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Why Sounds Like London needed writing

I was born and brought up in Hornsey, north London, and I remember music from a really early age because I was always interested in the Blue Spot gram we had sitting in the front room. It wasn’t just the glowing lights; one of the things that attracted me to it as a young kid was the smell. The gram would go on at maybe seven o’clock in the morning, and wouldn’t go off until midnight or one the next morning, so those valves used to get very, very warm, almost part of the central heating system, then they’d give off a certain smell!

So you could say I grew up fully immersed in the music. I was about seven or eight then, but subconsciously I was becoming aware of how important music was to the lives of the immigrant communities – not just from the Caribbean, but also the Irish and the Greek communities that were all around us. We were all working-class people, out all day, and the ultimate prize once you owned your own house or your own room was to get some entertainment in there. For black people in London in the fifties and sixties, the Blue Spot gram came a long way before the telly. It became the central piece of furniture, and a showing of your wealth.

Critical to all this, though, was the music – the software, if you like – which was the link back to the Caribbean, as it became a story of what was going on back home, and kept people in touch with who they were. Then, moving on a few years, for us that was born here, a lot of the reggae music we listened to in the seventies, we lived our life by it, listening to people like Big Youth or Brigadier Jerry articulating about life. The difference between what my parents listened to – there was calypso and ska, but country & western was massive, and then there was Engelbert Humperdinck – and what my generation listened to, was that my parents were trying to adapt, but we were trying to make our own way. All of this was reflected in the music we were listening to before we were making any of our own, and as we took the lyrics of this story-telling music seriously the messages were coming through.

Not that our relationship with our music was always so serious. One of the greatest things about having our own music was that it could be like our own private world in the middle of London. Take the calypsonians. Everyone was so coy and conservative in their attitudes outside, but these records were very explicit and that was our own world. It was particularly fun for us young people, because we knew they were covering things we shouldn’t know about, so we’d make up our own lyrics. It was only years later we discovered that was what they were singing about.

I got into sound systems early. All my older brothers owned sound systems, so I was born into it and it was synonymous with us as young black men coming up at the time – we didn’t go to the pub and we had our own style and culture. I must stress that this wasn’t so much a black and white thing among my generation, it was a working-class thing, and so many white kids were genuinely interested in experiencing our culture. I lived the sound-system life through my brothers, and the white and the Greek kids in our area all knew all about the sound systems and the music.

The importance of the sound systems was far more than just playing music, it was your connection with people in the Caribbean, with each other here. It was a refuge from everything that went on during your week at work, where you could be around like-minded people or where you could meet people, and it was how you expressed yourself. For the operator too, it was a business opportunity, and there were others that made money from around the sound systems, so it was a fusion of music, business and life, and something we were in control of for ourselves – in our Sunday football league there were a load of sound systems that put out football teams.

At the Soul II Soul clothing launch, Jazzie B and Lloyd Bradley show Frank and Dino how it should be done.

The music was absolutely key to how we lived in London. It helped to relax us, it helped to educate us, it helped us to enjoy ourselves, and the sound systems were always central to that music’s success. They provided the platform for the music we were making to get heard, and they also kept it under the radar, meaning this story of London’s black music is something that hasn’t been talked about much in the regular media. Mostly that’s been a good thing, because it’s allowed the various genres to thrive, away from influences that might have turned them around a bit. It’s a story that shouldn’t remain hidden, though, for future generations and people now who want to know about what went on before you saw the Dizzee Rascals and the Tinie Tempahs. It’s a story that needed to be told by somebody who really cares about it, and the most important thing about this book is Lloyd Bradley. The reason this story of London’s black music hasn’t been told before is because we haven’t had a Lloyd Bradley before, and up until now he wasn’t ready to write it.

I first met Lloyd when he wrote a press release for us about twenty years ago. As I got to know him, I realised that during my years in the music business I’d never really met anybody who had his level of knowledge or experience of this music, and had such a passion for it – he’s as much a part of it as anybody else. Lloyd’s one of the few people out there who have dug as deep as he has to build up a real genuine knowledge, and then been dedicated enough and smart enough to take on this role as historian. You’ve only got to look back to some of the things he’s done in the past, like his book about reggae, Bass Culture, or his writings in Mojo or the newspapers, to see the depth of his interest in those arts, how he understands the power and the passion of all of this black music, and, most importantly, how he looks into the truth of it all.

Lloydie loves London too. He went to school just up the road there in Hornsey, he’s a lifelong Gooner, and knows exactly how this music is such an essential part of London and why it couldn’t happen anywhere else. Which all comes through in the book, as it puts London as probably the most important city in black music history worldwide, because it wasn’t just one style that started here, it’s been years of different movements. Lloyd is aware of all of that, and he’s seen so much of it happen around him.

