FIRST TRAIN TO SKAVILLE..!*
I’m not sure how mainstream a music phenomenon the ska craze ever became in the States. Maybe it remains merely one of countless retro musical tendencies, each a refuge to renegades from the mechanistic impersonality of electronic beats & the misogyny & violence that underpins so much hip-hop. Or maybe it really has caught on across the nation as offering a triumphant return to the euphoria of wild abandon on the dancefloor in front of a live band.
My first encounter with Jamaica’s urban folk music predates its incendiary dissemination throughout the USA by at least three decades. For me the music will be forever associated with that mix of first & second generation West Indians who settled in the terraced & towerblocked suburban sprawl of South-East London. In the mid-‘60s I was a student at Goldsmiths’ College, the teacher training wing of London University. The main building was situated on the busy trunk road that had the Elephant & Castle as the gateway to the inner city at one end & the long-absorbed villages of Lewisham, Greenwich, Deptford, Blackheath, Catford & the shrivelling edges of rural Kent at the other.
Behind & beyond the college countless bisecting roads named after forgotten Victorian councillors & Boer War battlegrounds linked the territories, each one lined either with flat-faced terraced housing, narrow front doors opening onto the street, or, more respectably, semi-detached late 19th century two- & three-storey villas, now converted into self-contained apartments. A seedy pall of neglect hung over the region, as if decades of smoke & coal dust from the railways lingered still. There was no sense of ownership, no evidence of a stable core of residents whose long inhabitation declared belonging, a vibrant & centred community. Absentee landlords rented out the flats & a ragged tide of stony-faced sub-letting landladies, embattled families, elderly couples who wanted no trouble & students a long way from home ebbed & flowed through the shabbily furnished rooms. Corner shops, unchanged in appearance (& in some cases apparently in stock) since the early years of the century, supplied baked beans, sliced white bread & rolling tobacco to the neighbourhoods. Grim, chemically-lit self-service laundrettes churned the garments & bedclothes of the populace day & night. In steamy cafes bus drivers, off-duty postmen & truanting schoolkids ordered bacon butties & sucked on Pepsi-Colas & pints of tea. Dark, sticky-floored pubs served up warm Watneys & Worthington to solitary old men by day & rollicking undergraduates by night.
It was the second year of the Drama course. After 10 years of boarding school I was ready for my own place &, with my pal DH, I paid the deposit on a flat in a squalid little terraced house. D & I had the top floor - two minute bedrooms & a tiny kitchen with a stoneware sink & one cold water tap. There was no bathroom &, bafflingly, no toilet. In our anxiety to embrace the bohemian lifestyle we’d missed the bit where Mr. Buddhu, our landlord, had explained that we would need to arrange access to the single backyard toilet with the teeming Indian family downstairs. Since they rarely answered the door on which we pounded after a night’s steady drinking at the New Cross House, this access was rarely available. We managed a couple of weeks of bladder & bowel control & baths in the municipal facility behind the college. But having managed to ignore the scurrying sounds at night, we finally drew the line at sharing cheese sandwiches with rats so bold that, when discovered at breakfast one morning, they remained at the kitchen table until they had finished.
A larger flat was found in Tyrwhitt Road. It occupied the middle of three floors & although the toilet & bathroom were shared, they were on our floor, as was the gas meter. (This cooperative piece of equipment wasn’t fussy about coinage & would accept readily one of those old French francs with the hole in the middle. We dangled the coin on a piece of tough fishing twine into the slot & sharply withdrew it the moment we heard the gas ignite). Again, we each had our own room, but this time the galley was marginally larger & it had a hot water tap. What puzzled us was why the rent was the same as what we had paid for the Clifton Rise rat trap. This was clarified for us by the cheery Irish proprietor of the corner shop: it was because all the other tenants, & the neighbours on both sides too, were black & the landlord, a Greek Cypriot called Christodoulu, was generous to his white tenants in their adversity. In order to take up the financial slack, he simply charged his West Indian clients slightly higher rents.
The family upstairs of us was quietly respectable. Every Sunday they would emerge wearing black suits & straw hats & lace veils & white gloves & head off for the Jubilee Baptist Church in Peckham. The family downstairs were gloriously, unashamedly in contrast. They were a young couple called Byron & Lucinda Notice with two tiny children, a girl, Millie, & a boy, Manley. Byron had a stall selling records & sheet music & he worked three times a week, alternating between Deptford, Greenwich & Lewisham markets. The remainder of the time he alternated between sinking deep into a broken down sofa wreathed in smoke & dancing rubber-limbed on the threadbare carpet before the empty fireplace. Lucinda brewed black tea & stirred a permanently simmering pot of bully beef & rice with one child on her hip & the other on her back.
