‘You have to remember this is pre-internet days, pre-global networking days, so ‘new media’ was the coming of the pirate stations – we could start pirate stations that gave people like me and Jazzie access to the media for the first time. It was one more sound-system way of doing things. I remember radio stations which again perpetuated the whole suburban white soul boy thing – we could never get on them! – whereas DBC was so wicked because it was like a blues dance on the air. That was the culture then, that the kids or the audience understood, because it was of the black council estate, which is what Kiss did but from the warehouse perspective – which was not just about the black experience, it was everyone’s experience in London. Kiss was the all-important voice, it accurately reflected what was really going on on the street.’
Repeated DTI raids ensured that WBLS lasted only a matter of months. Its shutting down simply served to strengthen Kiss, which hoovered up deejays including Jazzie and Trevor. The station was so in tune with what young London had become that it soon had half a million listeners. Even though it was illegal, Kiss was voted the city’s second-best radio station in 1987 – behind Capital Radio and in front of Radio One – by readers of the London Evening Standard.
Kiss FM was, maintains Trevor, ‘the tap in for a lot of kids to get into the scene and the music’. Despite its popularity, canny business sense in terms of advertising sales and promotions, and more or less perpetual petitioning of the Home Office for a licence, however, the station was raided so frequently that it scaled back to weekends only:
‘We were taken off air a lot, it was like fifty percent of the time Kiss FM wasn’t on the air – I’d be surprised if I did more than fifty percent of my shows. Sometimes we’d be on on Friday night and taken off on Saturday. My show was on Sunday, so I was always fingers-crossed all through the weekend … please … pleeease … or if we were going to get busted, then at least let us get busted on Friday so we can get back on by Sunday. If it was busted Saturday night I had no chance! I actually think that added to our popularity, added to the whole desire to get grooves, the fact that your favourite station – and Kiss beyond any dispute was the best station – was barely on air.’
The Soul II Soul merchandise laid the foundations for their global triumph before they’d ever made a record. Here (from the left) Jazzie, Aitch B and Daddae lounge outside their first shop, in Camden Town.
Kiss FM did a massive job of publicising the new sound systems, and the quintessence of their impact on London youth culture was Soul II Soul’s Sunday night sessions at the Africa Centre in Covent Garden. Running from 1986 until practically the end of the decade, it was the perfect club environment: legal, regular, and possibly the most appropriately named venue in town, as the Funki Dreds renamed it ‘Africa Centre of the World’.
THE SOUND SYSTEMS EASED OUT of the warehouse scene during the middle of the decade, believing that it had become out of control. The druggier end of acid house was taking over, bringing with it, as Jazzie puts it, ‘chancers and violence’. He was determined not to lose the scene’s improvised vibe, however. The Africa Centre’s unadorned hall was suitably low-key, and perfect for the soundsystem’s banners and streamers. Trevor and Norman were regulars on the decks, as were Judge Jules and CJ Mackintosh, as well as long-time Soul II Soul associates Nellee Hooper and his Wild Bunch sound system from Bristol. Live vocalists included Bobby Byrd, Vicki Anderson, Darryl Pandy, Rose Windross and N’Dea Davenport.
The location of the Africa Centre was important, too. The sound system was playing so many gigs around town in its bid to become the biggest that the operators felt they were spreading themselves too thin, sometimes having to divide equipment and records to be in two places at once. As with the funk clubs described in chapter seven, a central site attracted kids from all parts of town, and thus effectively spread the word of Soul II Soul. And the crowd they attracted to these nights validated everything for which these sound systems had been striving. Here was a multi-culti, multi-racial, wide-age-ranged assortment of ravers, dreads, b-boys, soul boys, suburbanites, sticksmen, students, tourists and the merely curious, all of whom completely bought in to the situation. The reason those Africa Centre parties are still talked about as the capital’s best-ever club night is that the sense of community between hosts and crowd was on a par with the first sound-system lawn dances in 1950s’ Jamaica. It was the ultimate collective, epitomising the Soul II Soul motto ‘A happy face, a thumping bass for a lovin’ race’. Jazzie remembers having five or six hundred people packed in there:
‘There was a balcony, too, but that got closed off because it became unsafe – so many people up there feeling the groove you could see it bouncing up and down. We’d respond to how the crowd was feeling that night by getting different vibes going, we’d break new tunes in there so they’d be getting stuff they could only get there – like the old-time Jamaican sound systems – and if we’d pressed up too many of a tune we’d bang it about four times during a session to get a load of people coming up wanting to buy it!
‘We had all sorts in there, and because the vibe of the place was so full on, if you couldn’t get into it, you just didn’t go – if you hadn’t come to dance people would let you know! The whole thing was so inclusive, which was how we came up with the “Happy face …” motto. We used to get a crew of black guys in there who came up from south London who were a little bit edgy, more like wide boys, but because it was such a unique thing we were doing, we were able to turn the lights on and say “You, you, you, you and you … look, we know who you fucking are, but this is what’s going on in this place. Join in or fuck off!” Those hardcore elements understood and ended up being our security.
