Sounds Like London

by Lloyd Bradley

  ‘For me it was always more than a music thing, I had a problack agenda, make no mistake. Because I was a bit older than my peer group and I’d been through all that jazz/funk Blues & Soul thing, I was very conscious of them not appropriating what we created here, assimilating it for themselves and taking the credit for it. That was what had been holding down the progress of black deejays in this country. We had our own sound-system culture in this country, where we could do our own thing, and because we kept it as a subculture for so long we could keep hold of it. Then when it went above ground it was because the social climate was right. It happened naturally.

  ‘The greatest thing is that my generation made us visible. We were actively part of the creative process of the youth culture we all love and everybody takes for granted today. We were always bubbling away, and I always knew that were we to get a foothold, we would make a difference that would change the course of history. That’s why I was so driven, so they couldn’t rewrite history without us. I think we all knew that.’

  Trevor explains:

  ‘The key thing was the variety of music. Because it’s local you’d have to play across the board – however hip these parties ended up, all of them had a basis of local people in there, otherwise it would never be a success, and that meant people with all sorts of tastes. But having to play that sort of variety meant you could play everything. I’d do a party in Hackney and I’d try to play an Ayrton Moreira tune as well as a brand-new hiphop tune next to a soulful tune. I would try to educate the local crowd on what I liked so I could be a bit more specialised. I did that by doing “drinks for free” parties. [Trevor laughs heartily] We’d make our money on the door, but the people just opened their minds and started dancing to everything! That was my way of doing it, and they’d go home at the end of the night knowing they’d had a good time, they’d want to come again and they’d tell their friends.

  ‘The scene caught on so quickly because of the quality of the music. If you were a music fan and wanted to expand your experience, you had to go to those parties, because that was the only place you were going to hear that music. It wasn’t like today, when you’ve got access to eight million radio stations and every kind of music over the internet. Back then it was purely down to the sound systems and their selectors. You had to work at it, and in that era, on a sound system you had to be known for your tunes – not your personality or the clubs you played in, just your tunes. Which meant you had to stand out, so we would play things just because we wanted to be different – tunes nobody would expect – but at the same time you had to do it with quality. You wanted people to say “That guy’s got tunes!”.

  ‘That was when we started exploring what came to be called rare groove. For instance we started looking at Afrobeat, discovering Fela, starting in on Hugh Masekela, buying Manu Dibango, and I found Hamilton Bohannon and South African music. To me it was nearer to jazz/funk because it was all very percussive, but it was taking off in another direction. Norman was into his Philly thing, but much more than the Philly that most people knew about, and he had an appreciation for Northern Soul too, in a way that nobody else down here did. Soul II Soul would play anything they felt would work, and most of it did.

  ‘We’d have to hunt for the American records – I knew what time every secondhand record shop in London got deliveries … I would drive to Norfolk, a shop called the Soul Bowl, in a Mini. I was scared shitless because I didn’t usually drive on a motorway, but I would for music. I flew on a plane for the first time, to New York, and gone in warehouses full of rats just to look for grooves. I would do anything for music, and I wouldn’t even think twice. I’ve spent my bus fare and walked home from Seven Kings, wherever that is – in Essex somewhere – walked back to Hackney because I’d spent my last penny on a record. I didn’t have to, either. I could have come back the next day, I didn’t have a party or anything to do that night, but I just wanted that record now. Just having it under my arm it was good.

  ‘The crowds at those parties in the early days appreciated that you were taking the music more seriously than if you’d just gone up the High Street. Admittedly with some tunes you had no idea what the crowd’s reaction was gonna be! It was all down to your gut feeling, so your own instincts were very important. Usually, the crowd went with it because they were every bit as dedicated as we were – it was their scene and they knew it.

