It's a London thing

How rare groove, acid house and jungle remapped the city

Caspar Melville

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526131263
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire moderne de la Grande-Bretagne

This book is a record of the Black music culture that emerged in post-colonial London at the end of the twentieth century; the people who made it, the racial and spatial politics of its development and change, and the part it played in founding London's precious, embattled multiculture. It tells the story of the linked Black musical scenes of the city, from ska, reggae and soul in the 1970s, to rare groove and rave in the 1980s and jungle and its offshoots in the 1990s, to dubstep and grime of the 2000s. Melville argues that these demonstrate enough common features to be thought of as one musical culture, an Afro-diasporic continuum. Core to this idea is that this dance culture has been ignored in history and cultural theory and that it should be thought of as a powerful and internationally significant form of popular art.

Chapter 1

Hostile environment: London’s racial geography, 1960–80

This chapter charts the processes through which space became racialised in London between the 1950s and the 1980s and the emergence of specific forms of musical space, the reggae sound system¹ and the soul club, which flowed into and were reconfigured in the club cultures of London in the mid-1980s. It asks and tries to answer a series of questions. How was public space racialised in the post-war period? How was leisure patterned by race? How did it happen that those coded as non-white and considered thereby illegitimate presences in the city experienced public space differently to white Londoners? And, finally, how did this feed into the development of musical multicultures in the city? Answering these questions involves a brief examination of migration from the Caribbean, which peaked in the years between 1948 and 1962 (although it did continue thereafter), and the patterns of settlement that took West Indian migrants into particular parts of the inner city. Here, in areas like Notting Hill, Hackney and Brixton, we see the emergence of what Hall et al. call the ‘self-defensive black colony’ (Hall et al. 1978) as a response to specific strategies of spatial power, in particular the over-policing of black space and the racialised containment of black Londoners, underpinned by a ‘law and order’ discourse which perceived the changing racial composition of the city as a threat. Historian Bill Schwarz characterises this period the ‘re-racialisation of England’ (Schwarz 1996).

Against this background I consider the emergence of multicultural space in the city, particularly in schools, where migrants and their British-born children forged a new inter-racial culture with their white friends, all of whom were, in Schwarz’s words, ‘learning how to be post-colonial’. The chapter ends with a discussion of leisure spaces that outlines both the racial exclusion from formal zones of working-class leisure like pubs and football, and the development of musical alternatives: the semi-autonomous zones of black sociability around music – sound systems and Notting Hill Carnival which emerged as symbolic sonic tactical ripostes to the racial coding of space and strategies of racial containment² – and the southern suburban circuits of white soul, which deployed black music in the context of white working-class leisure.

Reggae and soul, the linked but distinct black musics of Jamaica and the USA, are the most important musical precursors of the club cultures of the 1980s and 1990s. It is the fusing of these two musical traditions in the club cultures of the 1980s which gives London club culture its distinctive character. Though reggae and soul share a rhythmic core around the interplay of drum and bass, draw from the same historical resources (‘African retentions’, spirituals and gospel, jazz) and overlap continually (it’s worth recalling that Bob Marley modelled himself on Curtis Mayfield), they were articulated in London before the 1980s in different ways and were sometimes mutually antagonistic.

Soul, especially after Motown, moved smoothly through the channels of the international music market and, relatively unmarked by strong versions of black particularity, found a ready market with white audiences, and especially within the mod subculture of the late 1960s. Reggae, once uptown ska gave way to ‘sticker’, more militant rocksteady and roots reggae in the early 1970s (Hebdige 1987), was largely ignored by the mainstream market and media, and it circulated instead through clandestine channels back and forth between Kingston and London, where it was put to use in the semi-autonomous zones of black London. Reggae and the rebellious independent Rastas who dominated it in the 1970s were exotic and mysterious to white youth – which is part of what made it such an influence on punk – but it was never something that white youth could claim as their own or constitute a subculture around, at least not in the racially mixed city, as they were able to with soul.

