Reggae music is the beating heart of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series, which traces Black British experience from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. In the 1970s, when the characteristically defiant Bob Marley song that gives the series its title was released, McQueen’s aunt, Molly, used to regularly sneak out of her family house in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, on weekend nights to go to “blues parties” – all-nighters usually held in someone’s house.
Back then, the blues party was a staple of West Indian immigrant life in England, a makeshift club-cum-shebeen, usually held in someone’s front room or basement, where, as the night progressed, the sweet smell of ganja merged with the lingering aromas of West Indian home cooking. As an escape from her strict, religious upbringing, Molly would dance until dawn to roots reggae, sweet-sounding “lovers rock” and floor-shaking dub instrumentals.
“My uncle used to leave the backdoor open for her to get back in,” says McQueen, “so there was this dynamic of the day-to-day life lived under a quite confining Christian doctrine and the release of immersing herself for a few hours in this other world of music and rebellion that was thrilling because it was raw and illicit.”
McQueen himself recalls being taken as a child to a relative’s house and witnessing the carpet being rolled up and put in the bedroom, the furniture being rearranged to create more space and, as he tried to sleep, the muffled thud of a bassline echoing through the house. When he woke up hours later, he remembers, he was covered in coats that had been thrown on the bed by revellers.
Certain images have stayed in his memory from that time: the sharply pressed trousers and Gabicci tops worn by the men, the way the dancers carried themselves, the hand movements and gestures that formed a wordless etiquette of flirtation. “A youth might run his hand along a girl’s arm, from her elbow to her wrist,” he tells me, “and, if he was lucky, she would then take his hand in hers and the ritual of flirtation would commence.”
It is these experiences and memories that inform Lovers Rock, McQueen’s mesmeric cinematic evocation of a young girl’s coming of age at a blues party in London in 1980, based directly on his Aunt Molly’s experiences and those of his screenwriter, Courttia Newland, whose mother hosted blues dances at her house.
While reggae music is threaded through all the films in the Small Axe series, it is mainly as a counterpoint to the events portrayed onscreen. In Lovers Rock, which is on BBC One on 22 November, it is the very essence of the story itself, a shifting, pulsing, sometimes overwhelming arbiter of mood, atmosphere and intimacy. As soon as we enter the blues party with the wide-eyed Martha (Amarah-Jae St Aubyn), we are transported to a self-contained world in which it often seems like the actors are stepping in time to a subliminal drum’n’bass groove in a deftly observed choreography of flirtation, desire and latent tension.
“Lovers Rock is my musical,” says McQueen, “but it’s a different kind of musical. It’s a film about everyday Black experience and the importance of music to that experience both as an expression and a release, but there is almost a fairytale element to it. I wanted it to be transportive. So, the music had to work in a different way, to be integrated into the film in an organic way that I had never seen before.”
The two scenes that stand out are shaped by the dramatically different songs that propel them, both anthems of a kind: Janet Kay’s plaintive lovers rock song, Silly Games, and the Revolutionaries’ thunderous instrumental dub track, Kunta Kinte. When the former is played by the DJs, the dancefloor is owned by the young, glamorously dressed women, who sway and move in time to the swooping melodies, so transported by the song’s seductive sway that they sing the words over and over long after the DJ fades the music.
In the second, young men writhe and stomp furiously to the relentless percussive charge of an echoing dub forcefield, a sonic call to arms that fuels a collective release that is both furious and cleansing. Both scenes, the one languorously sensual, the other viscerally physical, are audacious in their length and their immersive cinematography.
“They are two pieces of the same story,” says McQueen. “Seventies dub reggae was masculine in many ways and the women needed their own sweet music as a response and a respite. Lovers rock was essentially the women’s choice. It’s soul, really, delivered over a reggae rhythm.”
In both scenes, the sense of abandonment is almost spiritual. Remarkably, neither were planned in advance and were filmed as they unfolded. “They would have happened with or without me,” says McQueen. “The party became a reality because the actors were willing to go somewhere. What happened in those scenes was real and it transcended the period, the acting, everything. There was some deep shit going down in those scenes, I can tell you that. It was like I was invited to go along with them. But I knew what I was doing. Nothing was left to chance.”
