The Coming of Sound Systember

 

Those of you familiar with this back-water blog know that I often dedicate the month of September to Dub music. Every year the viewer results are fantastic, the visit rate is all-time high, the comments are abundant, & a good time is had by most. Every year I try to out-do myself & this year will be no exception. 

My plan is to call the month Sound Systember. I am going to try & show how Sound System culure created the environment that led to the rise & might of UK Dub.

Since the story of Sound System culture in the UK precedes Dub & since September is dedicated to Dub. I decided to share this beginning chapter now, as a run-up & preview of events to come.

Sound Systems were already big in JA & the rest of the Caribbean when HMT Empire Windrush brought one of the first large groups of post-war West Indian immigrants to the United Kingdom & entered into history.

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Windrush

HMT Empire Windrush carried 1027 passengers & two stowaways on a voyage from Jamaica to London in 1948. Of these, more than 800 passengers gave their last country of residence as somewhere in the Caribbean. Jamaica was the most popular country of origin (539 people), followed by Bermuda (139), Trinidad (73), British Guiana (44) & other Caribbean countries.

The reception in London was a major event that ended with a live performance from Calypso singer Aldwyn 'Lord Kitchener' Roberts singing the specially-written song "London is the Place for Me".
 
However, all was not as it appeared on the surface. The very poor couldn't leave Jamaica. They had to pay £28 for their passage & have another £5 on them when they sailed. This was an insurmountable number to the truly poor of the islands. 236 people arrived with no place to stay & were temporarily housed in the deep-level air raid shelter in Clapham Common. The nearest employment exchange to the shelter was in Brixton; so many of the original migrants eventually found accommodation in that area.

Also, just two days after the Windrush docked, a group of 11 Labour MPs wrote to Prime Minister Clement Attlee calling for a halt to the "influx of coloured people".

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One of the main ways to relieve the stress of a new-found land was immering in the culture of the islands. & one of the first things that was noticeably missing was music, mainly Calypso & soca played on the Sound Systems in the dancehalls & street of the immigrants native lands. For many of these immigrants, British pubs & clubs were hostile environments. (It was the era of  'No Dogs, No Blacks, No Irish'). British radio stations refused to play Jamaican music. So the Sound System began to make its slow rise in underground circuits through makeshift Dancehalls & word-of-mouth parties.

The first Sound System in the UK was Duke Vin's Tickler. Duke Vin was born Vincent George Forbes. He moved to London in 1954. Forbes, along with his two friends, Wilbert Augustus Campbell (DJ Count Suckle) & Lenny Fry stowed away on a cargo boat carrying bananas from Jamaica to England. After four days at sea, eating only the green bananas they found in the hold, they passed Cuba & emerged on to the deck, knowing that it would be too late for the captain to take them back.

Vin had learned his way around a Sound System by working for Tom 'the Great' Sebastian in Kingston, JA. With a fantastic collection of Jamaican music & US soul, Duke Vin built the first Sound System in England, the Tickler, in 1955 because he couldn’t find any dances like the ones he experienced in Kingston. 

 

He set up his first System at Ladbroke Grove in London & bought his records from a West London record shop owner named Daddy Peckings, who carried vinyl from Sir Coxsone Dodd's Studio One label. Record stores were the center of the Sound System growth at the time

Peckings Record Shop was the cornerstone in the history of reggae music in the UK. Like so many others, George Price, AKA Mr. Peckings, travelled in the early 1960s from Kingston in Jamaica to London, via Southampton. With him he brought the music of the Studio One Records label; without question one the most influential reggae record labels of all time.

Peckings Record Shop on Askew Road, Shepherd's Bush, was for many years the sole distributor of Studio One Records in the UK. This gives a clue to the huge influence this shop had on early Sound System culture in London.

This record gives a glimpse into the music Mr. Peckings would listen to himself, when working in the shop.

 

Various Artists - Tribute to Peckings, Jamaica Recording, 2015.
all decryption codes in comments

Ting a Ling - The Heptones
Send Me Some Loving - Cornell Campbell
Wise Words - Freddie McGregor
Meditation - R. Alexander
Major Walk - Ernest Ranglin
How Much I Love You - Owen Grey
Things Getting Hard - Lloyd Charmers
Everyday Is a Holiday - The Silvertones
I Don't Know - Freddie McGregor
Time Marches On - Owen Grey
La La Means I Love You - Winston Francis
Every Night - Don D. Junior
Over Flow - Lilly White & Sound Dimension
Roland Alphonso - Last Call - Roland Alphonso
Corn Meal Duckunu - Sammy Davis

 

 

 

 

Duke Vin continued deejaying for the rest of his life, spinning at the Marquee Club, the Flamingo, Brixton Town Hall, the Ram Jam Club, the Roaring Twenties, & Stoke Newington Hall. In true Jamaican fashion, he engaged in Sound System clashes with fellow deejays. His primary rival was Count Suckle.

