The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah

by Benjamin Zephaniah

  As I was coming to this conclusion, Chris Blackwell suddenly sold Island records to Polygram. The world was told that things within Island would carry on as normal, but I was informed there had to be cuts, and although my album could go ahead I had to stay with Groucho. As it turned out, Groucho and I had some great times together. As with many of my recording sessions, they would be part recording session, part political and philosophical debate, and Groucho loved that.

  We produced the album Us An Dem, which was released in 1990. To this day I think it’s a great album, but it was a flop commercially. Well, that may be a little harsh; after all, it sold a fair number and was deemed worthy of rerelease by Cherry Red Records in 2009. It was also popular in the USA. One track, ‘Everybody Hav a Gun’, was a big hit in Jamaica, but most of my hardcore followers thought it was a bit too funky and overproduced.

  If you think outside of categories and labels such as reggae or soul or house, you can really appreciate the album; it stands alone. But when you start to think commercially, and wonder where to place it and how to market it, then you run into trouble. I was told that over £25,000 was spent on the recording of it, the most I had ever spent on the recording of an album, but yet in purely commercial terms it was my biggest flop.

  By the early 1990s, dance music was firmly established as the dominant sound. Rave culture had happened at the end of the 1980s, turning a huge section of UK kids into a loved-up nation who would spend hours dancing in fields and warehouses. It wasn’t really my scene – I didn’t want to take ecstasy or drugs of any kind – but I was impressed by the way this music achieved something almost magical. For decades soul singers and ballad singers had been writing lyrics about people coming together to love one another: men and women, obviously, but also young and old, black and white. Now you had this minimal dance music – some of it with no lyrics at all, or just someone repeating ‘Aciid! Aciid!’ – and it achieved that very thing without saying it. It simply did it. I also liked the fact that the people involved with the scene didn’t give a damn about how you dressed or what age or heritage you were.

  I preferred the heavier drum and bass sound that emerged in the mid-1990s. I’d go to nights at clubs like Fabric and Heaven, which always had a great atmosphere, and I got into the stuff put out on the Metalheadz label, formed by Goldie. I was receptive to the new sound, but I knew a lot of established musicians at that time who were really frustrated by it. They’d practised their instruments for years and then, suddenly, it was all about computers.

  I think some of my best musical adventures are my collaborations. By definition these are projects that take me away from reggae and into different directions. I like taking my reggae attitude and mixing it with people who might be more into dance music, or rock, or even folk. To date I have done some great collaborations including with the Wailers, Kinobe, Swayzak, Amira Saqati, Back to Base, Toddla T, Mieko Shimizu, David Lowe and Sinéad O’Connor.

  Sinéad was somebody I’d always respected and wanted to meet, so when I was asked to work with her I jumped to it. Usually when I collaborate I’m the one with the heavy message and the others have to put it into context, but it was different with Sinéad. She put down some lyrics about a vampire sucking the blood of the people. Nothing new there, as this metaphor appears a lot in reggae, but then she says loud and clear, ‘From now on, I’ll call you England.’ I thought, Well, that’s heavy!

  I came with lyrics about the evils of empire and it worked well. It was one of my favourite collaborations and, after we recorded the track, we became good friends. We used to talk a lot about what reggae was trying to do and what she wanted to do, and before long she flew to Jamaica to record a brilliant roots reggae album called Throw Down Your Arms. I loved it because it didn’t sound like white reggae. She’d gone to Jamaica and worked with real reggae musicians, and she wasn’t trying to sound black. Her voice simply blends well with that music.

  I feel really privileged to have been the first person to have collaborated with the Wailers after the death of Bob Marley, but my dream collaboration would have been with Bob himself. He was a poet who sang his words – words full of social commentary, prophecy and wisdom. I am an angry ranter of verse. I think my lyrical chatting combined with Bob’s angelic voice would have worked really well. Actually I know it would. Well, it works when I’m in the shower.

  40

  CITY PSALMS

  After a tour during which I performed all over the world, in countries including Argentina, Colombia, Kenya, South Korea and Australia, I embarked on a British tour. After one of my last performances of that tour, I came off stage in Newcastle and a strange-looking guy approached me. He had a round, chubby face with windswept hair (well, it had been a wild gig) and he looked a little out of place. I was convinced he was going to ask me for a lift home or for spare change – after all, by now my audiences were dressing up to come to my gigs.

  He introduced himself as Neil Astley of Bloodaxe Books, and he said he would be interested in publishing me. He was really honest with me, saying he’d been aware of my name for a long time but hadn’t really been that interested in performance poetry. He didn’t think performance poets were able to get their words to work on a page, but he said he had listened to me and thought I could deliver material worthy of publication. And I was really honest with him too. I told him I’d got away with Pen Rhythm because it was released at the right time, when I was young and new, but I wasn’t happy with The Dread Affair. I also told him being published was not a major priority for me.