Personally, I’ve been inspired and been informed by a lot of the stuff he’s written over the last few years, and now I’m proud to say I’m a friend of his, meaning I’m one of the select bunch of people who knows just how good the lemon meringue pie he makes is.

Introduction

STAND FOR LONG ENOUGH on any street corner in London, and you’ll hear music. Chances are, these days, it’ll be black music of some description – dubstep, hip hop, grime, reggae, R&B … It’s been like that for a while, at least since cars had cassette players and ‘portable’ stereos evolved to the size of suitcases. The difference between then and now, though, is that the black music you’ll be hearing will probably have been written and recorded within a few miles of wherever it’s disturbing the peace.

British black music has never been so prominent. Indeed, it’s at the point now where artists such as Labrinth, Tinie Tempah and Dizzee Rascal are bona fide pop stars, with a young mainstream audience that accepts them in the same way as they would anybody else. Just as hip-hop stars like Jay-Z or Beyoncé have across-the-board acceptance in the US and beyond.

The brilliant thing – sorry, the most brilliant thing – about the current state of British black music is not so much that it has come so far in a mere fifty years (less than three generations), but that it has done so almost entirely by itself. Unlike the Americans cited above, who for the most part benefited from the full might of a global entertainment industry, our guys have very often succeeded in spite of the UK music business rather than because of it. In almost every case, enduring stylistic advances have been the result of intuitive and inspired individuals nurturing their ideas away from the lure of the mainstream. In fact, as the story unfolds, it’s when black music has opted to put itself in the hands of the regular music business that progress has fallen apart. Mostly, though, and in true immigrant style, it’s been shrewd self-sufficiency and a work ethic that’s never scared to learn or look for opportunity that have powered this astonishing trajectory. ‘Doing a t’ing’ as it used to be called, is now all over the British charts.

Sounds Like London is a tribute to the many single-minded characters who have trusted judgements honed by years of servicing black audiences that were never slow to let them know if something wasn’t up to scratch. A Saturday-night crowd in a Harlesden dancehall will be far more informative than any amount of focus groups. Furthermore, when the mainstream punters are presented with the genuine article, it’s usually far better received than anything specially tailored for them.

Sounds Like London also documents how the city’s black music has made a steady transition from being viewed as something that came from abroad, and therefore didn’t need to be taken seriously, to a music that so completely has to be that the BBC have devoted a digital channel to it. Attitudes towards the musicians themselves have similarly shifted. As the music has evolved from calypso and jazz to dubstep and grime, so the people making it have gone from being clearly identifiable as immigrants to being second-generation Londoners, blurring geographical backgrounds to the point that British is all they could possibly be. Despite what certain aspects of the media continue to think.

It’s an arc that leads from Lord Kitchener coming down the gangplank of the Windrush singing ‘London is the place for me …’ to Tinie Tempah sitting on the Breakfast TV sofa giving advice about what tea is best to use with London’s hard water (Yorkshire Gold, he reckons). And in between those two points, large numbers of black people have arrived in London, mixed it up with their new neighbours, done pretty well regardless of establishment attitudes, and now, for better and for worse, are part and parcel of life here. Most importantly, they are doing so on their own terms.

AS MY PREVIOUS BOOK, Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King, also made clear, it’s impossible to separate this social transition from the development of the music. Throughout the entire story, we see the former reflected in the latter. At first, black music held back, seeking to accommodate a broader audience. When that didn’t work, it tried too hard to identify with other established black music forms. Next, after trusting the mainstream perhaps a little too much led to its being patronised, it responded by retreating into itself in a conscious attempt to find an identity. That in turn provided the confidence to bring the mainstream to the music, rather than the other way around. Finally, black music displayed the intelligence to set itself up in such a way that it didn’t need the mainstream, but if the mainstream wanted to join the party … Sounds Like London is about the triumph of spirit as much as the triumph of music, which along the way enriched the host nation as much as it did the arrivals.

Coming to grips with a saga that begins in 1919, just after the First World War, was a mountain of a task. (OK, so it falls a little short of the advertised 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital, but that made a much snappier sub-heading than 94 Years of … or Not Quite a Century of …). Some selection process therefore had to be employed. Sounds Like London is not a chronicle of every form of black music that has touched down in the capital during that period; that alone would take a hundred years, and require four or five volumes. Instead it discusses the impact several of those forms have made on mainstream music and culture.

That means the city itself is as important as the music, and the styles and scenes that this book examines could only have happened here – lovers’ rock reggae was a London music; Osibisa’s sound was the result of sessions in a Finsbury Park rehearsal room; Brotherhood Of Breath were a product of a particular Soho jazz club. Among the most pleasing aspects of many of these London developments was that they also found success abroad. In several instances – calypso, African rock and lovers’ rock in particular – they influenced the styles from which they emerged, after being taken on board because they came from London. It’s also worth mentioning, incidentally, that although for reasons of space and continuity this book is devoted to London, several other British cities – including Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol and Birmingham, to name but four – had their own unique and pulsating black music scenes.