D & I were made aware of their presence the first night of our residence. Exhausted by the move (we’d transported all our possessions to & fro the mile-&-a-half lashed onto a single bicycle), we’d had a couple of beers & retired early. I was jerked out of deep sleep in the small hours by the sound of music. It wasn’t the dull, bass-heavy thump of music heard through walls; it was a masonry-shaking, pile driving immanence of sound driven by a lurching, rollocking rhythm with the emphasis on the offbeat. I sat up in bed transfixed. The immediate sensation was of being locked in the engine room of an ocean liner, a foot or two away from the pistons. But the secondary sensation was one of delight: what was this extraordinary noise that sounded so familiar & yet so exotic at the same time? It continued for about an hour, ceasing suddenly & leaving in its wake the echo of rattling drums, bubbling bass, a guitar played on the upstroke, creaky, slightly off-key sax & brass &, riding on top, impassioned but incomprehensible lyrics.
The following day Byron, emerging from his flat to buy a paper, found me sitting on the stairs, my arms clasped around my knees, rocking back & forth like a child in pain as the skipping & churning fired up again. Mistaking my hunched state for acute discomfort, he apologised profusely & promised immediate silence. When I put him right he invited me in, introduced me to the family & we spent the rest of the day (one full of last-minute examination coaching at the college) going through stacked boxes of Trojan, Island & Blue Beat singles.
Over the next few months, through Byron Notice’s messianic zeal, I received a crash course in state-of-the-art ska. From the music from the likes of Jamaica Fats, Derrick Morgan & Cornell Campbell, I was able to make the clear connection between early ska & the tight-yet-loose swing beat of Louisiana R&B, the first point of distinct influence. Higgs & Wilson & Clancy Eccles introduced me to the greater emphasis on the vocal line. Early Jimmy Cliff brought in the contemporary influence of American chart pop styling, But most intoxicating of all was the surging pulse of the ska that was being recorded there & then, both in Kingston & in tiny studios around South London, & an abiding love for The Skatalites, Toots & The Maytals, Prince Buster, Drumbago & The Blenders, Desmond Dekker & countless one-hit wonders was born. Although the incomprehensibility of most of the lyrics added to the mystery & dynamism of the music for me, Byron Insisted on translating everything & soon I was laughing with him (but, in fact, as a rather unworldly middle class white boy, secretly shocked) at the open sexuality of his favourites – such tracks as ‘Penny Reel’ & ‘Papa, Do It Sweet’. And I was deeply impressed & not a little intrigued by the strange melange of political satire & residual African iconography of other songs. It seemed that every area of human experience was covered by ska & all of it carried along on a storming, skanking beat.
Later, after I moved from Tyrwhitt Road to a flat in Lee Green, I used to delight in wandering in the evening & night time up & down certain of the roads leading off Lewisham High Street, moving through the pools of sound that spilled from one open window after another. Even more exciting was the brief time that my then girlfriend spent in a Goldsmiths’ hall of residence in Brixton (this locality having the highest density of West Indian population in London). I would drag her through the market, pausing at one record stall after another to part with the remnants of my student grant. In fact, a principal cause of our parting was, as I recollect, her always having to buy the drinks & cinema tickets!
By the time I started teaching, first at a primary school in New Cross & subsequently at a large, terrifying boys’ secondary school just off Albany Road, Deptford, ska had emerged from the ghetto. Records had charted & the first wave of skinheads had adopted the more obscure sounds as their signature music. Ska mutated into something altogether more accommodating to the host nation & my interest in its development waned as jangling folk-rock & feedback-happy psychedelia captured the hearts & souls of white middle class youth. The world changed very rapidly & my brief relationship with an emergent musical form that carried within it the evolving cultural identity of an entire people was eclipsed by my own race’s preoccupation with a largely spurious & self-indulgent inner world. I had shared enormous shaggy spliffs with Byron & listened to early Bob Marley through a haze of half-sleep & laughter. But now serial smoking of ‘Red Leb’ & ‘Pakki Black’ (the casual racism was lost on us) became the sacrament at the heart of the self-proclaimed ‘alternative culture’ & the instrumental functions of the drug as a filter through which to experience the music were transformed into something self-serving & fashionable.
It wasn’t until the sudden explosion of the post-punk Two Tone craze that I re-discovered ska. By 1979 I had been married for ten years & I had a family. Music was still a vital force at the centre of my life – I was playing in a hard-working blues band & spending much too little time doing my bit at home. But I’d lost a sense of popular music as a defining element at the heart of a nascent culture. The parade of bands that swiftly followed in the wake of The Specials & Madness brought something of that back for me &, once again, I found myself shuffling to & fro to the old classics & the new sounds that drew both reverently but innovatively from them.
It’s the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Two Tone label &, as I type, the sounds of The Maytals’ ‘Funky Kingston’ give way to The Beat’s ‘Stand Down, Margaret’. Even in advanced middle age, I can still ‘Do the Reggay’ as well as any other white fan of a quintessentially black musical form. However, much as I enjoy some of the more off-the-wall hip-hop, for me, a rather unworldly middle class white boy, the West Indian/British Afro-Caribbean nexus will always be best represented by the elemental loping rhythms of pure, mid-‘60s skanking ska.
*First posted in August 2004. Now expanded & partially re-written. A minority interest, I know, but indulge me...
