Good Jamaica music: the '76 British Reggae documentary

"This is a long way from roots Jamaica. Some call it 'commercial', others 'British reggae'." So says the narrator, Carl Gayle, of British Reggae, a 40-minute London Weekend Television documentary directed by Jeremy Marre which first aired on 18 September 1976. It's a comment about a soulful singer and her band at Paddington's Q Club. She's shown doing a pretty strong lover's rock tune. It's not really my thing, but like almost everything else in this documentary there's a compelling vividness to the live footage, not least with its repeated shots of audience members dancing, grooving and smiling along. Yeah man, dig it. Overall this is a great documentary. Slightly messy, yes, and with various interviewees who ramble on about the "feel" of Jamaican music and the various social pressures on "the West Indian man" in cold, unwelcomingly racist Britain, British Reggae nevertheless features some very evocative 50-year-old footage of the streets of Notting Hill, Brixton, Stoke Newington, Chalk Farm and Paddington (note: this is not really British reggae, it's London reggae). And the live performances are almost uniformly great. We see Delroy Washington at the '76 Notting Hill Carnival, Roy Shirley at a small club, Sir Coxsone at one of his sound system shows, and stuff from Matumbi, Aswad and the Cimarons. In particular, the clips of Aswad (30:45-32:00), Coxsone (11:20-13:00), Delroy Washington (2:40-5:10) and Roy Shirley (7:00-10:00) are all highly recommended. The clip of Shirley's ecstatic, limb-shaking rocksteady show is truly amazing, and glimpses of Rico on stage alongside him steadfastly pumping away on his trombone are the icing on the cake. If this documentary had been made today I seriously doubt it would feature any of these two- or three-minute-long live-performance sequences. The temptation to cut away would be too great. Yet that's precisely what's so effective about this half-a-century-old doc. It allows enough time for the power of the music to really come across. And the programme-makers are as interested in the audience's reactions as they are in the musicans on stage. Watching the people at the Roy Shirley gig rhythmically grooving along to his already intense performance makes the whole thing twice as good. 

The devil's music: Sir Coxon Sound's King Of The Dub Rock

Among the talking heads, Lloyd Coxsone speaks with missionary zeal about taking his music - "good Jamaica music" - into the ghettoes of inner-city London, and that's what British Reggae gives you: good Jamaica music, albeit with a UK twist. It's a pivotal time in the development of UK reggae. Pre-punk (or at least pre-Grundy) and the championing reggae will later get from John Lydon, the Clash and Don Letts at the Roxy, I'm assuming reggae in the UK was still almost exclusively listened to by black people, save for occasional lovers rock pop-crossovers. Nineteen seventy-six might have been the "year of punk", the long hot summer when the West Indies cricket team trounced England, but it was also the year of the Race Relations Act, and British racism is a constant background hum to British Reggae (the disconcerting noise in the speakers). Coxsone says, "Wherever I play, there's always the police ... they break down the house and mash up your tings". Peter Hall's super-stilted studio introduction to the documentary takes a liberal line about how communities can "understand each other through our arts". "We're now a multiracial society", says Hall, and in a mid-70s context I think this would have had a relatively novel - even vaguely radical - ring to it. But it's still staid old Britain, right, so we have to have a documentary about reggae stuffily introduced by a white establishment figure rather than, for example, by someone like Stuart Hall or Darcus Howe. In a further twist, the version of this Acquarius documentary on YouTube is from the TV Heaven retread series presented by old television stalwart Frank Muir in 1992. Muir's fruit-and-nutty-voiced intro, done fairly straight and not in his usual parody Old Etonian guise, is praised by a few people in the YouTube comments thread. "Jah bless Frank Muir", said someone as recently as last month. And just "14 hours ago" (says YouTube) someone offers the comment, "Big irie respect to Frank Muir". Yes indeed, big irie respect. Maybe British reggae has finally arrived ...?

Roy Shirley (backed by Rico) wailin' and testifyin' on stage