SO THE BOOK IS ALL ABOUT STYLES that evolved because of life in London, and either left a footprint on the mainstream music or culture, as with calypso, or were invented to service a community that could only have been found here – jungle, f’rinstance. The key is for the music to interact with its London environment, rather than exist as a hermetically sealed subculture, or simply develop as a duplicate of some overseas style. Therefore, even if the vast range of black music to be found in the capital can offer all sorts of exciting nights out, this is a book about London music, first and foremost. Not, say, Zimbabwean music in London, or Londoners trying their best to sound like they’re from the Bronx. Which is not to denigrate such scenes; there simply wasn’t room to include them here alongside their more interactive counterparts.

Sounds Like London begins even before the great wave of Commonwealth immigration, with the moment in 1919 when the Southern Syncopated Orchestra made its debut as the first black band to play in London. Although the music in its earliest incarnation did little to affect its environment, the story of the pre-war era provides a solid basis for what is to come. It also gave me a few surprises, with regard to the cultural contributions made by black people in Britain over the last hundred – sorry, ninety-four – years. Did you know there was a very successful black ballet company in London during the 1930s, run by two Jamaican immigrants?

Apart from that, the book does its best to beat a chronological path from calypso to black pop in ten stylistically self-contained chapters. Sometimes the timeline crosses over itself within chapters as well as from one to another, and in a couple of instances different chapters run in parallel. Please bear with me; it’s all part of showing how British black music has evolved and diversified. It’s been astonishing to see the shared connections and characters that carried the story forward in a single evolutionary sweep. You don’t need six degrees to connect Lord Explainer to Light Of The World, or Maxi Priest to Matata.

Ultimately, the whole story is a tribute to individuals, most of whom refused to play by the rules of what had gone before, and used whatever was available to make their music and to get it across to the widest possible audience.

1
‘They come over’ ere …’

‘It was hard to leave my home country.
I made the decision with tears in my
eyes, but I don’t regret it. It turned
out very good for me.’

CHAPTER ONE
Mash Up in the Mother Country

WHEN CALYPSONIAN LORD KITCHENER stepped from the gangplank of the SS Empire Windrush at Tilbury, on 22 June 1948, he barely had a chance to feel Mother England beneath his feet before a microphone was shoved into his face. The coterie of English reporters waiting for the five hundred new arrivals from the Caribbean knew to look out for this imposing, snappily-dressed figure, whom they’d been told was a bit of singer. Never one to pass up an opportunity, Kitch, unaccompanied and apparently ad-libbing, broke into song:

Captured by Pathé News, against the rusting hull of the former troopship, this cheerful, assured performance of “London Is The Place For Me” is still dusted off as an easyfit encapsulation of the start of mass immigration from the Caribbean into the UK. And, indeed, of the immigrants themselves – happy-go-lucky souls, never too far from spontaneous song. Neither assumption is particularly accurate. Not entirely the carefree, spur-of-the-moment songster he might seem, Kitch was already a big star all across the Caribbean, and had written the song during the four-week voyage for exactly this moment. For that matter, West Indians had been present in London in significant numbers since the First World War, while the Windrush itself had brought over a considerable number of Jamaican settlers the previous year. Kitch and fellow Trinidadian calypsonian Lord Beginner made the decision to pay the £28.10s passage on the Windrush precisely because they knew there was a healthy African-Caribbean music scene in London, and they could find a relatively wealthy black audience.

As a symbol of specifically musical immigration into the UK, however, Kitch’s quayside concert is priceless. For a calypso so vividly to reference the capital was a defining moment. This wasn’t simply music performed and consumed in Britain, on a strictly insular level, by immigrants and reverent aficionados; it was music that while remaining faithful to the Caribbean was adapted to fit its new setting, and found itself in a creative environment that was prepared to make efforts to accommodate it. Much like the passengers on the Windrush, who came in, got their feet under the table, got to know the neighbours, and mixed it up a bit with them. One reason the ship has assumed such significance is that 1948 marked the start of the process whereby Caribbean immigration made a cultural impression on the UK, as arrivals began to see the country as a long-term home. While staying true to who they were, they were changing how they did things, and the world in which they found themselves would never be the same again.

WHEN DISCUSSION TURNS to West Indian musicians who were active in London before the dawn of ska, the story usually begins with the beboppers of the 1950s: the likes of Joe Harriott, Wilton Gaynair, Harry Beckett and Dizzy Reece. Caribbeans had, however, been at the forefront of British jazz for almost as long as British jazz itself. Their influence is one of the great untold stories of the London scene of the 1930s and 1940s. By adding elements of their own countries’ music, players from the colonies were responsible for much of the originality in early British jazz, which otherwise, essentially, imitated jazz from the US.

