Sounds Like London

by Lloyd Bradley

  ‘That attitude was one of the big contributors to the Brit-Funk scene not lasting that long. The peak was between ‘79 and ‘83; it was all over by ‘84, which is too short a space of time for a music like that to be able to develop and establish itself properly.’

  It’s a great shame that BritFunk, one of the slickest, most musically stylish movements to come out of black London, doesn’t believe it fulfilled itself either creatively or commercially. When you compare it to lovers’ rock, however, it’s not hard to see why that happened. The reggae genre developed as completely self-sufficient, and was controlled all through the process by the same people who had thought it up, nurtured it and developed a production/promotion/distribution set-up that was quite happy to turn its back on the mainstream. It wasn’t perfect, and as we’ve seen some residual frustration remains, but the industry always called its own shots. BritFunk, on the other hand, put itself at the mercy of those who not only did not actually make the music, but in some cases did not even like or understand the music. Camelle is aware of the differences:

  ‘In the reggae field, they were much more astute about how they could actually take their stuff to market, therefore how they could nurture what they were doing and make sure it always stayed viable. They kept hold of it. We, on the other hand, came into it from a world that was all about the major labels, and to us it was really exciting to be with a major record company. We didn’t have that sound-system mentality, where you take care of your own business. The reggae side of things had much more business acumen than we ever did, and that was to our detriment. With us it was all about sign on the dotted line come what may! Then once we bought into all that, we started coming up against gatekeepers who didn’t have the good of the music at heart, and that fucked it up totally.’

  ALTHOUGH THESE GUYS ARE UNDERSTANDABLY disappointed, as Steve points out their influences weren’t limited to setting up potential pop stars:

  ‘Quite apart from that whole generation of London soul boy bands that wouldn’t have stood a chance if it hadn’t been for our scene – Kenny and the horns worked with Heaven 17 as well as Spandau, and did stuff for bands like the Jam… Baps toured with George Michael, Kenny did TV work with him… Camelle played bass in the Style Council … Bluey’s Incognito was at the start of that whole acid jazz movement. Then there was the generation that came after them – Omar, the Brand New Heavies, Jamiroquai… they all used to be at the gigs watching us and were encouraged to do their own thing.’

  Their influence continues beyond even that, as Kenny, Camelle and Steve all teach music, music theory and music business at various London colleges, Steve produces and manages young soul talent, and it’s not unheard of for any them to pop up on stage somewhere with different funky jazz-type projects. Or even as Light Of The World, Central Line or Hi Tension. In April 2011, Steve organised a Thirty Years of BritFunk concert at London’s O2. With a stellar line-up including Beggar & Co, Central Line, David Joseph Junior and Incognito playing to a packed house, it proved more than simply a nostalgia fest for the mostly-middle-aged-would-regret-it-in-the-morning audience. The bands got a great deal out of it, too, as Kenny recalls:

  ‘There must have been about 250 people walking about backstage, some of us who haven’t seen each other for twenty years. Some of us had fallen out or had disagreements, but seeing the crowd that turned up – and stayed, because it went on until about two in the morning – it made us realise what we’d achieved and what an effect it could still have. Hopefully it happens again, and everybody will turn up and go on stage.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘If You’re Not Dancing, Fuck Off’

  The new sound systems rewrite raving

  ‘THERE WAS A WHOLE LOAD OF KIDS OUT THERE – in London – that by the end of the seventies fitted between a lot of the different styles that were prescribed by the media. As a result, we were falling into the cracks – not really finding what we wanted in anything that was being put in front of us, so we had to start making something up. What that turned out to be were warehouse parties … it was pirate radio … it was genuine street fashion …

  ‘The brilliant thing was we were making it for ourselves so it reflected us and where we lived – it was particular to London. I’m not saying what we made was perfect, probably it wasn’t, but at least we weren’t making it according to some marketing executive’s idea of what we ought to be wanting.’

