet to be computerised a wealth of clerical jobs were on offer. Most black teenagers seemed content to buy into the fundamental reason why so many of their parents had set sail from the Caribbean: for their children to do better than they had themselves.
This was a time of strong family values. The original immigrants were largely establishment-sympathising churchgoers, who prided themselves on maintaining ‘good homes’, and most children were close enough to their parents to appreciate what they had gone through to get this far in a strange country. Despite Britain’s niggling levels of residual racism, the overwhelming sense of alienation or frustration that became such a factor a decade or so later did not yet exist. There was a strong all-round sense of community. Of course there was inter-generational friction, and while this frequently resulted in young men ‘locksing up’ – Franco Rosso’s movie Babylon, in which Victor played a character called Lover, pretty much nailed that situation – there wasn’t really any more rebellion than you’d expect in any other segment of society. By and large, the ideals that had made the crossing from the Caribbean were handed down mostly intact – especially to the girls.
This was a significant factor in how many youngsters initially took to, or didn’t take to, Rasta. Their now-middle-aged, work-oriented parents simply didn’t get the notion of not combing your hair, smoking vast amounts of ganja, and not wanting to be a part of society. To them this made even less sense in London than in Jamaica – what were you here for other than to get a job? These people came from an environment in which Rastas were outcasts, and were subject to ‘trimming’ – a process that went way past humiliation, in which Jamaican police would haul Rastas into police stations and hold them down while their locks were hacked off. Then there was the straightforward religious aspect: as churchgoers, many so deeply resented the perceived blasphemy of Rastafari’s appropriation of the Bible that the mere notion of dreadlocks filled them with, er, dread. That was without even taking into account the Old-versus-New-Testament debate. Those of these upstanding citizens who were not Jamaican were likely to be even more horrified by Rastafari, which at that time had not yet surfaced on other islands.
All in all, it’s hardly surprising that London’s take on reggae music was far less confrontational, and had a lusher, more conventionally pop-and-soul vibe, than what was being made in Jamaica.
BY THE TIME JANET AND VICTOR came into lovers’ rock – they both began recording (separately) in 1977 – the genre had already existed on the sound systems for several years. The first lovers’ rock classic, Louisa Mark’s “Caught You In A Lie”, was produced by one of London’s top sound-system operators, with another soundman leading the band that played on the session. For all its shiny, pop-tastic approach to reggae, lovers’ rock was still reggae, and as such conformed to reggae’s rules. When sound-system owner Lloydie Coxsone launched the style, he did it in exactly the same tried-and-tested manner as employed in Jamaica. That explains why, although reggae became increasingly fashionable after the 1972 release of the Jamaican feature film The Harder They Come, lovers’ rock came about without the rest of the UK music business noticing.
Lloydie Coxsone is no relation to Jamaica’s Coxsone Dodd – his choice of stage name is a mark of respect, and shows how closely London sound systems allied themselves with those back home. Like his counterpart, his Coxsone’s Outernational sound system was and remains among the very biggest and best in town. However, contrary to received wisdom, back then his massive set-up of powerful amplification and wardrobesized speaker cabinets was never a strictly reggae state of affairs. In true soundman spirit, he responded to what his crowd wanted by mixing in soul and (old-style) R&B, while also producing specials that had a softer, poppier feel. This meant his dances always had a strong female crowd, something that was not always the case in the often-macho sound-system world. One of his regular forays north of the Thames was Wednesday nights at the Four Aces Club in Dalston, during which he ran the Star Search talent contest. It had a citywide reputation, and hopeful vocalists would come from all over the capital to sing on his sound system over specially prepared instrumental backing tracks – riddims. Audience reaction determined the results; winners were invited back next week, and eventually competed in a grand final, with the prize of a recording session and single release. These vocal sessions at dances were another imported Jamaican-ism; live singers have always been a major attraction on sound systems over there, while talent contests had long been a part of the Kingston scene in theatres as well as dancehalls. Many of reggae’s superstars got their start at the talent shows, but at Lloydie Coxsone’s Wednesday-night affairs something far bigger was going on – a whole new style of reggae was emerging. From the audience itself.
Dennis Bovell today. Astonishingly, he’s not laughing.
Coxsone and Dennis Bovell, leader of reggae band Matumbi and operator of the Sufferah HiFi sound system, had reacted to the mostly female contestants singing smoothly reggaefied versions of pop hits by creating suitable riddims for the contest, and matching vocal specials for the sound system. In 1975, a sweet-voiced fifteen-year-old from Shepherds Bush, Louisa Mark, devastated the competition week after week before going on to win the final, and Coxsone and Dennis prepared her prize in singularly Jamaican fashion. At central London’s Gooseberry Studios, they built the riddim of their choice for her recording session, and only when that was completed to their satisfaction did they ask the singer in to do her bit. The tune they constructed was a cover of Robert Parker’s 1967 Southern soul gem “Caught You In A Lie”. Dennis remembers the session as one of those happy accidents that litter reggae’s history:
‘It was an important decision for Lloydie Coxsone to use that tune, because it was his sign-on piece, the first record he’d play when he came to the turntable, so it had particular significance for his followers. Because of that, although he came to me looking for a reggae version of it, I knew he wouldn’t want to lose the flavour of the original. Now at this point there weren’t any lovers’ rock records – the girls used to sing on the sound systems to pre-recorded riddims – so while that means you can do anything you like, you’ve still got to get people’s attention somehow, with something familiar. At the time there was a song that was killing it – “Curly Locks” – it was on rewind on every soundman’s turntable. I decided to attach a soundalike bass sound on the beginnings of this “Caught You In A Lie” – duum du dud u baah bad dah dah – to make it sound as if you were about to listen to another version of “Curly Locks”, but then switch to another tune. The original melody, though, a horn riff, seemed a bit dry against that bassline, and we wanted to create something unique. Robbie Shakespeare was over from Jamaica and in that studio at the same time, and I had a Moog synthesiser in there, which was unheard of in reggae, so I was showing off to Robbie – “Look, you ain’t seen one of these in Jamaica yet, mate. Listen to this!” I was making those electronic sounds with it to impress Robbie, and while running the track I came up with awah wah wah wah waaah … Just to show what you could do. But Lloydie Coxsone was sold on it and shouted ‘Yo! Dat sound good, yuh know, dat sound like the intro! Don’t rub that off!’ All I could say was ‘Yeah, OK, you like that … there you go!”
With the backing track finished and Louisa’s vocals in place, Coxsone rushed it up to the Four Aces. As he remembers, the reaction surprised even him:
‘Immediately I cut it on a dubplate, and that first night took it back to the club. From the first time
I played it, the whole place went haywire. More than just because this was their tune because it came out of their club off their sound system. They loved this record, because the young teenagers in London have never heard themselves before on a record with a good production like a great musician like Dennis Bovell coulda given it. I knew I had to release it, and it’s with that record that lovers’ rock truly started.
‘In the beginning, it was only people in London that came to my dances knew it was an English record; as it started to go wider when people first heard it they thought it was Jamaican. It was when the publicity began to go on around it, and people found out it was English, that’s when it really take off. It was a massive reggae hit, the biggest ever English-made record, and it immediately started to inspire a generation of singers as people realise that this young lady is only fifteen years old, from London just like them, and make such a good tune! I think all the other young ladies were saying “Well I could do better … I’m older than her and I believe I have a better voice!” It sparked one big competition in the reggae field as so many young ladies all over England start singing.’
Sounds Like London Page 20