In 1948, passage on the Windrush from Jamaica to the UK cost £28.10s; the voyage has come to symbolize the start of mass immigration from the Caribbean. From the left, passengers John Hazel (21), Harold Wilmot (32) and John Richards (22) lead a style offensive on the capital.

The very first black band to make its mark in the UK, the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, brought West Indians into the British jazz world in 1919. Put together by composer Will Marion Cook in New York the previous year, the 27-piece African-American band arrived in London to fulfil long-term contracts first at the Philharmonic Hall in Great Portland Street, and then at Kingsway Hall in Holborn. Along with the all-white Original Dixieland Jazz Band, who came from the US for an extended stay at around the same time, the SSO can be credited with introducing jazz to the UK. Such was its quality that it included operatic soprano Abbie Mitchell, pianist/conductor Will Tyers, and clarinet legend Sidney Bechet – who first encountered the soprano saxophone in London, seeing one in the window of a Shaftesbury Avenue music store and buying a specially modified version.

This versatile black band made an immediate impression on straight-laced Edwardian London, then recovering from the First World War. The Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, invited the SSO first to play at Buckingham Palace, and subsequently to headline a grand ball at the Albert Hall to mark the first anniversary of Armistice Day. With demand high, the band stayed on beyond 1920. Over the ensuing years, its original American members drifted away, to be replaced by London-based musicians who hailed from Barbados, Guyana, Trinidad, Jamaica, Antigua, Haiti, Sierra Leone and Ghana.

During the 1930s and 1940s, London’s better swing and rhumba bands were either entirely or largely West Indian – even if these British colonials frequently pretended to be Cuban, because the most fashionable dance rhythms came from the island. More than one musician of the day has maintained that Caribbean players were sought after for their trademark combination of exuberance and discipline, vital for the very swinging-est swing – a trait that later manifested itself in ska. Above all, though, as citizens of the British colonies these black players had the right to work in the UK, whereas from 1935 onwards the Ministry of Labour made it difficult for US musicians to get permits. UK bandleaders could thus pass them off as Americans, thereby greatly increasing a band’s glamour factor at a fraction of the cost of the real thing and with minimal bother.

A veritable flood of Caribbean musicians were therefore flowing into London long before the Windrush hove into view. Big bands like Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson and his West Indian Dance Band, Frank Deniz and his Spirits of Rhythm, and Leslie ‘Jiver’ Hutchinson’s All-Coloured Orchestra were in huge demand for ballrooms and wireless broadcasts. As both musician and socialite, the smooth, well-spoken Hutchinson was a particular favourite of the aristocracy. It was not unusual for him to accompany the hard-drinking Prince of Wales back to York House in the early hours to continue carousing. Recordings by the higher-profile early British black bands can be found on Topic Records’ anthology, Black British Swing.

At the same time, any number of small groups, pick-up bands and informal, shifting house bands were appearing in nightclubs of all sizes, all over London. Besides such well-known venues as the Café de Paris in Coventry Street, the Florida Club in Bruton Mews, the Embassy Club in Mayfair and the Hammersmith Palais de Danse, the West End also held a remarkable number of black-owned establishments, even before the Second World War. Soho was home to the Caribbean in Denman Street; the Nest in Kingly Street; and the Fullardo, and later the Abalabi and the Sunset, in Carnaby Street. Just outside, and somewhat tonier, were Edmundo Ros’s high-society haunt the Coconut Grove on Regent Street, and the Paramount Ballroom in Tottenham Court Road, under the apartment block Paramount Court. The latter is now an upmarket strip joint, but back then it was a big plush ballroom, owned by a Jamaican immigrant.

At the Royal Albert Hall, in 1942, Guyanese conductor, composer and clarinettist Rudolph Dunbar became the first black man to conduct the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

ARGUABLY THE MOST NOTEWORTHY of the pre-war West Indian influx was Guyanese clarinettist Rudolph Dunbar, who arrived in 1931. Dunbar had studied his instrument at Columbia University’s Institute of Musical Arts (later renamed the Juilliard) in New York; was involved in the Harlem jazz world of the 1920s; learned conducting and composing from Phillipe Gaubert and Paul Vidal, respectively, in Paris; and had been taught classical clarinet by Louis Cahuzac, considered the world’s leading soloist of his time. Once settled in London he fronted his own dance orchestras – the All-British Coloured Band and the Rumba Coloured Orchestra – and played alongside fellow Caribbeans including Cyril Blake, Joe Appleton and Leslie Thompson. As a sideline, he became the first black man to conduct the London Philharmonic when he led them in front of seven thousand people at the Royal Albert Hall in 1942. Dunbar also conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in 1945, and conducted in Russia, the US and Poland. Whenever he could, he’d perform works by black composers.

