logo

The legacy of it - the frequencies the tone the approach to the radical treatment of sound - has been handed down almost

Posted by admin   ·     ·   Jump to comments

"The legacy of it - the frequencies, the tone, the approach to the radical treatment of sound - has been handed down, almost like a griot thing, from r'n'b through Massive Attack to the drum and bass people. It's almost like the blues now, and we're just trying to get it taken as seriously as it should be."The compilation's title track - Tabby Cat Kelly's haunting and beautiful "Don't Call Us Immigrants" - sets the bitter-sweet tone perfectly. "Find some other way to amuse yourselves," Birmingham's Kelly counsels his unnamed tormentors, with an authority born of bitter experience, "because what's a joke to you is death to me." Perceived as second-class citizens - musically as well as socially - these British reggae trailblazers fought back with music whose spirit and quality still shines through three decades on.Producer, Dennis Bovell (whose remorseless inventiveness would later help shape the music of Orange Juice and The Slits, as well as Janet Kay's immortal "Silly Games") looks back with some fondness to his early days with London-based band, Matumbi.Driving up the M1 to Birmingham and on to Manchester or Leeds, the band felt like pioneers of the Old West. "There was a lot of rivalry between London and Birmingham in particular," Bovell remembers, "it was 'this is going on', 'no, this is going on', kind of like the northern soul versus disco thing. In the early days we had to have two different sets - one for inside London and one for outside."As connections were made and new groups and sound systems sprang up all across the country, British reggae soon felt the hand of the law on its collar. "We were the first all-night people," Bovell remembers, "and not everyone liked that.

Wherever there was a reggae dance the police would be looking for people who were going to 'cause trouble'. You'd play a new club and go back three weeks later and it would be closed down. Reggae was being hounded, and then the punk generation came up and said [Bovell assumes comedy punk voice] 'We like this'."Persecution reached its zenith after trouble at a soundclash between Sufferers Hi Fi and Sir Lord Koos at the Carib Club on Cricklewood Broadway, north London, when police surrounded the venue and administered severe beatings to homebound revellers. Of the 12 people subsequently tried at the Old Bailey under the archaic law of Riot and Affray, Bovell himself was the most severely punished. He actually served six months of an outrageous three-year sentence before the verdict was finally overturned on appeal."When you're in prison you're furious and you're thinking 'When I get out I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna do that'," Bovell remembers, "but once I was released, I was so glad to be out that I just got on with it."Not all subsequent British reggae lived up to this early frontier spirit - "People hit on a formula and then they stayed there," Bovell says sadly, "that's been one of reggae's greatest downfalls."Some of Don't Call Us Immigrants star turns, like Black Slate and Aswad, went on to achieve crossover infamy Others, like the one and only Pablo Gad, didn't. But the underground networks of entrepreneurial and musicianly endeavour they all helped establish would shape the whole subsequent development of British black music - from Loose Ends to Soul II Soul, from A Guy Called Gerald to Craig David.

And even if they hadn't done, the music would still sound fantastic.'Don't Call Us Immigrants' (Pressure Sounds) is out now. ''My interest in albums usually wanes at around this point," says Bert Jansch, 57 this year and, for all the outward appearance of a man who never does anything in a hurry, still a bundle of restless creative energy. With Crimson Moon out next week - his 21st solo album proper, let alone a dozen with his Sixties fusion band Pentangle and its (now firmly past-tense) latterday reformations - he is already thinking about the next one But only thinking about it. For now, a full quarter century after the NME could justifiably headline a feature "Bert Jansch? Not still going is he?", the individual in question has acquiesced to the celebration of retrospection on a grand scale.

readers comments

Comments are closed.

NBA

NBA

MLB

MLB

NFL

NFL

NHL

NHL

WWE

WWE

Your sideblock text goes here