  ‘You look back at the really good deejays from that era, the ones that have survived – the Norman Jays, Jazzie, me, whatever – and that was because firstly we were different, but importantly we had a quality control to what we played. I think we all pushed at each other to play different music, unlike today which is a little bit more safe. I think we were always in that kind of soundman competition, so we were trying to bully each other with our selections. Of course there were guys who were playing stuff just to be cool and trendy and faking it, and a lot of them got into the best clubs in London while we were still playing the sound systems. We used to get very frustrated, but the point is we’re still here.’

  FOR NORMAN, WHAT THE NEW SOUND SYSTEMS were able to achieve with their music serves as yet another denunciation of the status quo that then prevailed.

  ‘I was losing interest in the jazz/funk that was being pushed at deejays by the record companies – record companies they were all involved with. I wasn’t interested in what the soul mainstream was doing. I’d been to that as a punter and got bored with it then, I didn’t feel part of it any more. But I wanted to deejay, and I thought the way in was through the Funk Mafia thing. I thought what I could bring to it would be of value and broaden the base. But that isn’t really what anybody wanted. I can remember I approached those deejays like Tom Holland or George Power [Soul Mafia deejays], going to their nights and badgering them … “Can I do a warm up? Can I do a warm up?” I was always told “Yes”, but then waiting patiently for hours and hours, getting fobbed off with “Not just yet” until they’d say “Not tonight”. To them I was that annoying anorak kid, but with a bag full of records they would have died for. I’m not joking, because I was a record buyer anyway, I’d come straight from Contempo and my bag was brand new. It was another reggae tradition – when I come I’m breaking seals. I used to love that, a reggae tradition, they did it with dub plates, I did it with the cellophane! [US import twelve-inch singles and albums arrived shrink-wrapped.] Brand new! You ain’t even heard this music yet! Crisp biscuit! Not just new music either, but different music. That was when I realised that it was us who had the knowledge, not them.

  ‘I used to hold them in such deference, but if you judged a deejay on his music we were streets ahead at our house parties. And I think they knew it too, because, after all those knockbacks, when I did get a chance, I can remember being told not to play certain records … you can’t do this and you can’t do that. That’s when I knew I should be on my own sound system, where there ain’t no one fucking telling me what I can and can’t do. Sure, it’s risky, the crowd will instantly relate or let you know you’ve fucked up. It’s the greatest baptism of fire anybody could endure, [He laughs long and hard] but it made us and the audiences grow. That’s why that scene moved forward so quickly, and we had that whole subculture going on for years and years and years – we were ramming dances that you’d never read about in Blues & Soul.’

  Norman Jay on the Good Times sound system, rocking Powis Square at the Notting Hill Carnival.

  To progress beyond local house parties and to turn things from a scene into a subculture, Norman figured, organisation was required:

  ‘I used to wonder how come these people are running our scene, running our music, and we’re almost invisible? But what I learned from the Funk Mafia people was they were fucking organised – it had nothing to do with music. Once I understood that, it took the chains off and I knew we had to do it too.

  ‘It had dawned on me that I didn’t know Funkadelic [the London sound system, not the band], I didn’t know Madhatters, I didn’t know Soul II Soul �
�� I’d heard through the vine that these sounds are out there, but I ain’t got their phone numbers, I don’t know who they are. All the Mafia deejays knew each other, all the club owners knew each other, and it’s jobs for the boys. We’re on the outside and we still don’t know each other. So some time in eighty-two me and my brother organised the first meeting of all the prominent soul sound systems operating in London.

  ‘It was at my mum’s house, in our bedroom, and I got all the emerging black music deejays and sound systems to turn up. It was at that meeting I first met Derek Boland [Derek B] properly, or Rapattack, or Mastermind, or Funkadelic, or Madhatters; I can’t remember if Jazzie was there or not. All those sounds, and that was the first time that we all actually knew each other. Me and Joe made sure everybody exchanged numbers, ‘cause in my head I’m thinking “This is the only way we’re ever going to move forward, now we know each other.” We tried to do gigs together and everything, but it was the culture then that gave this perception that black people can’t work together – some of the deejays themselves believed it! – and in no time at all the coalition we’d formed fell apart.