Being Guyanese, however, Dunbar was in the minority among London’s overwhelmingly Trinidadian musical contingent. Because Trinidad had its own unique music scene, centred on calypso, its players tended to be more evolved. Double-bassist Al Jennings came over in the 1920s, and led his own bands through the 1930s and 1940s, most notably at the Kit Kat Club in the Haymarket – in the basement of the building that until recently housed the Odeon cinema – and at the Hammersmith Palais. He returned to Trinidad after the war, where he formed the All-Star Caribbean Orchestra, only to bring them back for a long-term residency in London in 1947.

Clarinettist Carl Barriteau moved to London from Trinidad in 1937, and played with bandleader Ken Johnson. After Johnson was killed when a German bomb scored a direct hit on the Café de Paris in March 1941, Barriteau, who suffered a broken arm in the incident, formed his own West Indian Dance Orchestra. As well as entertaining British troops on ENSA tours, he performed nightclub and variety-hall gigs, and broadcast extensively on BBC radio.

Sax man Freddy Grant, who also arrived in 1937, made quite an impact on London. He was Guyanese, but might as well have been Trinidadian, having spent a long time in jazz and calypso orchestras on the island. After playing jazz with Appleton, Dunbar, Blake and Hutchinson through the 1940s, he prospered with his own bands, including Freddy Grant and his Caribbean Rhythm, Freddy Grant and his West Indian Calypsonians, Frederico and the Calypsonians, and Freddy’s Calypso Serenaders, many of which employed the same personnel. During the 1950s, while working the calypso angle in dancehalls, the supremely talented Grant hooked up as a sideline with Kenny Graham’s Afro-Cubists. He also formed a partnership with Humphrey Lyttelton as the Grant/Lyttelton Paseo Jazz Band, recording calypso-ish takes on jazz and blues favourites.

Acclaimed Nigerian composer Fela Sowande provides a vivid example of wartime London’s cultural melange. The acknowledged founding father of Nigerian classical music, a Fellow of the Royal College of Organists and choirmaster at Kingsway Hall, he could be found duetting with Fats Waller on the piano in London clubs, and was a regular in Grant’s bands, playing calypso to audiences who assumed he was West Indian.

BETWEEN THE LATE 1920s and the mid-1940s, a black intelligentsia started to find traction in London. The city became a gathering point for African and West Indian students, professionals and political dissidents. Organisations like the League of Coloured Peoples, the West African Student Union and the Union of Students of African Descent all set up shop, exchanging ideas and experiences from around the world. Much of what was discussed in London was to influence the break-up of the British Empire. Groups in the capital maintained strong links with nascent trade unions in the colonies, and many who studied in London attained political office on returning home. There was also a considerable degree of interplay between the black students and the English intellectual hipster-types who were to become the beat generation. Soho became one of the very few genuinely multi-racial, multicultural areas in Britain, where black lawyers, waiters, students, dancers, seamen, doctors and actors rubbed shoulders with cockney market traders, jazz fans in from the suburbs, pimps, prostitutes, debutantes and landed gentry.

Trinidadian singer Sam Manning arrived in London in 1934 as calypso’s first international star. His influence was much more than strictly musical. Manning had spent the 1920s in New York, recording his trademark jazz/calypso hybrids and featuring alongside Fats Waller in the original performances of the jazz musical Brown Sugar. That was where he met his partner, the show’s producer Amy Ashwood Garvey, who had formerly been married to Marcus Garvey. The couple founded the Florence Mills Social Club, a jazz nightclub and restaurant in Carnaby Street. Named after the legendary black American cabaret star, it became a gathering place for London’s Caribbean and African intellectuals, and students of the growing Pan-Africanism movement.

Given Sam Manning’s prominence as a singer, he’s often, understandably, credited with introducing calypso to London. Both in Trinidad, however, and when it first reached Britain, calypso was regarded as being as much about the playing as the singing. Indeed, the very first example of recorded calypso has no vocals: in New York in 1912, Lovey’s String Band, a ten-piece Trinidadian fiddle, guitar, banjo and upright bass outfit, cut a danceable instrumental called “Mango Vert”, which was taken to be a different style of jazz. By the time the music crossed the Atlantic in the 1930s, calypso was mingling with Latin and big-band swing as an integral part of dance-orchestra repertoires all across the West Indies, with singers seen as more or less optional extras.

Things were much the same in the UK, where players integrated quickly and relatively painlessly into the established ballroom scene. Two main factors were at work. Calypso being a deceptively complex music to play well, the musicians were of a very high calibre. In addition, dance orchestras were smoothing themselves out closer to Glenn Miller than Count Basie, with barely enough South American flourishes to justify the maracas, so this injection of Caribbean flavour spiced things up in an easy-to-follow, appropriately exotic way.