  Sitting in the appropriately multi-culti Café Oto, behind Dalston Junction, Derek Yates is describing the clubland revolution in 1980s’ London. These days he’s Course Director of Design and Illustration at Camberwell College of Art; back then he was straight outta art school, and in demand designing flyers for dances. Derek created the most iconic London motif of that era: the Soul II Soul Funki Dred head. His visuals played a vital role in finally propelling the scene overground, after years of being more or less unnoticed by the established media or entertainment industry.

  ‘It was a bunch of people who weren’t really Soul Train and weren’t really Bob Marley, but at they same time they were all of that. Just none of it exclusively. It was how mixed up people’s tastes really were in London – you could be into a bit of electro and a bit of Run D.M.C., but also into Yellowman and lovers rock and Parliament. We took bits from a load of movements: I was sort of into breakdancing and I was sort of into graffiti, but I wasn’t into New York breakdancing, graffiti or hip hop. London had such a strong cultural feel of its own, what so many kids were really into was how things became something else when they came to London. That was what became Mastermind, became Good Times, became Soul II Soul … all those new London-based sound systems, that were very different from traditional reggae sound systems.

  ‘The best thing was that we almost sold it back to the media, but they never quite got it. Still don’t. Although, looking back, perhaps that was a good thing, as it allowed the scene to carry on defining itself.’

  This sound-system-led scene developed into a genuine social ‘movement’, precipitating significant cultural and commercial shifts. During the next twenty or so years it would prove to be every bit as game-changing as punk ever was, in effectively repositioning black music as part of the fabric of British pop. That said, apart from one spectacular exception, the scene produced almost none of its own music, so this is the only chapter of Sounds Like London not to be driven by musicians. Instead, the movement was all about how you presented music that somebody else had made.

  HOW TO DEAL WITH THE SUBURBAN club-door policies described in the previous chapter was hardly rocket science: the inner-city convoys just stopped making the trips. It was when the West End began to operate the same sort of entrance apartheid that things became more complex. Courtesy of a generation of kids who had been all through school together, the capital’s soul scene had been quietly and organically building its own internal multiculturalism. Derek Yates’s experiences as a white native north Londoner would have been commonplace:

  Jazzie B of Soul II Soul; his sound system rewrote the rules of raving.

  ‘We couldn’t all go to a club together, not the mixture of friends I had at that time – there were Greek kids and black kids and Asian kids and white kids … We went out on a Saturday night, and we couldn’t get in to the same club. We went to a black club, which would be a reggae club and more likely to be local, then me and the other white guys are going to feel like we’re the only white kids in there. Then if we went to a mainstream soul club in the West End, the majority of them weren’t going to let the black kids in.’

  Most remarkable, as Derek puts it, was ‘the mainstream totally missing a trick – there was a whole load of inner-London kids just like us, who wanted to go out.’ That state of affairs was perfect for sound systems: business opportunity meets social exclusion meets musical potential. Forced to forget about West End clubs or plush suburban discos, London’s black soul scene became self-contained, vaguely outlaw, community-based, ever-innovative, and in complete empathy with its cro
wds.

  To get there, however, the very concept of a sound system had to evolve from the big funk outfits, still run like reggae outfits, that had flourished in London since the mid-1970s – TWJ, Black Caesar and that stalwart of the Notting Hill Carnival, 6X6. While the internal dynamics, micro-economics and ghetto sensibilities of the blues dances remained important, the new sound systems needed to recognise how sophisticated and cosmopolitan young black London had become. Such a generation of operators was falling into place: British-born; grown up around local sound systems at weddings, christenings and funerals; and seduced by the glamour while living in a wider world. One such new kid on the block, Trevor Nelson, was by the early 1980s already running his own Madhatter sound system:

  ‘Even though I saw myself as a soul boy, I still wanted to be part of a sound system, I saw it as my protection. And while we weren’t the biggest sound system, we were a proper sound system – we had box boys, we built our own speaker boxes … We had to have the credentials otherwise nobody would have accepted us as being true to what we were trying to do.

