The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah

by Benjamin Zephaniah

  People in the media would have their cosy debates in TV studios, not understanding the reality of life on the frontline. We were angry; we wanted to hit back at Babylon and burn it down. Some people asked, ‘Why downtown?’ as in, ‘Why riot in our own neighbourhoods?’ The truth is we had nowhere else to go. The police had come to us using constant intimidation tactics and racism, and those areas of those cities where the uprisings happened were our space. We couldn’t say, ‘We’re gonna pool a load of people together and go to another part of the city’ – uprisings are not organised like that. If Babylon was going to come into our area, using state-sanctioned brutality, we were going to fight back. People were sick of being beaten down, beaten up and picked on.

  When I look at what people have to put up with from their governments, I’m surprised they don’t rise up more often. When you live in a community under pressure, where the living is hard and the policing racist and uneven, you can feel the tension build and build, and it can take just one incident for it all to kick off. The most recent uprising in August 2011 started because of police being cleared of shooting dead yet another black man, but it quickly descended into looting. I never looted, but I can see how disadvantaged and unpoliticised young people might see an uprising as a chance to accumulate stuff any which way they can, especially if it has a label on it. I think it’s all part of the legacy of Thatcherite greed – the privileged class will do their tax swindles and shady banking but the people on the streets, that’s their version of it.

  But back in the 1980s, after all the times we’d been stopped and searched and slapped in the face by the police, this was our opportunity to let it all out. We wanted to get back; we wanted to vent our anger. After the riots of April 1981 the government was forced to set up an inquiry, which was headed by Lord Scarman – a judge and fully signed-up member of the establishment – who found that the sus law, and the way we were being stopped and searched, were just two of the contributory factors that caused the uprisings.

  We had to rise up. Conversations and inquiries weren’t going to do it; debates on television and paying educated black people to tell us to calm down weren’t going to do it; we had to protest, and take ‘actions’ on the street to get this law abolished, so that’s what we did, and that’s how we won.

  We rose up again in September 1985 after police shot Cherry Groce in her home in Brixton. They were trying to arrest her son, my friend Michael Groce, on firearms charges. Michael wasn’t there when they raided, but the way they brutalised his mother meant that she was left crippled and spent the rest of her days in a wheelchair. When this uprising started I was in the East End, but the message got to me via some political activists.

  A couple of friends and I jumped into a car and drove to Brixton. We were stopped on the way by police who said we couldn’t go any further, so we parked the car and went by underground. In order not to bring attention to ourselves, we bought return tickets, but when we reached Brixton station the ticket office had been abandoned. As soon as we hit the streets the police hit us, and we resisted.

  On another occasion I was arrested and taken in for questioning before I was able to reach the frontline. The police said they had intelligence and they knew that I knew who had organised the riot (their words). I didn’t know, of course, and the uprising was not organised, but as a way of making me talk a policeman put me in the corridor and said, ‘Would you wait there for a moment, please?’ Then these other policemen came past and, one by one, they stamped on my feet. It was torture; they would say things like, ‘Sorry, young man’ or ‘I didn’t smell your feet there’, but every one of them did it.

  At one point I saw a woman coming towards me in civilian clothes and I thought she must be a probation officer or a visiting magistrate. She looked so innocent, so I thought she wouldn’t do anything, but then, crunch, her stiletto came down on my toes. It hurt more than the men’s shoes and, unlike the men, she stayed in position for a while and twisted her heel. She looked right at me and said, ‘Is it true what they say about the size of men’s feet?’ and ‘Is it true what they say about the size of black men’s feet?’ I could hear the other officers laughing in rooms off the corridor. I stayed silent.

  She went, and a few minutes later I was called into the interview room and was asked if I was ready to talk. I couldn’t talk, I knew nothing, but every time they stepped on my toes or slapped my face I stored up the anger and, when they let me out, I went downtown and let all that anger out.

  The problem was that the more ‘famous’ I got, the less I could actually do. One night in Brixton a policeman was coming towards me; he had pulled out his truncheon and his whole demeanor told me he didn’t want to stop for a chat. I looked around for a brick or some kind of weapon with which to defend myself, but there was nothing, and then he shouted, ‘What are you going to do now, read a poem to me?’ At that moment I realised that when it came to actions on the streets I had to know my limitations and understand that I couldn’t disappear into the night anymore.

  25

  THE NEW VARIETY

  I did many gigs at North East London Polytechnic, or NELP, as it was called then, but one was memorable for two reasons. The first was that the guy who was supposed to pay me disappeared with my money. He also disappeared with the door money, the cloakroom money, the beer money and the money of my supporting artists. And second, I met Roland Muldoon. He sat me down and told me about an idea he had. He wanted to get away from all the bullshit that other comedians were doing at the time, with their racist, sexist, mother-in-law gags, and he wanted to create something new. He called it New Variety.