Count Suckle, whose real name was Wilbert Augustus Campbell, stowed away on the same boat as Vin. Just as he had followed Vin to England, he followed in suit & started his own Sound System shortly after the Tickler. He called his Count Suckle's Sound System & he was shortly in huge demand at parties all over London. He made it his business to source the sounds that people wanted to hear. As he built up a reputation on the London party circuit, he would contact Randy's Record Shop in Gallatin, Tennessee. They would post to him the latest discs on the Sun, Chess, & Modern/RPM labels. He also obtained records from Jamaica. In 1958, on the first night of the Notting Hill riots, he was playing at a party in a street off Ladbroke Grove when the house was set on fire by a petrol bomb. The police had to escort Suckle & the revellers to safety while an angry mob of white working-class men stood outside shouting, "Kill the niggers! Send them back home!"

 

 

Feeling the fear of the times, Wilbert went legit, kinda. Suckle became a regular DJ at the Flamingo Club, in Soho's Wardour Street, where Georgie Fame & the Blue Flames had a residency in the early 1960s. Somebody told the owner, Rik Gunnell, that if he wanted to fill the club they needed to find Suckle. They did & from then on James Brown's Night Train, Sam Cooke's Night Beat & other African-American imports, as well as West Indian ska & calypso records, throbbed through the streets of Soho.

Eventually he secured residency at the Roaring Twenties on the West End of London. Count Suckle played his records between sets by a live band that played to a mixed white & black crowd. They came together for the music, R&B & ska, which was unlike anything else played in London at the time. Count Suckle opened his own club in 1962, called the Cue (later Q) Club, on Praed Street, Paddington. 

 

 Count Suckle sez:

     "We've always moved with the times . . . when we opened ska music was the thing, Prince Buster, Don Drummond, Reco, Tommy McCook, Roland Alphonso, Baba Brooks, y'know. They all played here when they toured London. We played all the latest things and the new dances caught on quick." 

 

He also founded a record label, Q Records, an imprint of Trojan.

But the early Sound Systems weren't the volume monsters of a few years later. The loudness & the heaviness of the bass had yet to become prevalent. Serving up some of that sweet soul music for the island folks was key to Duke & the Count. Here's a set of their sounds...quite different from the Sound System culture soon to come.

 

 

Various - Duke Vin & Count Suckle present Sound System UK: the Beginning, NØ Comp., 2024.

Intro
Honky Tonk Part 1 & 2 - Bill Doggett
Leona - Donnie Elbert
High School Dance - Larry Williams
Oh Gee-Oo-Wee - Charlie & Ray
Please Don’t Go - Count Suckle & the Rudies
Hey Boy Hey Girl - Oscar McLollie & Jeanette Baker
Ska Town - Prince Buster
Hot Ginger - Bill Doggett
My Boy Lollypop - Barbie Gale
Outro

 

 

Other Jamaican deejays in England during the 1950s & 1960s were the Coleman Brothers (Arnold & Cecil), Ossie Holt, Count Shelley, Sir Dick, Count Myrie, Duke Brown, & Count C. They played everywhere from garages to ballrooms. They played at clubs like the Ram Jam Club in Brixton or the 007 in Dalston. They played music imported from Jamaica, as well as records from their own collections that they had brought with them, or they found music in Britian as more & more British labels sprang up: Blue Beat, Island, Planitone, Orbitone, Trojan, & Pama Records.

Here's an example... 

 

 

Various - More Early Sound System Sounds, NØ Comp., 2024.

 

Forward March - Derrick Morgan
Don't Throw Stones - Prince Buster
A Message to You Rudi - Levi Roots
Riverflow - Clancy Eccles
I'm in the Mood for Ska - Lord Tanamo
Eye for an Eye - Prince Buster
Man in the Street - Don Drummond
Guns of Navarone - The Skatalites
Cool Breeze - Bunny & Skitter
Chinaman Ska - Prince Buster

 

See you in September,
NØ