For black Londoners, reggae and soul were held in an unstable compound: Rastas derided soul for its triviality and Americanness, for its sappy celebrations of love, for being in thrall to, rather than stepping out of, Babylon; while for black soul boys and girls, reggae could be perceived as too heavy, too serious, too dread and too far removed from the reality of teenage life in the British city. The techno DJ Colin Dale, for example, growing up in the 1970s in Brixton, where reggae provided the dominant musical and social context, was drawn to soul and disco clubs in Soho precisely because of their difference from the heavily Jamaican-oriented reggae sound system culture around him. ‘Although I liked reggae’, he recalled in interview, ‘I only reluctantly went to shebeens. I didn’t feel comfortable there. It was a very rude-boy atmosphere and I wasn’t a rude boy. [For me] It was definitely soul music, disco. Reggae was just out the window’ (Colin Dale interview, 30 July 2017).

But in reality most fans of black music were happy to sup from both of the dominant black Atlantic musical streams of the day. As the DJ and filmmaker Don Letts argues, the cleavage between reggae and soul is too often exaggerated, and throughout this period ‘Jamaicans’, even the dreadest dread, ‘loved American soul, James Brown, The Chi-lites; it was always there in the background’ (Don Letts interview, 7 December 2017). Dancers like H Patten, for example, growing up in 1970s Birmingham, would comfortably alternate between reggae blues parties and the soul clubs of the city, though he was well aware of the need to adjust his clothing, dance styles and modes of interaction accordingly: the blues were black space, competitive and sexually charged but overlaid with a strong sense of common feeling and familial affinity, while the soul clubs in the city centre involved tense inter-racial mixing where H, a popular dance partner for white women, was always aware of the resentment of the white male patrons, who tended to cluster resentfully in the bar (H Patten interview, 8 July 2018). For Nigel Thompson (Jumping Jack Frost), a Brixton boy, soul – especially the funkier end of Sly Stone and Bootsy Collins – was the soundtrack of home, what his parents listened to, while he would seek out the deepest roots reggae at Shepherd’s Youth Club on the Brixton Frontline, played by sound systems like Dread Diamond, Frontline, Stereograph and especially Jah Shaka (Jumping Jack Frost interview, 27 March 2017). The jungle genre which Jumping Jack Frost helped create in the early 1990s braided deep dub and funky soul together, using the cut-and-mix techniques of hip hop and the pounding digital beats of house (see chapter 4).

The white soul scenes of Kent, Essex and south and east London, which emerged in the 1970s from the mod subculture of Soho, would feature music from across the jazz–soul–funk spectrum, but reggae was off the menu. Soul eschewed dread reggae in favour of a peppy feel-good emphasis on fun, sprinkled with a very English end-of-the-pier silliness. Though some moved back and forth between reggae and soul, the two were constructed around very different, mutually exclusive political and cultural discourses. Within these various moral economies, racial meanings circulated through the music, and within the discourses that structured them. But they were also formed against a specific backdrop; the constitutive outside of reggae and soul is provided by the way space was racialised in the city beyond the walls of the night club, church hall or blues party. This chapter examines these processes of racialisation.

A hostile environment: the racialisation of London space

London has always been a hotchpotch. It is one of the world’s most ethnically diverse cities, and Europe’s most diverse. In his biography of London Roy Porter (1994) details the long history of immigration to and settlement in the city, by Jews, Hugonauts, Germans, Greek-Cypriots, Maltese, Italians and Irish migrants, drawn to the city for work, and in some cases to escape poverty, famine and ethnic oppression. As a port city, one of the world’s busiest until the 1980s, London has been made by the traffic of goods and people through it, and the temporary visits of sojourners, as well as those who decided to stay, has indelibly marked its character and culture.

There is a long history of black settlement in the city, as detailed in Peter Fryer’s classic study Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). Africans arrived in the UK with the Romans; black musicians worked in the court of Henry XIII; and black sailors from west and east Africa lived in the city in the sixteenth century. With the development of the Atlantic slave trade in the seventeenth century, in which Britain was the most rapacious slave-trading nation (Olusoga 2016), black slaves and servants became valued assets for fashionable London households. The black population of London swelled after 1784, when refugees who had fought with the British in the American War of Independence came to London pursuing the promise of freedom, which, as Fryer points out, was never kept: they found themselves exchanging ‘the life of a slave for that of a starving beggar on the London streets’ (Fryer 1984: 191).³

Workers from the Caribbean colonies arrived in the UK to labour in munitions factories during the First World War. During the Second World War around 16,000 West Indians volunteered to serve in the British army and around 130,000 black American troops were stationed in the UK (though the vast majority returned soon after it had ended). Post-war London also attracted migrants from West Africa, to study, perform and serve in the armed forces, the majority from Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Ghana (Bradley 2013: 131). But it was the post-war migration from the former colonies of the Caribbean that had the biggest impact on the development of a settled black population in London and that created the conditions for a profound change in the racial composition and cultural life of the city.