Meanwhile, London’s serious jazz clubs too were taking on Caribbean influences. With one branch of jazz busily repositioning itself from swing to bebop – complete with asymmetric phrasing, walking basslines and pork pie hats – the music’s broader fanbase welcomed the coming of calypso, thanks to the influx of Trinidadian players, as a blessing. As played by the new wave of jazzmen, calypso’s far more straightforward rhythms helped to keep bebop’s feet on the ground, while still having enough to keep things exciting.

Trinidadians Lauderic Caton and Cyril Blake, respectively a guitarist and a trumpeter, were particularly significant in both these worlds. Caton, an electronics enthusiast, built some of the first electric guitars seen in London, and is credited with introducing the instrument to British jazz, while Blake had been a member of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra. Together they formed the backbone of the house band at Jig’s Club in St Anne’s Court, between Wardour Street and Dean Street. As Cyril Blake and his Jig’s Club Band, their artful calypso-infused jazz turned Jig’s into one of London’s hottest clubs. Despite its insalubrious reputation, it wasn’t unheard of to come across the elegant likes of Fats Waller and Duke Ellington, each of whom employed Caton at some point, down at Jig’s. The pair also played alongside the likes of Coleridge Goode and Dick Katz, and in the dance bands of Bertie King, Ray Ellington and Leslie Thompson, and the ever-popular West Indian All-Stars.

Away from the mainstream, in the black dancehall world of the late 1930s, these various trends came together as hot jazz, which absorbed Latin and swing to osmose into jump jive and that newfangled rhythm & blues, all served with a generous side order of musical calypso. On this scene, the bebop revolution was far less evident – the emphasis at this point was on dancing and straightforward entertainment.

In the upmarket venue, the Paramount Ballroom, the crowd was ordinary working black London, supplemented by visiting servicemen (West Indian and American), merchant seamen on leave, a smattering of African students and musicians looking to hang out. Apart from a scattering of English women, there were virtually no white people; this ballroom scene didn’t draw the bohemian or slumming aristos found in the Soho or Notting Hill clubs, where interracial fraternisation seemed to be the latest rage.

The Paramount was much more straightforward: everyday black folks who had probably had enough of white people for that week, and wanted nothing more on Friday or Saturday night than to relax with people who looked like them. White women could get away with it, even if they risked the wrath of the disproportionately few black women there, but these dancehall crowds were liable to be openly hostile to unfamiliar white men.

With its entertainment policy, too, following West Indian rather than West End traditions, the Paramount became a totally swinging place to be. Like working people everywhere, the audience wanted a wild night out – but it had to be worth the price of admission. The Paramount’s owner, himself a Jamaican immigrant, understood that if his clientele had paid two shillings to get in, he’d better give them a half-a-crown show, and recreated the excitement of dancehalls back home with a dash of London luxury. The musicians reciprocated, too. The stage at the Paramount gained a reputation as somewhere they could really cut loose, in front of a noisily appreciative crowd – something that often came as a relief after ‘day jobs’ in more sedate mainstream situations. While the Paramount never enjoyed the profile of some of the later, more cerebral Soho clubs – because this was jazz for dancing – it was always a fertile arena for exchanging ideas. With big-name visiting players frequently turning up after hours, it hosted all manner of sitting in, showing off and experimentation.

Situations like that, all over London – albeit smaller – served to keep many of the West Indian players below the radar. Working in the ‘corn-fed’ dance bands, they were never considered jazz enough, while by doing their serious playing at less glamorous venues they missed out on the attention they might have otherwise have attracted.

Because it was both big, and open until five or six in the morning, the Paramount was ideal for the many men who had jobs but nowhere to live – ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs’ – and could be arrested for vagrancy if caught dossing on a park bench or in a doorway. With staff turning a sympathetic blind eye, they could snatch some shut-eye on a banquette, then have a wash in the gents.

Calypso singers were always part of this London scene, especially in the ballrooms. The first to make a real mark were George Browne and Edric Connor, who arrived from Trinidad as early as 1943 and 1944, respectively. Browne was a bass player who regularly gigged with Caton. During his first year in London, he had a huge hit with the tropically festive number “Christmas Calypso”. As calypso grew ever more popular, he turned to singing full time, and changed his name to Young Tiger.

Connor, a singer, actor and music-business mover and shaker, brought over the first Trinidadian steel band to play in Britain in 1951; set up London’s first black talent agency in 1956; was the first black actor to perform with the Royal Shakespeare Company, in 1958; founded the Negro Theatre Workshop, one of Britain’s first all-black drama groups, in 1963; appeared in numerous films and TV dramas; and still found time to cut several albums. His discography includes one of the first-ever official football records, 1956’s “Manchester United Calypso”:

In recent seasons, Connor’s original recording has been spun before home games at Old Trafford, and taken up by the crowd as a chant.

