Music

The album is an attempt, if not to make sense of the glorious chaos of living here, then at least to quantify it. The citizens of London, as you’re probably aware, are remarkably resilient and capable of handling anything from terrorist attacks to the rush-hour Northern Line. This is a city that still has fond memories of the Blitz, after all. However, we’re also past masters at ignoring problems, whether it’s someone struggling with a pushchair on the stairs or a subculture searching for acceptance. We frequently need someone to set the conversational agenda, and for that, we usually turn to music. A few days later we meet up for a yoghurt with renaissance rasta Don Letts. Photographer, filmmaker, musician, commentator and all that, Letts is a mutual friend of the band’s leaders and a very useful person to talk to if you want some perspective on the evolution of London’s music. Feature continues

‘When I went to reggae clubs, it was a strictly black affair,’ he says. ‘Then comes ’77, I’m taking Johnny Rotten and Joe Strummer to Four Aces, which was the darkest reggae club in England. Now here we are 2006, you go to a Jah Shaka event, it’s like the bloody United Nations, there’s no colour bar, man. And that’s just in my lifetime – government didn’t do that, school didn’t do that, politics didn’t do that, music did that. And that’s a fact.’

Letts first met Simonon back in the late ’70s, when The Clash were beginning their experiments with bringing reggae, funk and even disco into their speedball punk template and Letts was working at clothes shop Acme Attractions. By the early ’80s, as Operation Swamp ’81 set race relations back approximately a century while William Whitelaw denied the existence of institutional racism, black and white youths were already making unsupervised inroads to integration at places like The Roxy, a reggae club run by Letts.

‘That musical reportage quality that black music has, particularly in the ’60s and ’70s, is what attracted the punks. Music was about something. When people were singing “Burn down Babylon” or “I need a roof over my head”, these were things my white mates could easily identify with.’
This idea of musical reportage didn’t start with reggae, however. Going back to the Windrush generation, the newsreel footage of calypsonian Lord Kitchener playing his newly composed ‘London Is The Place For Me’ at Tilbury docks hinted at a new, exciting, exotic age. But faced with a post-war economic slump, the days of beer and roses were over. Within two years, Kitchener was writing the likes of ‘Chicken And Rice’, about being chased down Shaftesbury Avenue by a cleaver-wielding chef after doing a runner from a Chinese restaurant.

These days, of course, calypso is best known to most Londoners as the wellspring of the Notting Hill Carnival, whose gigawatt sound systems are a very different dutchy of saltfish to its origins. And that, fundamentally, is what makes London’s music scene so great. Whether it’s new people, new cultures or new sounds, it’s never ‘them’ who assimilate, it’s us. London’s culture is the result of a continual conversation every bit as wide-ranging and nerdy as Albarn and Simonon’s.

‘Through years of colonialism and the empire bringing in these different influences, English culture is constantly evolving. There’s no full stop,’ says Letts. ‘You put the Union Jack on it, all of a sudden you think it’s Empire-made. But if you know your shit, you know they got their tea from India, they got their potatoes from America. And that’s why I love London, because there is an interaction between the different cultures that doesn’t exist anywhere else on the planet. One of the obvious examples is the different youth movements and subcultures that we throw up every few months. That turnover of ideas doesn’t exist anywhere else.’