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Ska For Life I
t’s a good thing that venerable Jamaican musical legend Ken Boothe has got such a strong and distinctive voice. I’ve come to Ding- walls in Camden Lock on a bitter Easter Sunday evening to hear him sing his hits of yore: Everything I Own, Crying Over You and the like, but there’s a real danger of him being drowned out by the massed chorus of ageing skinheads, young hipsters, Rastas and other ska- maniacs who make up the audience for this closing gig at the 2013 London Inter- national Ska Festival. Fortunately Ken B’s got vocal fire power to spare and the soulful ache that made his voice (and those hits) stand out in the first place is still very much to the fore, in spite of the best efforts of the sweaty, jam-packed and very loud crowd.
You can’t blame them really. Ska is after all genuine 21st Century UK folk music. Play that jerky Jamaican rhythm to Brits in just about any setting and they feel it in their bones straight away. We took it to our hearts and hips from the get-go back in the 1960s and have been taking to it (and making it) ever since. Ska’s seeped into the fabric of our culture; listen out to how often it features in advert sound- tracks and TV theme tunes.
London is the home of a whole under- ground international ska scene, with bands, DJs, a fanzine and this here annual festival. The man behind a lot of this action is Sean Flowerdew, bassist with scene leaders Pama International and The Phoenix City Allstars, owner of the Phoenix City record label, organiser of the London International Ska Festival and all round UK Godfather of Ska.
Nathan Thomas of the Sidewalk Doctors
“Globally, it’s bigger than it’s ever been,” reckons Sean. “You’ve got a huge scene in Mexico. There are ska festivals in The Philippines and Indonesia. It’s still going strong in Japan and Australia. It’s huge in South America: Argentina, Brazil… they’re bringing a lot of the ’60s artists out there.” Ironically the one place there doesn’t appear to be a vibrant, youthful ska scene is Jamaica, although obviously this is where many of the origi- nal artists from the ’60s who are still with us, are based.
Freddie Notes
It’s now truly ingrained in the British consciousness as an urban folk music. Jamie Renton checks out the roots and shoots of Ska 2013.
Sean, like many of us, discovered the delights of ska via the UK’s Two Tone sound. You remember Two Tone? That cross-cultur- al, skanking blast of ska, punk, politics and partying that lit up the late ’70s UK music scene. “I discovered the music back to front,” he tells me, when we meet up in a Camden boozer on a sunny Saturday after- noon. So he went from Two Tone bands such as Madness and the Specials to the original sounds of the music’s early ’60s Jamaican roots (a bit like Stones and Yard- birds fans a decade and a half earlier, discov- ering the pure blues roots of their heroes).
Two Tone may have been UK ska’s commercial high point but the music’s never really gone away. Bands have taken it in unexpected directions (skacore, ska- punk, even ska-rave) and though fashion moved on decades ago, most parts of the planet have their own ska scene and the UK is seen as the hub. This year’s London International Ska Festival featured bands from Holland, Hungary and Norway, whilst the crowd contained contingents from all over: Swedish skins, Japanese rude-girls, US skaheads…the contemporary ska scene is a broad church indeed.
T
he roots of ska can be traced to the jump band rhythm ’n’ blues of 1950s USA (and espe- cially New Orleans). Its jerky rhythms were close to those of the Caribbean and were blasted out by Jamaican sound systems (mobile discos) at parties across the island. Inevitably, local musicians tried to create their own version of the much loved US sounds and got it gloriously wrong, inadvertently playing the rhythm back to front and mixing in elements of the local calypso variant mento. From such happy acci- dents is musical magic made and ska’s bold, brassy (often instrumental) sound ruled the local scene throughout the early and mid-1960s, a time of large scale Caribbean emigration over to the UK, where it was snapped up by mods and copied (often very badly) by beat groups. Ska’s reign was brief. The hot Jamaican summer of ’67 slowed the music down, heralding the cooler, sweet- er sound of rocksteady, which was in turn supplanted a year or so later by what became known as reggae.
The current ska scene encompasses all of this and more: from mento to the proto-reggae beloved of skinheads in late ’60s UK (Desmond Dekker, The Upsetters) and on to roots reggae, ska-punk etc etc. “The way I see it,” says Sean, “is that we should show people, not only that little period of Jamaican history, but how they got there and follow the journey. Because the brilliant thing is that every generation has come into contact with ska and has done something with it. It’s amazing how this little genre of this little island has transformed and mutated.”
Photo: Veronique Skelsey
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