  He told me he had a pool of people to work with, among them Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders and Tony Allen. The a cappella group The Flying Pickets were also in, at least a year before they had their number-one hit. Then there was Arthur Smith, Ade Edmondson, Alexi Sayle and Rik Mayall. Another performer was Pauline Melville, who went on to become a respected novelist. These comedians were already performing in the Comedy Store in central London, but Roland wanted to get them into the working-class areas of London. I listened to him telling me all this and I thought, This is a great idea, but he could just be mad. It turned out to be a great idea, and he was mad, but we did it.

  On a New Variety bill there would be a wide range of performers, each performing for 20–25 minutes. We would all get on stage and do our own slots, and sometimes we would combine. In July 1982, when Michael Fagan climbed into the Queen’s bedroom and woke her up to ask for a cigarette, me and Pauline Melville did our take on it. She played the Queen and I played the intruder, but I was looking for a spliff and a little conversation.

  These were big gigs in great venues and my slot usually followed the comedians. The audiences were really open-minded, so it was great to be part of another artistic movement where we all had similar ideas. There were no gags about blacks, Englishmen, Irishmen and Scotsmen going into pubs; no jokes where women were called ‘birds’ or ‘her indoors’; in fact, we poked fun at the people who told those jokes, and of course, at the political establishment.

  The people on the New Variety circuit were a breath of fresh air. A year or two earlier, when I’d been in the bookshop, I was surrounded by people who’d read books and were full of ideas. There was a lesbian, or maybe two; there was a gay guy, or maybe three; a Jewish guy (or a guy that said he was Jewish), and a few black folk. We all talked about our experiences and the books we’d read, and we went on marches together, but with the New Variety family I felt that we came together to express ourselves politically through creating and not just reading. We were bringing the words to life and influencing one another. No one was trying to outdo anyone; there was no competition; we didn’t care who headlined, we just did whatever would make the show work and, backstage, well, there you could feel the love.

  Roland Muldoon was, by his own estimation, militant. He was anti-police, anti-establishment and anti any authority. He was always smoking a spliff and wearing a hat, and wou
ld talk to me for ages about where to find the best weed. He was also part of a theatre group called CAST – he and his wife Claire told me it stood for the Campaign Against Shakespearian Theatre. One of his plays was called Sedition, with the subtitle Living off an Arts Council Grant. He’d actually got an Arts Council grant and had to write a play to justify it, but he didn’t know what to write, so he bought some weed with the money. When he (and the company, I guess) had smoked the weed, he wrote a play about smoking the weed. He’d done another play where they’d chopped off the Queen’s head. I don’t know where he got the money for that, but it wouldn’t surprise me if was from the Prince’s Trust . . .

  Like most poets, my work went through different stages. There was a time when it was more about the ranting than the work itself. Ranting punk poets like Steven Wells (aka Swells), Porky the Poet (aka Phil Jupitus) and Attila the Stockbroker had the ability to perform at a fast pace and not lose the audience. Alongside them was a movement of radical black poets, whose main source of inspiration was reggae, and they were called dub poets. I could rant as well as I could dub, and because I was able to cross over so well and perform to both audiences it was very natural to call my first EP Dub Ranting.

  26

  THAT FIRST ALBUM

  I recorded Dub Ranting with a small label called Radical Wallpaper, run by Red Saunders. As well as being a founding member of Rock Against Racism, he was also a well-known left-wing operator, photographer, dedicated anti-racist and someone who could get things done. He stood out at gigs; he would come on stage in a bright boiler suit and introduce the acts, but again it wasn’t just about introducing the bands; it was also about reminding people of the cause.

  He wanted to record some of us ranting poets, so he signed Swells, Attila the Stockbroker and me. I can’t actually remember signing anything – we just trusted each other. Dub Ranting was mainly poems, with only one track that was a poem with percussion accompaniment. It was recorded by the well-known, soon-to-be-legendary south London reggae producer Mad Professor. The recording didn’t really capture the way the poems were performed at gigs, but it still worked.

  Around this time I met a guy called Spartacus R. He’d had minor fame as the bass player in the Afro-funk band Osibisa, and was once a friend of Eddy Grant’s, but he didn’t really make it. He tried going solo, but that didn’t work out either, and by all accounts he became a little bitter. He started doing a one-man-band thing, with bells around his ankles and his guitar in his hands. We started hanging out and doing a few gigs together, and soon he became my informal manager. One day we went into a small studio and recorded a musical version of ‘Dis Policeman Keeps on Kicking Me to Death’ – the poem that’d had the crowd joining in at the Anti Nazi League gigs.

  It was just a little version for ourselves but it ended up on a tape for the massively influential music paper the NME (New Musical Express), which was putting out compilation cassettes of indie recording artists. The cassette was called Racket Packet and it went out in ’83. John Peel heard it and asked me to go into the BBC studio and record a session for him. So we did. We were given a date for the broadcast of the poem, then on the night we waited and waited but it wasn’t played. When I contacted John Peel he told me it wasn’t his fault and I should talk to his producer, John Walters. When I got John Walters on the phone he told me that it wasn’t played because I’d said the word ‘fucking’ in the middle of the poem. I argued with both John Peel and John Walters, saying it was always in the poem and nothing had changed since they’d first heard it, so it was crazy for them to now say they couldn’t broadcast it. It didn’t matter what I said, they weren’t going to play it, and they never did. That tape must still be hidden in a BBC vault somewhere.

  Despite our initial disagreement, John Peel and I became good friends. He thought what I did was in a world of its own, and would always advertise (or plug) my performances before they happened, and after the gigs he would always ask me how I’d got on. One night, as I was driving to a gig in Harlow organised by Attila the Stockbroker, I was listening to John on the radio doing his gig guide. He mentioned my gig and said he hoped that I would get on all right there and get home safely. He sounded really concerned, which made me worry. I began to wonder what kind of a place Harlow was.

  It turned out to be a great gig, with one of those moments on stage I would never forget. Attila introduced me and, as I arrived on stage to a roar from the crowd, they were right with me and I was ready to give it to them. The first poem I was going to perform was ‘African Swing’, so I said to the crowd, ‘I’d like to dedicate this first poem to the all the Africans in the audience.’ Suddenly the place fell silent, everyone looked around to see if there was an African in the house, but not one could be seen. Attila looked at me, smiled, and the audience burst into spontaneous laughter. I later reported to John Peel that it all went well, but it was nice to know he was concerned about me.

  I was soon approached by record labels asking me to record a whole album, or LP, as they were called back then. The biggest offer came from EMI. One of their A&R people came to see me. He offered me a lot of money but he wasn’t sure how to deal with me; he said they wanted to give me studio machinery, like drum machines, and I was to go away and work on some tracks, which would be recorded later, but he didn’t seem to know what my poetry was about. I had the feeling that someone had sat at a desk, read about me and sent this man out to offer me a deal.

  There were other offers, but one label stood out above the others. This was Upright Records. They were probably the smallest label that had approached me, but I immediately took to the owner – a bearded family man called Bill Gilliam. He ran two labels, Upright Records and Workers’ Playtime, which had names contracted to it like Dead on Arrival (aka DOA), Jello Biafra and the reggae duo Laurel and Hardy. Bill offered me a deal and, to everyone’s surprise, I chose him over the others. I liked the intimacy of the label, and I liked the other bands on it, plus Bill had been watching me as I’d developed and we had a similar political outlook. Although he was offering the smallest financial deal, he seemed to be the most sympathetic to my ideas and what I was doing.

  When it came to recording the album, I wanted to do something different. I wanted to use two producers so we could work as a team. I had never heard of anyone doing this before. If an album was credited with two producers, one of them would be a band member, but I had this idea that I would bring people together on the project to move away from the common reggae sound that was around at the time.

  I approached Spartacus R and asked him to work with me on the album with another producer, and he said, ‘Absolutely not.’ He said he wanted to do it on his own or he would walk away. I tried to convince him to stay on board but he refused to work with anyone else, so I told him to walk away. He then told me that if he wasn’t working on the album, then I couldn’t use the track ‘Dis Policeman Keeps on Kicking Me to Death’, at which point I laughed, but so did he, telling me that the track belonged to him.

  I did some research and found that he was partly right. This was a lesson I learned the hard way, and I tell young people about it as often as I can. How it happened was that when John Peel asked me to do the session for him, Spartacus R was producing the track and was therefore also taking care of the paperwork. This was at a time when, for the first time in my life, I was making a lot of money. I was in a hotel room, living it large with my big entourage, a couple of brothers to back me up, and a few girls to massage my aches and my ego. Spartacus R came into the room and said I had to sign some paperwork for the John Peel session. I was in front of my crew; I didn’t want them to see that I couldn’t read or understand the contract, so I made it look like I knew what I was doing and signed it. I didn’t know then that I was signing away some of the rights to my own creation.

  So my message to young artists is that if you feel you don’t need to be able to read to rap or bang out a tune, the bottom line is you should at least be able to read your contract. When I re
corded the track, for legal reasons I had to credit Spartacus R with some of the writing, which is odd. I remember once challenging him by saying, ‘If you have any part in writing that track, then perform it for me, just a bit of it.’ And he couldn’t. That track, in fact that album, keeps selling, but every time I get a royalty statement next to ‘Dis Policeman . . .’, I see his name, and it doesn’t feel good.

  The album I recorded with Upright Records, my first full album, was called Rasta. I ended up producing it myself because I didn’t want to repeat the experience I’d had with Spartacus R. What I did find out was that even if Spartacus R wanted to work with me, nobody wanted to work with him, such was his reputation in musical circles for being difficult. All the tracks on the album were ones I had been playing for a long time. I would write the words and then, with a basic idea for the bassline, I would jam with a few friends – people I’d got to know since moving to London, who shared my view of the world.

  Most of these jam sessions happened at the flat of a friend called Jerome. The block of council flats where he lived is no longer there, but I remember the place so well: number 111, on floor 11, Drinkwater Tower, at the top of Leytonstone High Road, east London. An informal gathering of musicians would hang out there, and we would play a few tunes, philosophise for an hour or so, play some more tunes, and then philosophise some more. It should never have worked, really, because me and Jerome were both bass players, but this was all about love. He played some, I played some and, as long as Jah was happy, we were happy. As it turned out, Jerome kept playing the bass and I didn’t, but he was always a much better player than me.