‘CALYPSO’ COMES FROM THE WORD ‘KAISO’, an exclamation of encouragement in the Hausa language, widely spoken in West Africa. Pronounced kye-ee-soh, it meant ‘Go on! Continue!’ Plantation slaves, who were forbidden to speak to each other in the fields and thus communicated by singing, would shout it to each other as mutual support. The rhythms of many African songs are comparable with basic calypso, and were homogenised into a single form in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, adopting a few Europeanisms and instruments along the way. Jamaican mento, which retains the most original instrumentation, remains the closest to what originally came over. Kaiso-based music was prevalent throughout the West Indies, but became known as calypso in Trinidad because, so legend has it, Europeans on that island wouldn’t make the effort to pronounce the word properly.

Developing a strong narrative bent among the slaves, who used it to mock slave masters, comment on everyday life, tell tall tales and have some bawdy fun, kaiso evolved into the combination of satire, protest, innuendo, social commentary and observational comedy we know today. The sharpest calypsonians were contemporary griots, as influential as they were informative. Champions of the underclass, they frequently took the colonial government to task, and criticised the social invasion that accompanied the setting up of American bases on Trinidad during the war. Inevitably the authorities responded: songs were banned, and singers prevented from performing. Despite being exclusively based in New York, the calypso recording industry found itself officially censored – producers at the American record companies had to submit their recordings of Trinidadian singers to British government officials on the island who would – or, as was mostly the case, would not – sanction their release. Contentious titles included “The Censoring Of Calypso Makes Us Glad” – a hilarious piece of sarcasm by Lord Executor that was, of course, banned. In the face of such harassment, many singers opted for life in the UK.

BY THE TIME THE WINDRUSH DOCKED, calypso was popular enough in London to offer all sorts of opportunities. For Kitch and Beginner, it was more a case of how soon would a gig find them than how soon would they find a gig. They were celebrated artists all over the Caribbean, who were happy to front an orchestra playing big-band arrangements, but could also hold their own interacting with boisterous audiences in small clubs, backed by local players, or accompany themselves on guitar on a variety bill in music halls or between orchestra sets in a ballroom. It was not unusual for a star of Kitch’s calibre to dash around the West End playing sets in three or four clubs in a signle night.

One much-told story tells that, days after landing in England and in search of a gig, Kitch began to perform solo in a London pub, where the customers were so outraged that their noisy protests almost reduced him to tears. Supposedly, the disgruntled drinkers’ problem lay in the fact that they ‘couldn’t understand a fucking word’ of the songs. The story continues that Kitch had to risk similar humiliation in several other pubs before anybody would take any notice. While this may or may not be an urban myth, it sounds highly unlikely. Kitch arrived as a big star and didn’t need to scratch around looking for work; it’s unlikely any pub landlord without a reasonably sized West Indian clientele would have let him through the door, let alone put him on stage; and what makes a good calypsonian great is his diction and very correct use of English.

The real problem with this tale is that it crops up time and time again, and is taken to represent the truth. As such it has come to define the relationship between London and the Windrush generation of West Indian arrivals. It depicts Lord Kitchener as some exotic alien, plaintively trying to impress a host who was going to bully him for a while before reluctantly accepting that he might have something of some small value. It epitomises the idea that West Indian immigrants were in London under sufferance, had precious little sense of self worth, and existed only in relation to white English people. That might explain why it gets repeated so often, yet questioned so rarely.

The reality was that, to a large degree, Londoners didn’t know what to expect from the new arrivals or what to do with them. West Indians who endured that period speak of attitudes that varied between openly welcome, outright hostile and completely indifferent in pretty much equal measure. In the years during and immediately after the war, native Londoners made very little attempt to engage with the new arrivals. That wasn’t simply a matter of racism, although there was no shortage of that. It was more the case that the city, being naturally insular, was still recovering from the Luftwaffe onslaught and the wider implications of being at war. West Indians contributed to this lack of engagement, too. Few believed that they needed to instigate any kind of relationship with the host country, as they didn’t think they’d be here very long – maybe five years, certainly no more than ten. The worker recruitment drives across the Caribbean – London Transport in Barbados, British Rail in Jamaica, and the newly formed NHS everywhere – sold the adventure on the notion of rebuilding the Mother Country after the war, and then, job done, going home with pockets bulging with cash. Although it was rare for anybody to go home quickly, the dream was so cherished that among this generation the notion of a black British identity didn’t even begin to form. Their emotions buoyed by the Independence Fever that washed through the Caribbean from the late 1950s onwards, Jamaicans saw themselves as Jamaicans, Kitticians as Kitticians, and so forth. That said, it’s important to remember that while such nationalism promoted a certain amount of inter-island antagonism, and different nationalities tended to live and primarily socialise among their fellow countrymen, everyone was aware that they all had much more in common than they did keeping them apart. After all, it wasn’t as though most Londoners cared whether you were a Grenadian, a St Lucian or a Dominican; generally all that registered was a black face and an unfamiliar accent.