  ‘What it did, though, was it showed who was really serious and who had just come along for the ride. There were a few of us that were motivated and had a clear vision of what they wanted. This focussed us. I guess out of that group came people like Jazzie, myself, Derek Boland, God rest him, Trevor and a couple of others.’

  This is a crucial issue. To move things on, the new wave of sound systems needed to grow. While lovers’ rock had represented black Britain, it didn’t represent black Britain within Britain at large. It never really wanted to; indeed in many ways that was the reason it flourished. Now, a few years later, here was a generation of soundmen who never thought for a moment that what they were doing couldn’t be part of the mainstream – ‘some open-minded brothers’ as Trevor puts it. It was vital to reach a wider crowd, to present black music in a purer form. Trevor continues:

  ‘The race thing was massive for us, but that never meant what we did was exclusive. My mentality was I did it with black people in mind, but white people were welcome. The key to unlocking black music in this country was tapping into that white crowd, but from our point of view. We knew we had to make an environment that was genuine and would be what our crowds wanted, but at the same time was comfortable and not intimidating for white people. That’s been the key to black music ever since.’

  AS THE 1980s PROGRESSED, London’s house-party landscape was changing. Both the New Cross Fire in 1981, in which thirteen black youngsters died when fire swept through a packed sixteenth birthday party, and the collapse of a floor at a Clapham party a couple of years later – it was in a flat above an empty shop and no one was seriously hurt – pushed local councils and the police to work harder to shut them down. New powers enabled the authorities to seize equipment rather than simply request for the volume to be turned down. With black parties being disproportionately targeted, this was widely seen as routine racist harassment, but many of the deejays themselves had become concerned. Trevor explains:

  ‘We’d do them in empty properties, running power in from outside, or if anybody we heard about was buying a flat we’d say “Have you put a deposit on it yet? When you moving in? I’ll buy the keys off you for fifty quid for a weekend.” Then we’d keep a rave in there. Or if somebody had a flat but hadn’t moved in yet, we’d ask “Are you going to decorate?” You’d rinse it out, then when you couldn’t hold no more raves in there, you’d decorate it for them! Or sometimes, if you knew somebody in an estate agents’, you could buy the keys to an empty place off them for fifty quid. As long as you made sure it was left how you found it, nobody would be any the wiser.

  ‘Totally unregulated, and these parties could be rammed – “Health and safety? What’s that?” Then environmental health got wise and started shutting them down, and more than that they said “We’ll more than shut you down, we’ll take your gear and then we’ll lock you up!” It changed things.’

  Like Trevor, Norman enjoyed the necessarily risky beginnings. He relates the changes more directly to New Cross, as he had family living in the area at the time who knew people at the party.

  ‘All those kids getting killed in that house in New Cross really changed the house-party thing, not immediately but it got people thinking about looking for other options. I can remember house parties where you could feel the floor bouncing up and down about four or five inches – I can’t understand why more didn’t collapse! Some of my earliest parties … boy! … I’d be locked up by now for health and safety reasons! [He laughs loudly] Some were in the most scary places. I can remember going into places where there’d be huge areas of the floor missing, a space where you could literally fall down to the floor underneath. We were so popular, our dances were rammed, we’d fill three storeys of a Victorian house, put our boxes in every available area, deejaying from an alcove on the first floor, and New Cross made me realise how bad it could be if a fire did happen …’

  The solution was simple: bigger venues with easier access and exits, and fewer nooks and crannies; environments that would also allow bigger, broader-based crowds. At that time, there were a great deal of empty industrial buildings in London, in pre-development areas like Goods Way in King’s Cross; where Westfield stands just north of the Shepherds Bush roundabout; Curtain Road, by Old Street; Tooley Street, in between the southern ends of London and Tower bridges; or what became the Olympic Park, just south of Hackney Wick. To the resourceful soundmen, these disused offices and warehouses were dancehalls waiting to happen.