  ‘My sister was part of that earlier [jazz/funk] scene, she’d tell me about those nights like Chris Hill and the Southgate Royalty, so when I was at school I subscribed to all of that. We had tee shirts calling ourselves the Dalston Funk Force because I thought this is what you do, you get a little tribe! But when I got to be eighteen or nineteen, I realised it was about individualism. Then by the time I got to deejaying, that British jazz/funk scene was more or less dead. The London crowd didn’t want that Caister-ish “wooh wooh!” thing, we were looking for anything that sounded fresh and new. It had to be on a local level because the West End ostracised us – we knew that, everybody knew that – so there was an almost anti-West-End vibe. My scene was in Hackney and there were plenty of people who would only rave in Hackney, then there were the people who were outgoing enough to go raving all the way across London – they’d travel eight miles to Brixton or Streatham or wherever to rave in a like-minded situation. So you got this hardcore travelling all over the city, but they wouldn’t go down the road into the West End, they’d say “Well it’s not for us, they don’t want us there.” and in most cases they’d be right.

  Derek Yates’s graphic evolution of the Funki Dred head.

  ‘Although we were staying local we didn’t want to rave with the local reggae scene, because those guys weren’t moving on. That blues-dance scene went on a lot longer than people realise, the whole of the eighties, creeping into the nineties, so while the scene had to go back to house parties, now there was a new set of deejays cutting their teeth and things were changing. In the beginning in my scene there were only about twenty like-minded people and the core of them were my friends from college [Trevor went to Westminster Kingsway], but then there got to be more of them. Just people from Hackney who wanted to stand out and be different from the usual Gabicci-wearing, Farah slacks-wearing, skins-wearing crew. Then once people got into the parties, and saw people dressed a bit different and dancing to all this different music, it started to get them away from that whole tribal identity thing.’

  Another such deejay, Norman Jay, was cutting his teeth on his brother Joey’s sound system, Great Tribulation. We meet in upmarket Brixton Village – formerly Granville Arcade – in a bakery/coffee shop so cutting-edge that they have Duralit toasters on the table for customer use, and you collect little pots of spreads from the counter. Of course Norman is wearing a hat, and, just as inevitably, he is cheerful and charming, even if his early sound-system memories aren’t all positive:

  ‘The sound system started in 1974, it was purely a reggae sound system with Joey playing lovers’ rock and Nina Simone’s “My Baby Just Cares For Me”, that kind of thing. I didn’t join initially, although I used to go to lend some brotherly support at sound clashes [two sound systems playing in the same venue in competition]. But there was so much about that culture I was totally opposed to – particularly, rather ironically, the sound clash. To me, the sound clash was never about your audience, it was about you, and beating the other sound. I hated that. All I wanted to do was play continuous music and see people in front of us going “Wicked tune!”. Not blasting it at another deejay, and he’s making noise over your music, and you can’t play because he’s spinning back or his people are pulling out your cables. That, for me, epitomised the sound-system culture that was so introverted.

  ‘As a self-sufficient business model, though, you can’t beat a sound system, and I thought “What if I extricate a sound system and put it in front of a different audience and change the soundtrack?” [He claps his hands] Then bingo! We’re on a winner. I was always a soul boy who had grown up in a reggae sound, and to my way of thinking there was no reason why we couldn’t run a parallel universe of playing different music.

  ‘What really motivated us was going into the clubs where the deejays played continuous music and they were breaking our music, but there was never going to be any way in for us. I was very conscious then, a lot of guys my age were – not just the reggae men, all of us. I was young and angry and all the time thinking that black deejays were conspicuous by their absence. When I read magazines like Blues & Soul and read about those deejays in my mind I assumed they were black and there was an accepted status quo there, but that couldn’t have been further from the case. There was only Alex Pascal, Tony Williams and Greg Edwards and even they were from overseas, not homegrown. We weren’t working in the record companies or in the media, so our only entry level was the sound systems. Like it always has been with sound-system culture, it was born out of necessity and we needed to do this for ourselves.

