There’s a scene in "Lover’s Rock", an episode of Steve McQueen’s five-part series Small Axe, where the revolutionary might of reggae is laid bare. The events in the short film take place across a day and night in a West London home in 1980, during the preparations for a teenage girl’s birthday party. At that time, black people were often unwelcome in nightclubs, so West Indian communities would host house parties, complete with home-cooked food, plenty of Red Stripe and a soundsystem. Over the course of the evening, an emotional tapestry of adolescent lust and longing, pent up male aggression and repressed passions unfold. Outside, the hostile forces of Babylon — police, skinheads — are held at bay by the closed front door.
Lover’s rock is the romantic reggae genre that the episode takes its title from, but it’s the urgent, dub-heavy track "Kunta Kinte" by The Revolutionaries that soundtracks its climax: the crowd skanking in the front room as the beat kicks in, warming up until the inevitable pause, record-scratch and pull-up that unleashes five minutes of unbridled release among the dancers. The scene ends with the crowd stomping the floor boards, the MC standing proud on a table, fist in the air, leading the chant: "Jah! Jah Rastafari!" It’s an encapsulation of strength in one small Notting Hill living room. It’s pure power.
This emancipatory possibility of reggae is why the genre is more relevant than ever today, says David Hinds, who has been lead singer of the band Steel Pulse for 50 years. The band will play a homecoming show at Birmingham’s O2 Institute on Friday night. "The downtrodden masses, the grassroots people, the people that are in the trenches have embraced it and used it as their source of energy, something to lean on," he tells me. "When you know what it's like to be under the hammer, you automatically gravitate towards reggae music."
The story of reggae in Britain is by no means an exclusively London story. Steel Pulse came out of Handsworth in 1975. For Hinds and the band’s original members, Birmingham in the late ‘70s was a downtrodden place but one that had fight in it. Their first album, Handsworth Revolution, embraced this multifaceted backdrop of black life in Birmingham that would come to a head a few years later with the Handsworth riots (or uprising, depending on your point of view). In the years since, members have come and gone but Hinds has stayed constant and so has the steady stream of album releases. Their twelfth, Mass Manipulation, came out in 2019.
Long before that, was a tour with Bob Marley. Steel Pulse found success relatively quickly. In 1978, they released their single "Ku Klux Klan" with Island Records, a label that had learned reggae could find a much wider audience (and generate a lot of money) if marketed to fans of anti-establishment punk music. Jamaican exports Bob Marley and the Wailers were the epitome of that vibe, and Island wanted to find British home-grown bands who could replicate their success. Step forward Steel Pulse, who spent much of that year supporting the band on a European tour. The experience would change them forever.