  I was already reaching millions of people with my performances on stage, on radio and on TV, so I was happy to carry on doing what I was doing. My mission was to take poetry to people who didn’t read books. But I also told him I was ready to do another book if we could work together to bridge the gap, or make the connection, between the page and the stage. Neil was pleased, and said he knew exactly where I was coming from. So that was it. We parted and I started work on City Psalms, which was published in 1992.

  Once again, many of the poems and even the title came from one of the prototype books I’d made years earlier. Since then I’d met hundreds of people but one significant contact was a guy called Bob Mole. I’d met this fellow lover of poetry a few years earlier. Not only was he a lover of the arts, he was also a cricket enthusiast and a great gardener. It was he who first turned me on to Shakespeare by sitting me down to watch a filmed version of Macbeth, and putting it all in context for me. He loved reading great poetry but he also had a good understanding of performance poetry, so I asked him to write an introduction to the book.

  For the cover I used a colourful piece by an artist I had always admired called Michael Hawthorne. He created really powerful images of people exploding or experiencing pain. He was a white man who seemed able to capture perfectly the pain of the black man. His work exploded and danced and cried. Although on the surface the piece I chose for my book simply depicts a man and a woman walking down the street, the artist’s graphic style and the sense of place he captures speaks volumes about the urban experience.

  41

  COOL DOWN, RASTA

  In February 1993 my father died in Barbados. I didn’t attend the funeral but relatives took care of things and a couple of my sisters went over. I wouldn’t say I’d made my peace with him exactly by the time he died, but I was glad he spent his final years enjoying himself. Apparently he was the first person on Barbados to have a satellite dish. As a final gesture of respect, and because he’d loved his old job so much, he was buried in his GPO uniform. Apparently, in the days leading up to his death, he would sit and look at a photograph of me and Mum. I think there was something deep there, but those men of that generation really didn’t know what to do with their feelings.

  Back in Birmingham, love was blossoming in Mum’s life. I first heard about it when she called to tell me she had ‘found Mr Right’. He was in fact known as Brother Robin Wright, and she’d met him through her church. Brother Wright had
been very dutiful and, after admiring my mum from afar, he’d gone to their pastor to talk about his feelings for her. Their church didn’t allow for relationships outside of marriage, so once he had the pastor’s blessing he proposed and Mum accepted. After a bit of playing with his name I told her I had to meet him; I felt like someone had started dating my little sister and I had to check him out.

  I made the trip to Birmingham and I immediately got on with Brother Wright. He was a retired reggae DJ but he still had his sound system with its massive speakers, and played heavy bass music, except instead of playing rude boy reggae he was now playing Christian reggae. The other thing was, like me, he was a lover of old Triumph cars. I’d been through a series of Triumphs by now – there was that GT6, of course, that the police had impounded back in 1977, but I’d also had a TR2, a TR4 and a TR6. I’d always loved the TR models, but Brother Wright had two classic Triumph 2.5 PIs, with two spare engines. He was also very interested in world affairs and loved listening to Radio 4, so we had a lot to talk about.

  On 1 July 1993 they were married, and me and all my brothers and sisters attended the wedding. Brother Wright had his own kids, who would visit from time to time, but he didn’t talk about them very often. Everyone got on with Brother Wright, and we also got on well with all of his kids, but it felt very much like he was ‘ours’; he treated us like his kids, although we were all fully grown.

  When I was in Britain all I did was work, and when I had time off I did more work, and when I travelled to get away from work I always ended up doing yet more work. I couldn’t stop. It wasn’t because I was ambitious, and I certainly wasn’t seeking fame – I hated being called a celebrity – I just wanted as many people as possible to hear what I had to say about the world. If I was asked to appear at a political event or something I was passionate about, I couldn’t say no.

  My political campaigning was as important to me as my creative life, and in the mid-1990s it probably took over from my creative life. But it was unsustainable, and things came to a head when I came off stage one night during a tour in the USA, having just performed, and collapsed in the wings. Fortunately the audience didn’t see me. When the hotel doctor came, he asked to see my itinerary. I was absurdly busy, with something like forty-six gigs in as many days.

  The doctor told me to rest, so I did, and the next day I felt fine. I went back on stage the next night but the same thing happened – I collapsed as soon as I walked off. The doctor came out again and this time he shouted at me, reminding me that he’d told me to take a rest the night before.

  ‘I did take a rest,’ I said. ‘I slept all night.’

  He said that wasn’t good enough. He meant a rest from performing. He told me I was suffering from exhaustion and I had to take a proper break from all the travelling and touring. I had burned myself out.

  I had heard about artists being burned out, but now I was experiencing it for real, and it wasn’t good. It was as if the electrical circuits in my body were shutting down, and fuses were blowing.

  The doctor said I had to take a complete break. He didn’t mean a few days or a few weeks; he said I should have at least six months off from touring solo and playing live with my band, and if I wanted to be active I should take up a hobby. But I had made commitments I didn’t want to break, so I struggled on with the rest of the tour then, when I returned to England, I decided to make some big changes.