  ‘But the good thing about not being able to break through then, was that perhaps it might have been the wrong time. It meant that we were allowed to nurture and learn our craft, and by the time we broke through we were ready. I believe the whole sound-system ethic of being self-sufficient and not relying on a promoter or a club owner to dictate policy was what allowed us to succeed. I never played in a club as a deejay, so I learned all my skills outside of that environment – MC-ing, selection, turntable skills, rudimentary electronics … we never had the platform for anything like that until we started our own sound systems.’

  Significantly, when Norman did join Joey’s sound, and it started to change direction, one of the first things he did was change the name:

  ‘I didn’t feel right playing under the name “Great Tribulation”. I knew the meaning of it, but wanted to deejay under a name that was more upbeat, more optimistic. When I moved away from playing purely reggae, I had an epiphany moment on hearing the Chic track “Good Times”. I’d always loved the group, and this name was perfect for what I was looking for.’

  At the same time as Norman was reinventing this West London sound system, across town Hornsey/Archway sound system Jah Rico was renaming itself Soul II Soul, and, quite literally, turning itself around. Over thirty years later, Jazzie B sits on the terrace of his comfortable Regents Park home, and remembers how sound systems had been changing for a while, and how that was altering the audiences:

  ‘It was the breakthrough of the lovers’ rock sounds that opened everybody’s eyes to the real entertainment prospects of the sound system, and things started to get more refined. Lloydie Coxsone was on the cusp of that new generation, because sounds of that era had a whole different energy to the ones that went before. They weren’t like yardie-style sounds, they were more about us in London – more fish and chips than rice and peas! Then we wanted to take it up a bit more. Lovers’ rock made the dance more sophisticated and we, Norman, Paul Anderson [Trouble Funk sound system] and Mastermind took it on from there. We acted like reggae sound systems, so we had all of that heritage and attention to detail, but we were banging James Brown.

  ‘The crowds were changing at that point. Now there was young white boys and girls from working-class backgrounds, who were far more integrated. They’d been young kids growing up when there was three sound systems in every street, and they
knew all about them. In our area [Holloway] it was Greek kids or English kids like Yatesy [Derek Yates], and as we got older we got into music together, just like we’d be playing football together. But the cool thing about them was they weren’t trying to be black or anything like that, they were just there.

  ‘There wasn’t a master plan, we were just reflecting what was going on around us as kids growing up in London. We wanted to define street culture as it really was, too. It wasn’t all about sufferation or being dowdy or downtrodden. It was about being optimistic, doing quite well for yourself and having a bit of a swagger. We wanted to say “We’re here, and we’re enjoying ourselves.” Kids in London, across the board, could relate to that.

  ‘We wanted to create an atmosphere that was edgy enough, through the sound-system vibe, but nobody was going to feel threatened. I think most significant is when we turned the decks around. All reggae sounds will work with their decks against the wall, usually in a corner, so they’ve got to play the sound with their backs to their crowd, to protect their equipment and so nobody can see the records they’re playing. That, to me, was exclusive, more about them than their crowd. We started off like that because that was what we knew, then we turned them around so we faced the crowd and we could all be part of the same experience – inclusive.

  ‘What we were doing wasn’t a black thing or a white thing. Everybody was welcome provided they’d just come to dance and enjoy themselves We knew the only real difference between us and the white kids from our area that hung out with us was they didn’t have to cream their skin.’

  Considerably more important than inclusiveness in itself was the fact that it was being driven from a black perspective. For the first time since the days of the Soho jazz clubs, black people were running a black music scene that was intentionally open to all comers. That represented a significant step forward from lovers’ rock, which while it undeniably made a huge advance in establishing a British black music style, kept it to itself. Jazz/funk went too far in the other direction, and lost out after handing the reins to the mainstream music industry. Norman has no doubt that what they were doing went way beyond simply playing records: