Sounds Like London

by Lloyd Bradley

  ‘We knew it was all about the tunes, how to play them and how to react instantly to the crowd to keep them dancing. That was all that ever mattered when we did the house parties, and we took that into the warehouses and the wider situations. It’s just the job we did, but compared with most mainstream clubs or discos, it was on a whole other level.’

  BETWEEN 1983 AND 1986, this was London’s hottest underground scene. Promotions like Family Funktion, Shake’n’Fingerpop, Dance Wicked, High On Hope, Soul II Soul and Too Damn Funky featured deejays including Paul ‘Trouble’ Anderson, Judge Jules, CJ Mackintosh, Derek Boland, Gordon Mac and Dan the Man. Venues ranged from the totally illegal and broken-into to the semi-legal – it was not unusual for youthful commercial estate agents to ‘loan out’ premises just to be able to hang out with a sound system – and the fully legit, with the warehouse vibe recreated in spots like the Arches in Vauxhall, the Fridge in Brixton and HQ in Camden Town.

  Publicity was handled in standard sound-system style – flyers were handed out around a venue, outside other dances, or left in cafes, shops, barbers or colleges. At this point the club flyer was far from ubiquitous, and blues-dance handouts were never in any case the most imaginative of documents. Once again, traditions were adapted to address a new market that was becoming increasingly aware of design and expected a visual connection. The Face launched in 1980; ‘designer’ became a buzzword in the elaborate post-punk fashions; and even the reggae world, in which images had always been optional extras, caught on. On Greensleeves’ Disco 45 sleeves, a bunch of hand-drawn characters, many of whom would only be found on London’s streets, showed the music’s progression from Jamaica to a Westway sound system. Derek Yates remembers Jazzie asking him to design a flyer for Soul II Soul’s Serious Shit sessions at Portlands in Great Portland Street.

  ‘That generation really understood the importance of visuals – Jazzie certainly did – because it was an obvious way of instantly identifying with your desired market as doing something different. We did flyers that looked interesting and exciting, and let people know that it was a sound system, but it was a sound system that was open to them … as long as they were cool! That was the great thing about illustrating the flyers, you could show people at the dance that looked like the people you were handing them out to. It worked, because it really opened things up, and it probably paved the way for the club-flyers-as-art-in-themselves thing.’

  Norman talks of the personal touch:

  ‘I never used to use the words “soul” or “funk” or “dance” or “club” on our flyers, I just used the word “party”. Everybody will come to a party, but the moment you start putting tags on it you’re excluding people … the rock’n’roller or the punk who goes “I can’t stand that soul boy shit!” They’re not coming! So I just used to put on my flyers “Shake’n’Fingerpop Party BYOB’ – bring your own beer. We wanted people to turn up with open minds, after that it was up to us.

  ‘I’d get my mate who was a burgeoning graphics student to scrawl something, then I’d go up to the photocopier place in King’s Cross because they were open on Saturdays. Ten thousand copies, cut them up, then go down to all the trendy bars down the King’s Road and all the fashion shops and the hairdressers. A completely different way of promoting than through the magazines, because there you pay for an advert, then your gig will get written up, but who the fuck are you reaching? My hairdresser friends, my student friends don’t read Blues & Soul! So we had to find another way of reaching them.

  ‘It was how it’s been done in sound systems for about forty years, and it gives you the personal touch that always works. “Oh, this flyer looks wicked!” Yeah? Give me a call, and I’ll put you on the guest list if you bring half a dozen mates. Person to person to person contact is how we did it – built up networks, and our parties were always infinitely better.’

  Their efforts to attract broad-based crowds paid off in two influential areas: London’s student population and the fashion crowd. Norman remembers the former as open-minded kids who wanted to enjoy the music and be part of a scene that felt rebellious but was relatively safe. On top of that, being from out of town, they weren’t party to London’s internal prejudices:

  ‘These were white kids, mainly, who were just coming to London. I always knew they were there, but I didn’t know where, as at that time I didn’t know about the halls of residence like at LSE or Goldsmiths or wherever. I lived in inner-city London, and I only really knew black kids who lived on council estates – I don’t remember any kid from my school ever going to university while I was there. But here were these kids who were young like me, they’re dressed like me, they liked fresh sounds and they liked attitude. Then we realised what the crowd we tapped into was, and we went for it. For a lot of them, that was their introduction to our music culture, properly, and they appreciated what they were getting. They were very good to us, because they spread the word among other students and other colleges, then when they went home they told other people about us, which helped it get all over the country. It was a properly multicultural crowd too, and evolved into more a class thing than a race thing. Kids that had a certain attitude towards life, a way of thinking … liberals, I guess.’

  Flyers distributed around hip clothes shops, and colleges like Central Saint Martins and the London College of Fashion, attracted fashion students and the fashion-conscious, so it wasn’t long before the fashion business caught on. Soul II Soul and Good Times were regularly invited to set up at large-scale parties in designers’ own warehouses, even when they weren’t required to play music. Über-stylist Ray Petri, for example, was famously obsessed with sound systems and the reggae aesthetic, as Jazzie recalls:

  ‘Those weren’t the crowds that were truly following us, but such was our kudos that we ended up in there – everybody from the Ray Petris of this world to cool designers such as Christopher Nemeth and John Moore. Then there was the Katharine Hamnetts and the Vivienne Westwoods. I remember the first ones really had nothing to do with the music, because they just hired the sound system. They were fashion people who had this whole fixation on reggae sound systems as a fashion thing – they liked the idea of big speaker boxes and black guys with locks just standing around. I think they had a whole sexual thing going on with it, and definitely it had something to do with Ray Petri.

  The Soul II Soul sound system was a sonic work of art; Derek Yates made it literally so.

  ‘It was important for us because this was our whole philosophy of being a dread, our blackness, and taking it uptown. We did start properly playing these events, when one of them hired the system for a hundred quid and whoever was supposed to play the music – quietly – didn’t turn up, so I went and got my records and played it like a normal dance. They started to vibe off it, and it went on from there. That was important to us, to show what we really about. Our aim was to break the expectation of what people had of us, to break that glass ceiling. Even at that time we [black guys] were all tarred with the same brush, but we weren’t just muggers and stroppy kids – it hasn’t changed much today, every kid carries a knife and everybody’s in a gang.

  ‘It was this crowd that got us into the media, so the style press started writing about us, not the music press. So it was very important for us to be saying to this influential crowd that we had had enough of sufferation, that we were here and we’re enjoying ourselves, and that you will too if you come along with an open mind.’

  Norman saw the connection between what they were doing and the fashion crowd as vital to the scene’s growth:

  ‘The whole soul boy thing flirted with the mainstream, but it ran out of steam because it never addressed the idea that youth culture isn’t just about music. It’s lifestyle, fashion, art … it never addressed that, and the music lost out to the New Romantics, which was the mainstream and all about dressing up. Until then the only press we’d got was appearing in papers like The Sun, in a negative way – All-night, black, drug-taking party in Brixton … But the
new magazines, who had come to us through the fashion world, they put it in a way that the new, enlightened, working-class and middle-class youth in Britain could find palatable. They did the same with hip hop, which is why the youth took to hip-hop culture so eagerly.

  ‘They were lifestyle magazines, not music magazines, and the new wave of sound systems – me and Jazzie particularly – understood that it was about a whole lifestyle.’

  Jazzie addressed the lifestyle aspect with gusto. During the late 1980s it seemed as if half of London was wearing clothing emblazoned with the Funki Dred logo, which was marketed through a series of Soul II Soul shops and market stalls in Camden Town, Tottenham Court Road, Dalston and the Angel. By that time his sound-system crew had achieved a look that both acknowledged and set them aside from London’s other black tribes – ripped peg-leg jeans, bomber jackets, bandana, topped off with dreadlocks shaved at the back and sides. This hairstyle became the defining Funki Dred statement. While it appeared to be acknowledging Rastafari in a very modern, London-centric manner, Jazzie has admitted it was because the guys didn’t want their very proper West Indian mothers to know they were locks-ing up, and could hide the growth on top by perpetually wearing hats.

  Derek Yates, who was hugely significant in Soul II Soul’s evolving look, even created and drew their own comic book, The Adventures Of The Funki Dreds:

  ‘At that time, especially in London, there was a visualisation of street culture, the first time it had happened on that scale. It was a weird mixture of the fine-art influences of the time, of the Harlem Renaissance, mixed with graffiti, mixed with people like Tony McDermott [Greensleeves’ graphic artist], mixed with fanzines, mixed with people drawing their own record covers. The major influences on my work are a collection of covers on reggae records I’ve bought, and Pedro Bell. All were done by untrained artists, so they have a sort of crudeness to them, but also a real direct visual strength I found really exciting. It showed a direct relationship between producer and consumer that was just somebody thinking “Fuck me this is a good idea, I’m going to do it!” Importantly it wasn’t owned by the mainstream, you felt you owned it. That made people like me associate with it more, because it did feel like you could do it too – it was, sort of, democratic.

  Never one to limit his ambition, Jazzie, with of course the Funki Dreds, conquered the planet Arg.

  ‘It was a very sound-system relationship between the artists and the public. Jazzie picked up on this and understood from very early on that a strong visual identity would be vital for Soul II Soul. There was already the Funki Dred look which he’d figured out as a way of giving the dreadlocks thing a London twist, and Jazzie said to me one day “We need a tee shirt!”, I think it was for the Carnival, What set off my thinking about that logo was the DBC tee shirt, a really classic piece of artwork that really told the story of that time. I remember seeing that and thinking “Wow! This is the first image I’ve seen anybody wearing that is mine. That is my culture that is my people … that is my music.” Ironically it was a black geezer smoking a spliff, but it was what I lived every day in 1981 or whenever it was. It was ours, it felt ours in a way that nothing else I’d ever seen felt ours.

  ‘With the Soul II Soul logo I took that DBC idea, which was still related to some sort of cliché of dreads with spliffs, and made it a bit more London. I wanted to make him look a bit more like the people that I go to clubs with, so I’ve given him the short dreadlocks shaved at the sides and I’ve given him the round glasses. Some people thought it made him a bit whiter, but at that time and around that culture, black and white are funny terms – at that time white people had their hair cut like that, black people had their hair cut like that, white people wore round glasses, black people wore round glasses … I wanted it to look like all of us, to look more London. The DBC tee shirt looked London enough to stop me at the time, but it wasn’t the London of Soul II Soul.’

  Jazzie, however, is far more pragmatic, positioning his retail empire as the acceptable face of Thatcherism:

  ‘All those things came about as a result of the size of the parties we were doing, where people really needed to see who was who. We had our look with the locks shaved at the sides, and we all wore red bomber jackets and tore-up denim jeans, then when we started to screenprint our own tee shirt we wore that with it. It was so we stood apart from the crowd at our dances, but when we started with the tee shirts people were “Aaw, let me get one of them, let me get one of them …” So we started to sell them in the dance, just stuck one up on the wall where we had our sound, and we were selling the tee shirt as much as we were getting people coming in the door. Our dances were like a pound or two quid to get in, which weren’t nothing then, but the shirts might have been five or seven quid.

  ‘But people really started to link with it as being part of the whole collective thing, and it just escalated from there. We already had four or five market stalls, and the shop in Camden High Street, later we got on in Tottenham Court Road, selling secondhand clothes and remaking clothes. It was an underground thing and that’s what people wanted. Everything was related to us, but because we were in the High Street, we were a sort of version of Vivienne Westwood and all of that sort of punk thing. We’d sell Troop and Kangols and flight jackets and all that b-boy aesthetic, and because we were who we are people accepted it as authentic. In Camden we had a ninety percent white clientele, mostly tourists, and, because it wasn’t so different to what we were wearing, they knew we were selling them authentic London street culture.

  ‘It was about being entrepreneurial. People were surprised that we did all that, but people coming over from the West Indies when our parents came over were always trying to do a little t’ing, and we were no different. At the time, Maggie Thatcher coming up had legitimised the moves we were making, although I don’t think we were what she had in mind. But as it turned out we were practically selling a lifestyle in the shops before we had the Soul II Soul clothing and the other merchandising, This was before we’d released any records, so with the tee shirts and the clothing going all over the country and all over the world thanks to people visiting Camden Market, we were already in people’s minds.’

  This, Derek believes, played a major part in establishing Soul II Soul so deeply in youth culture at the time. In a post-punk, post-Bob-Marley world where many people were far more socially open-minded, that logo became a beacon of multicultural-ness – even if you didn’t know its origins:

  ‘Soul II Soul went mainstream because it was a complete product. It had merchandising, it had a visual element. They were a brand, built by Jazzie. Although I designed the logo, Jazzie defined the identity of Soul II Soul, and by the time the mainstream got interested that identity was total: they had sound applications; they had visual applications; they had punchlines, catchphrases … a philosophy! It would be really interesting to go back and define the Soul II Soul brand according to those corporate branding guidelines that I have to look at all the time, because it’s all there – every aspect of what’s needed to build a successful brand is there.

  ‘It all began with that tee shirt, because it meant Jazzie’s sound system was about more than playing a record. Anybody could buy into it and feel part of something. They could see people in Camden Town wearing it, and think ‘Fuck me, that’s a good tee shirt’, buy it, and they might get into the music that way. Or you could identify yourself as being a Soul II Soul fan, which then became a metaphor for “I am cool because I’m wearing this tee shirt – I go to the Africa Centre, I go to London warehouse parties, it doesn’t matter I’m only fourteen and my mum won’t let me out.”

  ‘The Soul II Soul logo worked on a broader level, and Jazzie completely understood its power because he totally got that thing that people like about teeshirts – you buy a piece of clothing that you put on your chest and you immediately give out fifty messages about yourself. You walk around in a Soul II Soul tee shirt, you’re saying “I’m not racist, I believe in multiculturalism”, “I have
good taste, I like black music” … all of which would make you attractive to the opposite sex! You were defining your attitude as a person. I can remember thinking that was the point at which it changed, for somebody young and white such as myself … Or maybe it didn’t change, but there was a point at which I realised that the coolest, the most contemporary, the most cutting-edge thing that I could do was to hang out at a sound system, to associate with people like Jazzie B.’

  Appropriately enough, when Jazzie’s crew tried to get the first batch of commercially printed tee shirts from a print shop in Essex Road, the Greek proprietor wasn’t at all keen on dealing with these large black men with the radical-looking logo. He directed them to Tyrone Whyte, a black tee-shirt printer and UK Karate Champion, who was only too glad to help. Such was the value of subsequent orders, Tyrone was able to expand and re-equip his operation with state-of-the-art electronic equipment in new factory premises.

  AT MUCH THE SAME TIME, two hugely significant, black-owned, London pirate radio stations were set up. Kiss FM, launched by club deejays Gordon Mac and George Power in 1985, involved Norman Jay from the beginning, while Derek Boland’s WBLS, first on air in 1986, featured Jazzie B on a deejay roster that also included a young Tim Westwood. These operations stepped into the gap left by the enthusiastic official crackdown on the jazz/funk pirates described in chapter seven. WBLS in particular shifted the approach away from a kind of borderline cheesy ‘radio presenter’ mode to a sound-system-centric vibe. Whereas the previous generation had aped legitimate radio as a prelude to applying for their own licences, these stations accepted their illegality, and used it to represent an audience that was already happy to rave at illegal parties in unoccupied buildings. Norman believes it was the evolved spirit of DBC: