Aniefiok Ekpoudom on how a generation influenced by both the emerging New York rap scene and Caribbean Sound System culture created a distinctly British Black identity in music and other art forms

By the west of Clapham Common, nearing Junction, were Debbie Pryce and Susan Banfield, friends and pioneering rappers whose parents arrived in Clapham and South London alongside a generation who migrated as a result of London Transport and NHS recruitment drives in Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and other countries across the Caribbean.

In the 1950s, London Transport had set up an office in Bridgetown, capital of Barbados, and then aired news of their recruitment scheme on local radio, in the local Bajan newspapers and on posters across the city. Word spread soon across the island, and before long, applicants were being interviewed. Written and medical tests were conducted, and workers were cleared to start new jobs in London. The Barbadian government covered their travel fees, and the new recruits journeyed across the Atlantic, filling out the London Transport workforce.

Shortly after, British Rail and the NHS erected similar schemes, and thousands of Caribbean people slowly dripped from the islands into Britain, starting work as bus drivers and rail workers and nurses in South London. Debbie’s mother was a nurse, her father worked for London Transport, among a wave of immigrants drafted into the city’s local economy from overseas, many of who were received by family members and friends already settled on the other side.

Together, this new influx rented rooms, they bought property, they sought to build Caribbean communities in South London, weaving among each other in church congregations and Blues Parties and Pirate Radio stations, then raised children in these community cradles. Debbie and Susan grew up among this loosely connected fraternity of families in Clapham. In the eighties, when they grew up, their houses were furnished from trips over to Brixton market and the salesmen who would go door-to-door, hawking to the West Indian families in the area.

They were raised on their parents’ record collections, fed on Sunday Reggae shows on Pirate Radio and on British pop music like David Bowie and Dexys Midnight Runners, and emerging with distinctly Black British genres like 2-Tone and Lover’s Rock. Sounds of home and sounds of a far home underscoring their early tastes. There were influences from further afield, too. In the early stretches of the decade, Hip Hop, born of Jamaican Sound System culture, and fashioned in the housing estates of the South Bronx, began seeping into Britain. Sometimes, a friend would travel to see family in New York, and then arrive back in South London with tales of what they had seen, or would bring back handfuls of records, or tape recordings of documentaries like Style Wars (1983) and films like Wild Style (1982) and Beat Street (1984), which catalogued and then broadcast the early moments of Hip Hop culture.

In this process, the genre’s elements: MCing, breakdancing, DJing and graffiti writing jumped from the working-class, Black and Latino neighbourhoods of New York, and into the working-class Black areas of London and Bristol and Birmingham. They travelled on tapes passed between extended relatives, played on Pirate Radio stations like Invicta FM where British DJs began to spin the early records, or were performed on early tours like The New York City Rap tour in 1982, where American breakers, MCs, DJs and graffiti artists delivered their fledgling art forms on a London stage.

Running parallel to the breakers and the MCs and the graffiti artists were kids of the same era, second-generation, British-raised Caribbean young people entrenched in Sound System culture. Many of them were raised around Clapham and wider South London, their sounds the products of music that had travelled along strong family lines stretched between the islands and the UK. There was Smiley Culture from Stockwell, son of a Jamaican father and a Guyanese mother, who, among others, bent Reggae into something of his own. Reggae artists often DJed and toasted on songs, a vocal delivery style where the artist would chant and talk over the cruising melody.

In Britain, Smiley Culture and others like Peter King and Tippa Irie took things further, chanting with an increased pace and speed over the records. Some would call it fast-chat Reggae or speed rapping. On his Reggae riddims Smiley Culture placed Jamaican patois alongside British cockney, bringing the dualities of a young Black Britain onto record, building on the foundations laid by the Sound Systems erected across Clapham and Brixton, Battersea and Lewisham in the seventies. There was Reggae Sunsplash too, the music festival, first held in 1978 at Jarrett Park in Montego Bay, Jamaica, before spreading into Selhurst Park, South London in 1984. By its 1987 iteration, over a quarter of a million people crested on Clapham Common, the festival coinciding with a celebration of Jamaica’s twenty-fifth year of independence, and the centenary year of the country’s deceased, but still influential, political activist Marcus Garvey.

And so, young British-Caribbean people, from South London and further field, raised on Sound Systems and Reggae and Soul and now Hip Hop, began to fuse these scattering of influences into sounds of their own. It’s a process they would repeat for the next forty years.

Susan and Debbie would hit up Hip Hop nights called The Breakers Yard at a club in nearby Nine Elms, where teenagers from across Clapham Junction, the Common and Battersea would assemble to practise, and enjoy their new art form. Or in Covent Garden, an early mecca and a meeting point for British Hip Hop, where new crews from across the city and the wider country would link, battle and throw up new graffiti pieces. The girls witnessed a genre on the rise, bound themselves to its ascent by taking on the names Susie Q and MC Remedee, calling their new coalition the Cookie Crew. They were among the first Hip Hop groups in Britain, and after practising for hours in Debbie’s front room, began taking their gift to youth clubs and early rap shows, sharing the stage with their New York counterparts, their songs ringing out in night clubs and on the radio, peaking with the single “Rok da House” that reached number 5 in the UK charts in 1988, and a debut album Born This Way that settled at number 24. In their wake came further Hip Hop acts from Clapham and Battersea, rappers like MC Melo and Monie Love, No Parking MCs and The Boogie Bunch.

The generation raised both by rap and Sound System culture marked the beginning of something distinct in South London, their tastes a symbol of music boomeranging across the Black Atlantic: Jamaica into the Bronx, the Bronx into Britain’s inner cities, where it began to evolve into something new. In South London, these fusions of cultures were a window into what was stirring on the ground, the sounds a reflection of an emerging and distinct Black British identity in this remote corner of the city. A drumskin was being layered, early rappers and chatters in the ends, and the varied music genres they leaned into, a signal of a distinct and varied strain of MC culture shooting from the seeds their parents had buried.

This is an extract from Where We Come From: Rap, Home and Hope in Modern Britain (Faber) by Aniefiok Ekpoudom. Buy a copy here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

Aniefiok Ekpoudom is our guest on “A Drink with the Idler” this Thursday 29 February from 6pm. Free to subscribers.

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