The British Nationality Act of 1948 gave citizens of British colonies the rights of citizenship and settlement in the UK. Following a series of campaigns aimed at recruiting Caribbean workers to aid post-war reconstruction and work for London Transport (founded 1933) and the National Health Service (founded in 1948) migrants began arriving in the UK from Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua, Guyana, Saint Kitts and Nevis, the Grenadines and other islands of the British West Indies. The MV Empire Windrush docked in Tilbury in 1948, from which 492 Jamaican men disembarked, starting a flow of immigration that eventually brought around half a million black West Indians to Britain, until this was slowed after 1962 by increasingly stringent immigration laws, which reduced but never completely stopped the flows, which continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

West Indian settlement in the UK was, from the beginning, an urban phenomenon, one that transformed the political geography of Britain’s cities. By 1971, 68 per cent of the West Indian population were concentrated in Britain’s two biggest conurbations: 13 per cent in Birmingham and 55 per cent in London (Peach 1996). There were clear factors pushing Caribbean migration into British cities. The job market was one; another was the depopulation of those inner-city areas – London in 1981 had a population two million less than in 1938 (Porter 1994: 346) – a leakage concentrated in central boroughs like Hackney and Lambeth, which lost 18 per cent of their population between 1971 and 1981, and these were the areas where Caribbean settlement was highest. This population leakage was primarily a result of economic depression and the collapse of manufacturing and heavy industry, especially the decline of London’s docks, which led to the contraction of the East End labour market. A high proportion of London’s East End working-class population who had relied on the ports for employment relocated, from the late 1960s onwards, to parts of Kent and Essex and the New Towns of Basildon and Harlow, created following the New Towns Act of 1946 (Mandler 1999: 218). Once Caribbean migrants had started to settle in these emptying London boroughs, ‘white flight’, the abandonment of inner-city areas by whites as a consequence of the presence of the black population, led to increasing racial polarisation (Peach 1996).

The Blitz of late 1940 and 1941 had a devastating effect on London’s housing stock, destroying 100,000 family dwellings and creating a ‘gargantuan housing problem’ (Porter 1994: 349–51). This further exacerbated the patchwork pattern of London identified by Charles Booth in 1885; by 1942 areas such as the Georgian squares in Islington and Clapham, which had been relatively homogeneous on Booth’s map, were peppered with bomb craters. In post-war reconstruction, priority was given to housing, and by 1949 some 50,000 new homes had been built in London and 64,000 more were on the way (Porter 1994: 351). It was partly Winston Churchill’s promise to build 300,000 homes a year that propelled him back into office as Prime Minister in 1951 (Pilkington 1988: 53). Much of this housing was built on bombsites and was lowincome council housing, which sprang up cheek by jowl with Victorian middle-class housing, albeit much of it in fairly dilapidated condition by the late 1940s, but gentrified since, in increasing intensity towards the end of the century (see Mandler 1999).

The decision of many thousands of Commonwealth citizens from the Caribbean to make the long journey to Britain was the result both of the push factors – weak domestic labour markets and high unemployment, a fragility that was the legacy of plantation economics – and of the pull of the British labour market, which during reconstruction had more jobs than workers (Foner 1978: 120–51). Membership of the New Commonwealth meant that West Indians had British passports, and the right to live and work in the UK; moreover, they had been educated in a British system and conditioned to consider Britain the mother country, and themselves as fully British (Linton Kwesi Johnson interview, 20 February 2017).

But we should not overstate the lure of the mother country. The preferred work destination for many Jamaicans was the much closer United States and it was only with the passing of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952 (known as the McCarran–Walter Act after its congressional sponsors), which severely limited Jamaican access to the American labour market, that Jamaican migration switched to the UK. And though some arrived in London with a song in their heart, like the calypsoan Lord Kitchener, who famously delivered his optimistic ode to ‘this lovely city’, ‘London Is the Place for Me’, to the Pathé News cameras from the deck of the Windrush at Tilbury, many took the journey reluctantly. Sam Kelly (who would become the drummer in the UK Afro-funk band Cymande), for example, bor...