CivicLeicester Closes African History Month UK With Zoom Event Highlighting Brent’s Unique Black Music History
On October 31, CivicLeicester will round off African History Month UK with CivicLeicester Presents Brent Black Music History Project Review, a Zoom event co-organised with BBM/BMC (BritishBlackMusic.com/Black Music Congress) that will celebrate the north-west London borough of Brent’s unique black music history.
The event consists of the screening of excerpts of Brent-based BTWSC’s Heritage Lottery Funded ‘Brent Black Music History Project’ DVD, which covers artists, producers, record labels, radio stations, sound systems, shops, buildings and other musical connections to the north-west London borough.
Following the screening, the project lead and video director, historical musicologist Kwaku will be on hand to talk further about the history. The event is in memory of one of the contributors of the video, Sonny Roberts.
The event will include Roberts’ daughter, Cleon Roberts, making a short presentation on her father’s life and the Planetone studio and label.
Jamaican-born Roberts emigrated to Britain in the 1950s. A carpenter by trade, he found a lucrative sideline building the speaker boxes for London’s emerging sound systems in addition to running his own Love Vendor sound system. He ended up becoming a pioneering record producer, records retailer, record label owner and the founder of Planetone, possibly the first African-owned recording studio in Britain.
Roberts recorded several Jamaican musicians and artists at his studio, such as trombonist Rico Rodriquez, songwriter and pianist Tony Washington, and The Marvels vocal group. Roberts was instrumental in making 108 Cambridge Road a music industry hub. Because as a result of Roberts introducing Chris Blackwell, who had recently relocated to London from Kingston, Jamaica to his landlord, Lee Gopthal, an Indo-Jamaican accountant whose father emigrated to Britain on the Empire Windrush, Blackwell moved his Island Records operations to Gopthal’s premises.
It was from here that Island released Jamaican calypso and ska records, such as Lord Creator’s ‘Independent Jamaica’ in 1962 and it was in Roberts’ studio that Washington rehearsed Millie, whose London-produced 1964 release of ‘My Boy Lollipop’ provided Jamaica’s first global hit record!
More was to come from the Kilburn premises, when Blackwell and Gopthal later joined forces to re-launch Trojan Records in 1968, which became the world’s biggest reggae company. Before the company crashed in 1975, it delivered several UK hits for Jamaican artists such as Bob and Marcia, Jimmy Cliff, Nicky Thomas, The Maytals, the Harry J All Stars, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s Upsetters, Desmond Dekker, and Dave and Ansel Collins – the last two acts topped the UK charts with ‘Israelites’ and ‘Double Barrel’ respectively.
In the early 1970s Roberts moved to another part of Brent, Harlesden, where he opened the Orbitone record store and label. In addition to reggae, he popularised other Caribbean genres such as soca and released the earliest Arrow records in Britain. He also produced highlife and Afrobeat by artists such as the Nigerian band The Nkengas, and released highlife records by Ghanaian artist Gyedu-Blay Ambolley.
In 1987 Roberts’ production of Judy Boucher’s ‘Can’t Be with You Tonight’ reached no. 2 in the British pop charts. Roberts returned to Jamaica in 1997, where he got into farming, and died of throat cancer in 2021, aged 89.
Contributors of the video include Bunny ‘Striker’ Lee, who talks about another important Brent company, Pama Records, which was founded by the Jamaican Palmer brothers. This company served as an alternative outlet to Trojan for Jamaican producers looking for UK releases. Led by Carl Palmer, the company changed its name to Jetstar Records and became a leading distributor of reggae. Along with the several record shops and labels dotted around Harlesden, Jetstar helped make its base in Harlesden the heart of reggae music in Britain.
Brent’s black history does not just cover reggae. For example, one of the biggest African and world music acts, Osibisa, came from Brent. Phil Fearon and Galaxy were a crossover dance act, and Fearon’s Kensal Rise-based Production House label got Baby D’s ‘Let Me Be Your Fantasy’ rave anthem to the top of the pop charts.
For more information or to book this free event: https://bit.ly/BBMHPFinal.