  It’s a common misconception that warehouse parties were cavalier affairs – find a disused space, kick the doors in, run power from a lamp post, and you’re away. The reality of the successful ones was far more mundane, and drew on Norman’s flair for organisation:

  ‘The idea for a warehouse party manifested itself when, in ‘82 or ‘83, I read about a big event in Australia where twenty-odd-thousand people turned up to a disused warehouse – Grace Jones was there. I pictured it in my mind … Amazing! At that point I’m doing house parties for a hundred or a hundred and fifty people, and I always wanted to do something bigger or grander, to take the next step. It had been in my head for a while and this thing I read about helped it germinate, gave me that flash of inspiration.

  ‘It helped that we were already doing the Carnival, so I knew all the rudimentary things to keep us self-sufficient: you need a generator, ‘cause there ain’t gonna be no power in the factory, and we had a van – power and mobility. So we knew we could bring the sound system in and hook it up to the generator to play records. Then once I’d scouted the place we are going to use, all we need is some way of securing the building so people don’t bunk in. Remember, this is a sound system, it’s a collective – we roped in a few friends, but there’s enough of us in the sound to run the dance, we’ve got the driver, box boys, selector, security … and I took care of the promotion and the media.

  ‘Then you have to have the debrief afterwards – “What went wrong? How can we improve? How come all these people got in for free? How can we get people in quicker? How do we deal with the Old Bill? What are we going to do if they try to take the speakers?” All of these things, we used to sit down and discuss, because we knew we had to deal with them. Nobody was doing that kind of thing then.

  ‘You had to have your wits about you, too. We were able to get away with it when Old Bill was shutting parties down, because I used their prejudices against them and put white guys up front. I knew that if I was seen as the face of it, we wouldn’t have got off the ground, so I teamed up with my middle-class white mates, instructed them on the mantra of what to say when the Old Bill came – even wrote it down for them!’

  It helped in this respect that one of Norman’s sound-system partners was Judge Jules. A white former law student – hence the nickname – he would regularly confound constabulary with rapid-fire legal jargon. On plenty of occasions, suited-and-boot
ed young white guys convinced police that commandeered premises belonged to their fathers, who must have forgotten to inform the local nick that there would be a birthday party here that weekend.

  Trevor was always confident they could bring an audience into the warehouses, as their ingrained sound-system mentality was all about pleasing the punters. The time-honoured principle described with regard to the Paramount Ballroom in chapter one, and that was also the cornerstone of the West Kingston lawn dances of the 1950s, remained the same – ‘undersell and over-deliver’. Things were no different in the 1980s: your crowd had still stumped up hard-earned cash to come in, and they were still expecting to forget the week at work and all that went with it. If they’ve paid a tenner to get in, you’d better give them a twelve-pound dance. This, Trevor reckons, was more about music than environment:

  A rare view from behind the Soul II Soul rig at the Africa Centre.

  ‘The warehouses were perfect for us. Our crowd wanted cover, they didn’t mind the odd mice running around, but they wanted a roof, a hard floor to dance on, and a good sound system – music was the key, not drugs or anything else. That was why there was never a black crowd at those big raves in fields, where chancers were making all that money and selling drugs and Es and stuff.

  ‘It might sound weird, but we’ve always been hard people to impress yet very easy to please. Really, we were unfussy people, still happy if things were simple – remember our original nightclubs and dances didn’t have flashing lights and t’ing, we had a red bulb in the corner and one bouncer that nobody fucked with. It was simple, you had electricity and that was all you needed. Unless you’re not playing the right tunes – you could put me in the best club in the world, but if I’m not playing the right tunes then the black crowd aren’t having it. They’ll just stand there looking at you [he strikes an arms-folded, glaring pose]. We’d cut our teeth knowing how hard we’d need to work, so that was like second nature.