I put it to McQueen that the original blues parties were self-created spaces where Black people could be themselves, and express themselves, purely on their own terms. “Totally,” he says, “It was DIY culture and part of the reason for that was because Black people were not that welcome in clubs so they had to create a space of their own. In its DNA, a blues dance was a form of resistance and release. People were working for the weekend when they could let loose, come out of themselves. To be surrounded by people like themselves was, in itself, important, because it allowed them to feel comfortable enough to let go and lose themselves – and be understood without question.”
In many ways, though, Lovers Rock is an elegy for the blues dance, and for another time, when the West Indian community was establishing its own place in British society and culture. “Yes, I think so,” says McQueen. “My aunt was very emotional when she saw the film. She was watching a part of her youth – the music, the way people carried themselves, the courtship ritual, the clothes – the amazing dresses that young West Indian girls like her would have made themselves after work on their Singer sewing machines. It meant a lot to her to see the richness of that experience acknowledged.”
Music runs deep through the generations in McQueen’s family history. A decade before his Aunt Molly danced to Dennis Brown and Gregory Isaacs, his mum, Mary, was a 60s teenager in thrall to the pop and soul performers she watched religiously on the weekly music programme Ready, Steady, Go! Her brother, Carl, was a regular in the studio audience and, McQueen tells me, “was called the Black Beatle because he had straightened his hair”.
The quintessential mod group of the 60s, the Small Faces, feature twice on the soundtrack to Small Axe with Tin Soldier and Lazy Sunday. “That was definitely a nod to my mum’s record collection,” says McQueen. Decades later, the group also played a small but symbolic part in the soundtrack of his own life: “It was their song All Or Nothing that was blasting out over the PA when I first met my wife at an Ajax FC game in Amsterdam,” he says. “Steve Marriott! What a voice! Absolutely incredible – talk about the rebel yell. He had it.”
Another more unlikely singer to feature on two of the films is the smooth 60s crooner “Gentleman” Jim Reeves, an American country star whose ballads became a surprising soundtrack for an older generation of Jamaicans. “I had to put Jim Reeves in there,” says McQueen. “I remember on Sundays my dad would play those tunes and put his feet up. He was huge in the West Indian community. I think it’s to do with hope, which is a big theme in American country music. Without the hope they found in music, a lot of people I know would not be here now.”
Reeves’s song The World Is Not My Home, which features in Red, White and Blue, the story of Leroy Logan, a West Indian officer isolated in an unwelcoming white police force, is particularly resonant. The song’s message of not belonging echoes the similar sentiments of countless Rastafarian reggae songs, where home is both the place left behind, but also the promised land awaiting those who believe.
“Home was not where you were living,” says McQueen, “but the place where things were always better. Rastafarians constructed their own faith around that belief, not least because their surroundings were so unwelcoming and oppressive. If Rasta had not provided that sense of togetherness, I think there would have been deep psychosis among young people from the West Indian community back in the 1970s.”
McQueen’s own taste in music is broad and often surprising. He came of age in the 80s, when illegal warehouse parties sprang up in disused buildings all over London as an antidote to the more established – and expensive – mainstream club scene. “Those were wild times,” he says. “I remember when I was 15 or 16, there would be flyers that were passed around at school telling you where the party was that weekend. We’d listened to David Rodigan and pirate radio and then head across London to Acton, Shepherd’s Bush, Peckham, Ladbroke Grove. It was exciting, because you didn’t know what was going to happen next. Things moved so fast so there was always this sense of anticipation and danger when you headed out for the night.”
For a time, he tells me, he followed the London DJ Norman Jay, and his Shake’n’Fingerpop and Good Times sound systems, wherever they played. By then, American soul, rare groove and old-school hip-hop had supplanted reggae as the predominant soundtrack for a new, multicultural generation of urban revellers and the blues party began to lose its place as a nexus of young West Indian emigrant experience. Except that the dub sounds that had been played at those makeshift gatherings continued to echo through dance music culture. You can hear their influence in the sonic adventurism of trip-hop, house, drum’n’bass, garage, grime and beyond.
“Dub was essentially futuristic,” says McQueen. “It came overground in all sorts of ways because the momentum of Black music culture is about constant reinvention, drawing on the past to create the future, always trying for that sound that’s further out, just beyond one’s reach. So, you had hip-hop and then acid house hit and that’s when it got properly mad.”
