Don't Stop the Carnival (eBook)

INTRODUCTION

BLACK BRITAIN, IN SOUND, SIGHT AND DEED.

In early 2018, the UK national press carried the story of the facial reconstruction of one of the earliest known inhabitants of Britain. DNA analysis carried out by researchers from the Natural History Museum of a skeleton that dated back at least 10,000 years produced results that unceremoniously overturned long-held assumptions about the ancestry of the nation. Or at least what it looked like.

“Cheddar Man” was black. Whether this was a quirk of evolution or a reminder that modern science needs to look as far back as it does forward, the discovery raised no end of debate. If the “first Briton” was actually not white, then what does that say about successive generations down to today? Is there a spook haunting the family house rather than just sitting by the door?

National identity remains a concern in societies all over the world, and Britain is no different, especially when some politicians and media are wilfully advancing the notion of a distinct, unexpurgated British Britain, a “Britain first” or, as Eurosceptics trumpet, a Britain that craves and deserves its “independence”. Freedom from the fair-skinned technocrats of Europe as well as from the onslaught of dark-skinned migrants from Africa, or even, in the 70th anniversary of the arrival of Empire Windrush, a hunt to find and expel elderly West Indians who have lived and worked in the UK for fifty years, but don’t have the requisite papers.

The existence of an ancestor, or an indigenous inhabitant with roots running so deep that it turns racially polarized stereotypes on their heads, cannot but strengthen the case for asking who exactly we are, and from where we might have come. UCL geneticist Mark Thomas was forthright on the value of “Cheddar Man” in the context of education and cultural awareness. “If it becomes a part of our understanding then I think that would be a much better thing. I think it would be good if people lodge it in their heads, and it becomes a little part of their knowledge.”

This should force us to ask: how much do we really know about the peoples of Britain and their journey through the ages? Cast against the emblematic backdrop of the Union Jack, the flag that was flown proudly around the world to denote the expansion of England beyond its original borders, the perception of our population as mono-racial, a comforting ‘we’ before a discomfiting ‘they’, has long looked absurd.

In keeping with the way historians and scientists continue to bring vital new information to light on the real complexity of the past, Don’t Stop The Carnival is based on the premise that tracing the lives that black people in, and of, Britain may have led, and the forms of cultural expression they devised, can make a contribution to our understanding of the past as not just multi-faceted, but decisive in its contribution to the present. As a pervasive, dynamic, and often exhilarating artform, music has always been an outlet for the imagination of people of vastly differing circumstance, whether from a privileged elite or from a disenfranchised working class. The goal of this book is to put under the spotlight as large a cross-section as possible of the music makers in British history who have been classified according to a range of terms: Negro, coloured, African, Ethiopian, Black American, West Indian, Caribbean. Of course, the geographical range of musics that have arrived in Britain and taken root here is wider than this. However, because the cut-off point in time for this first volume, of what is intended as a two-part study, is the mid-1960s, it does not deal with the emergence of music whose origins were the South Asian continent, the home-grown phenomenon of bhangra, for instance, in the 1980s.

All of the various epithets noted above reflect the whimsical lexicological shifts through time with regard to the naming and position in society of those who are perceived as the racial “other”. To this day, the chess-playing with words continues. BAME – Black And Minority Ethnic – is an official designation of communities in Britain who to all intents and purposes, trace their roots elsewhere and stand connected to another part of the world, which for the most part, means areas of the globe formerly known as the colonies or overseas territories, or even the “dark continent”, lands that were once part of a UK plc, constructed on conquest and lucrative dominion.

If the assets of the Caribbean islands and African states included such valuable commodities as sugar, cotton, cocoa and tropical fruits, and oil and minerals, then the export of their human resources has been equally important in the enrichment of the British national heritage. These were people who came to take up arms and fight wars for the “mother country”, who served for instance in the NHS, the transport system, on ships, in factories, and – the subject of this book – in the entertainment and cultural “industries”. These people brought with them sound as well as word and deed, and my focus is on the immense range of creative output and its roots in the quotidian experiences of these arrivants and settlers, who were recipients, variously, of adulation and disdain, lightning rods for complex, and often contradictory feelings about what actually constituted entertainment, art, culture, decorum, the emotionally and sexually exciting and the socially acceptable. Music played by Blacks asked questions about what it meant to be a human being, to exist in the world, to stand alongside others, to broach questions of freedom, family, friendship and fidelity, to have trouble in mind as well as joy in one’s heart. There is a deep repository of stories about black musicians in Britain over time, from the minstrels and trumpeters of Tudor times, the street entertainers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the skilful practitioners of western classical music, the exponents of gospel and blues, the forerunners and innovators of what became marketed as jazz, and the pioneers of calypso, ska and high life. Then there are the champions of the idioms built on those ground-breaking foundations: rhythm & blues, soul, rock and rocksteady. The constant is change. The sound moves on. The instruments with which the sound is made also evolve.

All this points to the fact that music made by Blacks in Britain has never been one thing, and we can only understand its artistic scope and social ramifications if we embrace its multiplicity. Part of the creative momentum underpinning musical development has always been its proximity to other forms, including dance, cinema, theatre, literature and even the visual arts. This constant interconnectedness and cross-fertilization makes the story of Black music in Britain all the more vital. What and how a musician plays, the gestures they adopt on stage and the language used all connect to this wider cultural milieu.

With voices came instruments – drums, strings, wind instruments of brass and wood. But there were also devices that did not fit into any existing western musical conventions. There were adaptations, if not adulterations, of percussion instruments, the use of sundry objects assembled for the purpose of rhythm that were initially subjected to the long arm of censure before enjoying the embrace of approval. The development of a music of passion, even of an explosive violence of sound, was part of a spirit of invention – the ability to see something mundane as a blueprint for something ingenious – the genius to make music from what, according to the norms of the day, was condemned as anti-musical. For defenders of received ideas about British or European culture, the music of the non-west was often perceived as noise.

Yet, over time, black people holding strange things from which they ‘magicked’ original music, or invigorating song and dance, have become an integral part of the musical history of Britain. Musicians, lest we forget, are also members of society, and their human story, regardless of any elevated status a small minority enjoyed, is not separate from the stories of their peers who earned their daily bread less glamorously. An immigrant musician is still an immigrant. A black musician is still a black man or woman. They could be visible and esteemed providers of pleasure and invisible outsiders at the same time. Get in, stand under the lights, get out by the servants’ door.

There is no way the story of Black music in Britain can be told without recognising its context of racial discrimination, the arc of which stretches over centuries rather than decades. This has provided a bitter undertaste to all the sweetness of Black sounds filling our green and pleasant land. No portrait of a singer or player would be complete without an insight into the litany of prejudice they encountered – the xenophobia of “swampings” and “invasion”, fear of miscegenation and job loss, the moral panics over the alleged erosion of civilized values, and the actual occurrence of insult, bodily harm, murder, eviction from the home and dismissal from the workplace. All this inevitably became a part of the musicians’ chronicles, not least because they made their music in conscious response to this state of affairs.

To do justice to these histories requires the broadest possible vision of Britain. Not an account of events and life stories in a single location, but a trek from north to south and east to west. In real terms, this means the Black experience in Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Cornwall, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool and...