Lord Kitchener, seen here with a double bass, was an accomplished musician as well as a singer.

In such an environment, calypso was massively important to the new arrivals, who felt an understandable sense of disconnect with the West Indies they’d left behind. Hearing a new song was like getting a letter from home. It didn’t even matter that ‘home’ would always be Trinidad, the fact that it was Caribbean tended to override inter-island rivalries. Calypso’s traditions of wordplay and story-telling were embedded all over the West Indies, so a house party that spun calypso records, or a pub featuring a lyrically clever singer, would put you back in touch with who you were.

Almost exclusively experienced live – what records were available were imported from Trinidad, which had an established music industry – calypso functioned much like kaiso, secretly mocking those in power. The sharper wordsmiths would comment on London life and London people with in-jokes and slang that kept things pretty much closed off from anyone apart from themselves and their own crowds. The music owed its popularity to more than just its amusement value; it played a vital role in retaining a keen sense of self in difficult times. Immigrants performing for immigrants, the original London calypso singers would appear as support acts in venues like the Paramount, while also headlining in smaller West Indian clubs and turning up during popular Friday night and Sunday lunchtime sessions in such pubs as the Queens in Brixton or the Colherne in Earls Court. While every bit as exciting and ad hoc as you might find in Port of Spain, however, this was pretty much the original Caribbean form frozen in aspic with very little evolution. Ironically, that lack of reinvention became increasingly significant, as more and more West Indians came to accept that they weren’t going home for anything longer than a visit, and such snapshots from the islands meant so much more.

AS THE 1950s ROLLED AROUND, the big-time London music business began to take calypso seriously. Recording calypso in London was nothing particularly new; as far back as the 1930s, Decca and Regal Zonophone had cut sides by the likes of Sam Manning, Lionel Belasco and Rudolph Dunbar. These were for export only, however, and treated as novelties by the domestic operations. From 1935 onwards, Decca UK tried to release calypso recorded in New York by its American division, but even stars like Attila the Hun, Roaring Lion and Growling Tiger failed to ignite sales. Releases were discontinued in 1937, and all titles deleted in 1940.

By the time the Windrush arrived, most calypso recording was happening on a below-the-radar scene, which put Kitch and Beginner in the studio almost as soon as they arrived. Both cut tunes for London’s most successful calypso label, Hummingbird Records, run by expat Trinidadian businessman Renco Simmons (Trinidad is also known as ‘the Land of the Hummingbird’). Simmons would hire RG Jones’ studio in south London and record well-known calypsonians who were either living in London or passing through. He’d then get records pressed in London primarily for export to Trinidad, with supplementary sales in the capital. Back home, he retailed his records through Hylton Rhyner’s, a chain of tailor’s shops that also sold calypso records (there’s still a Rhyner’s Records in Port of Spain). In London he’d place them in the network of black-owned grocers, cafes and barbers, which had been beyond Decca’s distribution arm.

While this enhanced reputations in Trinidad, and catered to West Indian London, it had no wider impact. That all changed when Denis Preston, a suave, charismatic hipster who had been on the London jazz scene since the early 1940s, discovered calypso. Preston, who briefly dubbed himself Saint Denis, was a contributor to Jazz Music magazine and an announcer on the BBC’s Radio Rhythm Club. He was also a groundbreaking independent music producer and a savvy record businessman. It was Preston who pioneered the model of recording artists at his own expense and then leasing the results to record companies. He also hired the fledgling Joe Meek as his engineer, and built Lansdowne Studios in Ladbroke Grove in 1957.

Preston happened on calypso in 1946, when, as jazz editor of Musical Express – today’s NME, just after it dropped the words ‘Accordion Times &’ and before it added ‘New’ – he was promoting a ragtime concert in London at which Freddie Grant & His West Indian Calypsonians were halfway down the bill. Three years later, when working for Decca in New York, he came across the music again as a favourite of the dance bands in Harlem clubs. Seriously impressed, he convinced EMI’s Parlophone Records on his return to Blighty to get into the calypso business, and took Kitch and Beginner into the company’s prestigious Abbey Road studios early in 1950.

SOUNDS LIKE LONDON

Contents

Why Sounds Like London needed writing

Introduction

1
‘They come over’ ere …’

CHAPTER ONE
Mash Up in the Mother Country

SOUNDS LIKE LONDON

Contents

Why Sounds Like London needed writing

Introduction

1‘They come over’ ere …’

CHAPTER ONEMash Up in the Mother Country

1
‘They come over’ ere …’

CHAPTER ONE
Mash Up in the Mother Country