I would never have put him down as a raver, but McQueen goes on to tell me about a night in 1988 when he encountered a friend’s older brother, wide-eyed and wired, in the Astoria in London. “This guy was about a year and a half older than me and he had never once spoken to me before, but suddenly he appears out of the crowd and comes up and goes, ‘All right Steve? How’s it going, mate? Are you on one?’ I was taken aback. First up, he was talking to me and, secondly, he was totally off his head. Next thing, I was on the dancefloor and I came out hours later, sweating, sweating, sweating.”
Did he get on one then, I ask, intrigued. “Nah, no way,” he replies, “Listen, I’ll tell you my one drug story. In 1989, I took half an E at a party and I ended up ringing my mum and shouting, ‘I love you Mum! I love you Mum’ down the phone. Sad, but true. That was the extent of it for me.”
I remind McQueen that the first time we met, in 2008, he introduced himself and immediately asked me to tell him about the late Joe Strummer, having read an interview I had done with the Clash’s lead singer several decades before. He cracks up laughing when I mention this. “Oh yes! I was a big fan of the Clash. I liked the whole post-punk time when they were mixing it up, drawing on other forms of music.”
He surprised me even more a few months ago, when he announced his teenage fondness for the Cure, the Cult and Siouxsie and the Banshees. When I bring up their names now, he breaks into a chorus of the Banshees’ Happy House down the phone. “I was listening to it all, mate. PiL, Blondie, Julian Cope. I was into what the Americans call ‘alternative music’, which is a term I hate. It’s just good music, isn’t it? If its adventurous, it’s just good music. End of. I loved a whole range of music growing up. It was another part of who I was.”
In this, was he the exception among his friends, the soul boys he ran with? “I suppose I was a bit different, more curious. I liked music that was experimental and inventive. That’s one of the reasons I hated Britpop. That was bullshit. A fabrication. Music had moved on from traditional guitars so they had to invent Britpop to sell records. It was like the anti-disco thing. Reactionary. To me, it was conservative music that was not very inclusive to Black people.” He thinks for a moment. “That said, I could feel the white, working-class angst of those early Oasis songs. I could smell it! The anger’s there in the guy’s voice.”
A few hours after we speak, McQueen calls me back and says. “I’ve been thinking about what we talked about and I just want to say that it’s rebel music that moves me, whether it’s expressed in the lyrics or the actual sound. My definition of rebel music is not purely political, it can be music that is experimental and risk-taking or that expresses vulnerability. It’s rebel music I love in whatever form it takes.”
Prince: Sign O’ the Times album (1987)
Sign O’ the Times was a big album for me. It’s an important one. No ifs or buts. Prince was huge and this showed just how much of a musical genius he was. It’s all in there. Just incredible.
The Specials: The Specials (1979)
Another very important album for me -- just the whole idea of them. The Specials were my first crush. I remember me and my sister dancing in the kitchen with our cassette of their first album, sweating. It was a mad, crazy album, but serious as well.
James Brown: the early singles
James Brown, of course. Incredible. You put JB on if you want to get the party going. Wherever. Whenever. He invented it. What I want to know is, who invented James Brown?
Blondie: Atomic (1979)
I love all the Blondie albums. I was mad on Blondie back in the day. It’s hard because they made so many great pop songs, but I have to go for Atomic.
Michael Jackson: Off the Wall (1979)
I have to include Off the Wall – a huge record. Everything about it. Quincy Jones’s production just took it to a different level. I met Quincy and got to work with him on Soundtrack of America. Google it! [A 2019 event in New York programmed by McQueen and featuring five nights of live performances tracing Black music in America from slavery until the present day.]
Dub reggae
A lot of dub reggae, too much to choose from. Lee Perry and King Tubby, of course. When I heard Kunte Kinte by the Revolutionaries (a track used in Lovers Rock), it was like a dog whistle going off and releasing these crazy frequencies in your head. And I have to mention Denis Bovell, who is my musical hero. He produced Silly Games by Janet Kay, the lover’s rock anthem, and then went on to work with post-punk groups like the Slits. A pioneer and a genius. He has a cameo in the movie. He’s the old timer in the hat.
Tricky: Maxinquaye (1995)
What can I say about Tricky? He doesn’t compromise. There are some dark truths on this record.