‘There was such a sense of community and purpose in there that one bank holiday we were rammed in there with a queue of about four hundred outside who couldn’t get in, I went on the mic and said “Look, you’ve been in here for four hours now and there’s as many people outside want the same experience, how about you do them a favour?” And they actually fucking left! No complaints, just “Fair enough, see you next week.” We swept the floor and let the late shift in.’
Trevor remembers the Africa Centre crowd as being in the West End but not of the West End:
‘I used to look at that crowd and say “My God, this is London,” because they were from all corners – locals from all corners of London. We had a core of dancers, which you had to have, we had a few fashionistas, a few musicians, usually, and we’d see deejays from other circles standing at the back to hear what’s going down – that used to make me and Jazzie laugh! But really it was about real people. We knew that, and so did the people who came there.’
It wasn’t completely without problems, but even they were suitably self-regulated:
‘There was a famous occasion when somebody had gone to the police to report a Walkman stolen, and the police came in to the Africa Centre adamant the perpetrator was inside. They said they were going to shut the place down if they didn’t find him and the guy sacrificed himself. He came out of the crowd and said “Yeah, I nicked a Walkman” and they took him away. That’s how much people loved that club.’
Jazzie backs that up:
‘If anybody ‘lost’ anything [he makes quote marks in the air], like a Walkman or a bag, we’d get on the mic and ask if anybody had found it. Without fail, within ten minutes it would be handed in. Really, we didn’t have a lot of trouble until we really started to blow up and I’m convinced that the WAG Club and this other club round the corner were the ones that kept sending the Old Bill down. Up until that point, there were no broken shops or anything going off, and as soon as the police started getting heavy with us everyone started to get more frustrated and some things, not much, went off.
‘That went against the grain, and showed other people reacting to us in a way that hadn’t moved on. The point in us evolving into what we became was that it really wasn’t a black-and-white thing, it was the content of people’s characters that carried us t
hrough.’
THE LOGICAL NEXT STEP was to start making music. The hippest club, interest from the new generation of media, six-figure radio audiences and a slick merchandising operation already in place … if lovers’ rock had had that kind of support system, it would probably rule the world by now.
At first, the sound-system scene attached huge kudos to new or rare records, and appeared to have very little interest in making its own music. No one’s really sure why that was, other than it was never part of the soul scenes in which it grew up. Trevor agrees that their way of thinking was far closer to the jazz/funk guys than to reggae’s entrepreneurs:
‘The feeling was that it would never work, because it just wasn’t set up for people like us. We were thinking about the established record companies and they weren’t exactly biting our hands off. I can’t speak for the others, but I was always scared to make music. I was always “Awww … in case I fail”, that sort of attitude, and I think that a lot of people were like me. I remember Jazzie having this conversation about getting into music, and Norman saying it will never work. I remember us having a meeting, and Jazzie making this announcement about “I’m gonna make some tunes”, and Norman, Joey and me just sitting there looking at him. We were sceptical. Until “Fairplay”. That tune changed everything.’
“Fairplay”, the first release by Soul II Soul as recording artists in 1988, was the result of continuing experiments by Jazzie and the collective. In true soundman style, he’d cut specials for his dances on dubplate and see how they went down, honing the music with each attempt, then give the well-received cuts a push on the radio.
It made perfect sense for Jazzie to make records; he had a day job working as a sound engineer, in the studios owned and operated by the first British teen idol Tommy Steele, no less. Having recorded several of the jazz/funk acts mentioned in the previous chapter, he understood the process, and had access to a studio and dub-cutting facilities. He’d been doing unofficial remixes and mixtape-style acetates for the sound system for a long time, and had pressed up some of his own specials for sale in the Soul II Soul shops.
Pretty much a template for what became the Soul II Soul sound, “Fairplay” was one such special. Virgin A&R man and Africa Centre regular Mick Clarke was so impressed when its huge bassline and Rose Windross vocals boomed out of the Funki Dred’s sound system that he signed them to a three-singles-and-one-album deal. It was the perfect way to get your demo to a record company: shudderingly bass-heavy reproduction and a reaction by the crowd to ‘their tune’ of cheering and singing along. Most important of all, Clarke appreciated Soul II Soul’s world, and figured it might not be the best idea to put them through conventional record-company channels. Jazzie still chuckles at the memory:
‘Clarkie got it. The record business, and to whatever degree the media, didn’t get what we were about – still don’t, really – but Mick Clarke did. More than that, he understood how we did things, and knew it could only work if he let us do it our way.
‘I’d always made records for the sound, but my thing about selling them turned around when the clubs were too full. The warehouses we were playing had reached capacity, and at the same time everyone was wanting mixtapes from us, as we were famous for the London beats we were making. Somewhere along the line the two things connected, and my thinking was that if that allowed more people to get into our things, then we’d be the biggest sound system in the world. If you’re listening to my records, then you’re listening to my sound system. That was the genuine reason for it, and the commerce thing came further down the road, because we had the shops. Then it was like ‘How many? We sold a thousand? Fucking hell!’”
Coincidentally, this is very similar to what happened to Coxsone Dodd, Jamaica’s most famous soundman. Dodd needed to be convinced he could sell his specials, and was astounded to find that he actually could. He went on to found Studio One.
‘So we knew all of that before we signed a record deal, so we could prove we knew what we were doing. We said “Right, our record’s got to be on white label, and we’ve got to sell them.” The record company said “What, like bootlegs?”, and we just agreed with them, even though it showed that within the company they didn’t really know what we were doing. They gave us the promos, so then we were like the distributors for our own records but with Virgin paying for it all! We were selling our records like imports, to all the little record shops, and it was really like a little hole in the market and we filled it. It taught us how to promote and distribute our own music.
‘It helped because they didn’t have a set-up like that yet, or if they did it was all based on Loose Ends and stuff like that, which was still pretty industry standard. When we came along we made everything much more street, and after initially fighting to get press we embraced the fact that the press didn’t get it, and it really blew up for us.’
Even to say ‘it really blew up’ is something of an understatement. Neither “Fairplay” nor its follow-up “Feel Free” charted, but after that, during 1989, Soul II Soul’s “Keep On Movin’” and “Back To Life” could be heard floating out of virtually any open window. Tunes that were perfectly representative of the new wave of sound systems, and the crowds that they attracted – a bit of soul, a bit of reggae, a bit of hip hop, a bit of pop, all wrapped up in a seductive, big bass beat – to become the Official Summer Soundtrack. This was contemporary London on vinyl, and the rest of the world immediately bought into it. Those tunes kicked off a six-year run of success that included top twenty singles all over the world, two UK number one albums and two Grammies. Soul II Soul eventually sold almost seven million albums, making them Britain’s most successful black act ever.
Soul II Soul’s was one of the slickest, funkiest live shows on either side of the Atlantic.
With hindsight, Trevor is certain that only Jazzie could have achieved this:
‘It’s to do with his determination as an individual – when he wanted to do something, he invariably did it.’
BY PROVIDING AN ALTERNATIVE, controllable outlet, the combination of the new sound systems and the success of Soul II Soul changed how black music operated in this country. With intelligence and resolve, they took the self-help spirit of lovers’ rock and the mainstream aspirations of jazz/funk, and expressed black Britishness in a way that contributed hugely to culture as a whole. While this was the first time this had happened on such a wide-reaching level, it was, given the timing, not too surprising. This generation of black Britons remained close enough to the Caribbean or Africa to have assumed the resourcefulness and work ethic of their immigrant parents, while being sufficiently well versed in London’s machinations fully to understand the ways of their hosts. Forty years on from the Windrush, this was a significant turn of events.
During the 1990s, the audience for a much broader spectrum of British black acts was ready and waiting, and it became much easier for them to be taken seriously by the UK music industry. Artists like the Brand New Heavies, Beverley Knight, Young Disciples, Urban Species, Galliano, Massive Attack, Omar, Us3, Mica Paris and Roni Size all did well. Making direct nods to Soul II Soul, black bands on both sides of the Atlantic adopted snappy, bite-sized philosophies, while hippie-fied hip hop became very fashionable. What didn’t surprise Jazzie was that neither in the UK nor the US did record companies start knocking out Soul II Soul clones:
‘They couldn’t. Because it wasn’t a manufactured thing, they couldn’t just put a few together. They only ever got about half of what we were about, and never got the idea that we were a collective, not a group in the accepted sense. We ran it as a sound system, whereas in the days of rock’n’roll or, say, Eddy Grant, they could understand that and fix it, so it was the guy with the guitar who could sing who’d be out front, and he was the one they could concentrate on. Then America tried to put their finger on it because we were so cool to them over there, and they missed the point, treating us as too black for certain situations and not black enough for others.
‘
We never stopped being a sound system and you can’t just manufacture that. Also, there is no way this could have happened in any other part of the world.’
Jazzie now has an OBE, and Trevor and Norman an MBE each, but their most vital legacy today is on the streets of London, among the next generation of sound systems, who automatically plugged into how it all worked from a British rather than Jamaican point of view. Most importantly, they could see how far it could go.
The coming waves of London black music – latter-day ‘collectives’ like the So Solid Crew, Roll Deep and so on – benefited hugely from this template, using pirate radio, the internet, club nights and dances to operate as self-contained, self-supporting sound systems. As we’ll see, this savvy outlaw mentality pushed itself into the mainstream to such an extent that London black music has become a cornerstone of the UK pop business. Without Soul II Soul, Madhatter, Good Times and so on, there would be no Dizzee Rascal, there would be no Kano or N’Dubz, and not much Rita Ora. Trevor agrees:
‘I don’t think there would … although you’ll never tell them that.’
3
Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner
‘We’ve been here for a long time now, so
it’s inevitable people are going to feel more
comfortable around each other, and you
don’t need a firm knowledge of black culture
to like Chipmunk or Dizzee Rascal.’
Sounds Like London Page 30