  I was going to take it easy. I decided I’d take up a hobby to distract myself from work, because I’d stopped doing anything other than writing and touring. I bought a little sports car – a Triumph, of course. I got me a TR7. I’d originally got it for Amina, but she didn’t like it, so I began working on it. That particular car wasn’t great, but it had rekindled my interest in working on motors, so I got rid of that one and, with the help of some friends, started to rebuild another old one from the bottom up. When we’d done the job, I drove it for a while and then completely rebuilt it again, this time on my own.

  I also started collecting banknotes – a strange hobby, but it happened by accident. I was on a TV programme and when I was asked what I did in my spare time, I said I collected money. I don’t know why I said it, I think it was just to get a laugh, but then people started sending me banknotes from all over the world.

  This might strike you as a low-key or even boring hobby, but banknotes can tell a lot as to what a country cares about, or what the rulers of that country care about. And there are some very interesting stories behind the designs of notes: some are about revolution, some about work and industry, and some are designed by the greatest artists of their day. I enjoyed looking at the detailed artwork and also getting hold of rare ones. I liked it when people laughed at my hobby, then I would pass them an album of notes and that would be it – they would be engrossed for the next two hours.

  So this, and the rebuilding of old cars, took me far away from the world that had consumed me for the previous couple of decades. I’d switched my focus from anything else I was doing or had done and I started to feel better for it. A change is as good as a rest, after all. On top of all this, I began to take my martial arts more seriously and made sure I was super-fit. But it wasn’t only about being physically fit; I started to really get into the mental and spiritual side of it. I went from concentrating on the external to the internal, and I started to meditate, and spent time forgetting time.

  We were still living in a housing co-operative place, and I was still paying £5 a week rent, but a rumour had started that the housing co-op was going to fold. I didn’t like the idea of renting commercially, and had always hated the concept of being tied to a mortgage, but we had to do something. Not far from where we were living, in Lonsdale Avenue, East Ham, a house was for sale, but it had no ‘for sale’ sign up and I’d heard the estate agent was finding it hard to sell. So I formed a plan. I found the owner of the house and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. It was cash, it was quick, and it was done. It was on Roman Road, East Ham, and it didn’t take long for Amina and me to make it our first real home together.

  42

  TALKING TURKEYS

  In the busy year that was 1993 I was approached by the children’s publisher Puffin Books. They asked if I was interested in writing a book of poems for children. I wasn’t. I was performing in schools, and some of my poems could have been called children’s poems, but I didn’t want to separate them into categories based on age.

  Although I resisted at first, the scout from Puffin kept on at me. I started thinking about it. Lots of children were telling me they really liked seeing their own books, on their own bookshelves, and that having a few poems of their own in books for adults wasn’t good enough. Secondly, there was an absence of black writers on those bookshelves, and I was in a position to change this. So I stopped resisting and started working on my first children’s book.

  I already had a handful of poems, but there was one in particular that would go on to have a life of its own. The previous year I’d been working on a TV programme with Gaby Roslin and Craig Charles. We were filming on a city farm, where I had to write and perform three poems. I had written two but was struggling with the third, and inspiration wasn’t coming. The night before the last day of filming I called Craig and asked if he would write it, but he insisted that I do it. He said I was thinking about it too much, and I should just relax and write whatever came into my mind.

  When we’d finished the call, I then imagined myself on the farm surrounded by turkeys, and I asked myself what I would want to say to the world. Then it flowed.

  Be nice to yu turkeys dis Christmas,

  ’cos turkeys just wanna hav fun.

  Turkeys are cool, turkeys are wicked,

  an every turkey has a mum.

  And so ‘Talking Turkeys’ was born. And it became the title of the book, which was published in 1994. I’ve no idea how many books were printed in the first run, but I was told they had to reprint very quickly because it had sold so well.

  It h
as since become trendy for comedians and celebrities to write children’s books, but when I wrote Talking Turkeys it wasn’t seen as cool at all. In some circles I was even mocked for it. Twenty-five years ago, children’s books that included animal characters tended to be about clever, fluffy creatures and their adventures, whereas the animals in my book mainly feared being eaten. Children in my book were being bullied, and the earth was being abused and polluted, just like the real world.

  For many years I never considered performing ‘Talking Turkeys’ live, but one night I decided to end my gig with it. I thought it would be a nice change from all the heavy stuff I was doing, and I was absolutely astonished by the reaction of the audience. All I did was open with the first line, ‘Be nice to yu turkeys dis Christmas’, and the crowd went wild. I was shocked. And then I noticed, as I went through the lines, other people were going through them with me. When I said the last line, the roar from the audience reminded me of a football crowd. I hadn’t realised what that poem meant to people, or how many people were coming to my performances waiting for me to perform it and going home disappointed.

  I’ve turned down five requests for the poem to be used in advertising, most notably and bizarrely by Bernard Matthews meat products, which was probably the most surprising and made me the most angry. Some of my hardcore followers really don’t like the fact that it’s the poem the establishment goes to when they speak of me, rather than my more revolutionary poems, but there’s nothing I can do about that.

  It has captured the imagination of so many children and young people, and I’ve even known situations where teachers have got competitive about whose class or school has a child that can perform the best recitation of the poem.