INTERVIEW : LKJ
Interview by : Benoit Georges
Pictures by : Benoit Collin
on Saturday, March 01st 2008 - 18 083 views
Linton Kwesi Johnson, bard of "dub poetry", is now more often seen on university platforms than on stages. His latest album, "More time", dates back to 1998. LKJ is above all a man of letters, a writer, poet, sociologist and an intellectual of renown across the Channel.
We meet him during the recording of Manu Katché's programme One shot note, broadcast on Arte, where he and his partner, the bassist Dennis Bovell, were invited for a (far too) short featuring with Manu Chao. 30 years after the release of "Dread, beat & blood", the musical setting of the collection of poems of the same name published in 1975, we had many questions to put to LKJ. "I don't much like doing interviews," he warns us, "you have five minutes". Intrigued by a translation of Nicolas Sarkozy's Dakar speech that we show him, he will finally grant us a quarter of an hour: just enough to skim the themes we wanted to cover.
Reggaefrance / You started out by writing poetry; how did you come to record albums?
LKJ / It happened by accident. I was reciting my poems in my local community, at the Youth Club, at the Community Center, at the library, or during meetings and political demonstrations. Then I started working with a group of Rasta drummers called Rasta Love. I published a first book, Voices of the Living and the Dead, in 1974, then another in 1975, entitled Dread Beat & Blood. When I recited those poems, people thought they sounded like music, and began talking to me about putting music to my poems. Working with musicians was never more than the next step up from my work with the drummers. So I went to see friends from school who knew more about music than I did. At the time I was told that if I wanted to make reggae and sound authentic, I had to find Dennis Bovell. Because English sound engineers didn't know how to record the bass and drums together properly; they did it the way they would have recorded rock.
Today marks thirty years since your first album, ''Dread Beat & Blood''.
When I was at university, I was a copywriter for Virgin Records to earn a bit of pocket money. One day I suggested to the marketing manager that I might be able to record in a studio. He passed the idea on to Richard Branson and they gave me 300 pounds. With that, I went to a 4-track studio in Wimbledon with my musician friends, and we made a demo. On it there were Dread Beat & Blood, All Wi Doin Is Defendin, Five Nights of Bleeding and one more poem. Richard Branson liked our demo, and we agreed on an album. And of course, I went to find Dennis. At the time he was a member of the Sufferer Hi Fi sound system, and he was also the resident engineer at Gooseberry Studio in London. In fact, I had interviewed Dennis beforehand and told him that one day I would come to him to record an album. We did it, and the rest is history.
From Virgin, you eventually joined Island.
The people who knew reggae were the ones at Island Records. And of course, when ''Dread Beat & Blood'' came out, Island wanted me to sign with them. Virgin offered me a six-album deal but I turned it down. I joined Island after meeting Dennis Morris, who was looking for talent for Chris Blackwell. After the successes of ''Forces of Victory'' and ''Bass Culture'', they too offered me a six-album deal. And again I refused, because I wasn't that kind of artist; I was a poet who recited his words over music. I see music as a vehicle that carries my poems to a wider audience. I decided to set up my own label because I believe in, and preach, artistic independence. I couldn't say one thing and do the opposite, so I set up LKJ Records. The first record we released was a poem by the Jamaican Michael Smith, Me cyaan believe it. He was killed in 1983.
Looking back on 1978 today, what changes do you see?
Some things have changed over the last thirty years, but some haven't changed at all. For example, a lot of people talk about these tragedies, these shootings between young Black people. All of that was already there when I was young; the violence was there, it's nothing new. Apart from the technological revolution, the only significant thing that has changed is that my generation didn't have access to guns the way young people do today. I find it very disturbing that a gun is one of the easiest things to buy in English cities. Why? I keep asking myself that question. Why this proliferation of guns? Why are they so readily available in our communities? Is the police powerless? With MI5, MI6, Scotland Yard... can't they do something? The culture of violence hasn't changed; it's the availability of guns that has changed. There's something else too: the young people of my generation were rebelling against racial oppression, against the system. Today, if young people are rebelling against something, I don't know what it is. They are depoliticised. It's a generation more focused on material possessions, that obsession which comes to us from Western societies. It's the culture of instant gratification: ''I want these new Nike Airs, this new iPhone, and I want them now''.
Does this depoliticisation of the new generation seem noticeable to you in today's music?
I don't listen to much of it. I'm older now; I listen to music for people my own age. I don't even know what they talk about in their songs. It was certainly different thirty years ago.
What about the police, and the brutality you denounced?
Thanks to the struggles Black people have fought, to the organisation we built, and to the uprisings and insurrections, things have changed. It is no longer as easy for the police to pick on people, to fabricate false evidence, to brutalise the population. My generation fought those practices. But there is still racial injustice: a young Black man is seven times more likely than a white man to be stopped and searched by the police. Today we are told that stop and search is increasing because of the fight against the proliferation of weapons among young people. Despite this disproportion against Black people, it has had absolutely no effect on youth violence. It has turned out that this method is totally ineffective. The real effect of this method is to lay the groundwork for a resentment that could perhaps explode again, as in the riots of 1981 and 1985.
France has also seen riots recently.
I have always thought that France was 20 years behind England in the way it regards its minorities. I don't know whether it comes from our tradition of fighting colonialism... I remember having a very interesting conversation about this with the Martinican poet Edouard Glissant. I still don't know why we started organising immediately, as early as my parents' generation, to fight racial oppression. When those riots happened in France, I asked myself one thing: why didn't this happen sooner? I remember the beur movements in the 80s, and the racial hostility towards young North Africans and Africans. I didn't understand. I think perhaps it's because there wasn't enough solidarity between Caribbean Blacks, African Blacks, and North Africans. In England, we set up associations that bring together all nationalities. When I was young, if you weren't white you were Black. There were no real ethnic distinctions between Pakistanis and Indians. I don't think the way your president reacted helped. But that's typical of leaders... There should have been dialogue, an acknowledgement that there was a problem, and a search for solutions.
Last year, you were officially invited to Ghana to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of its independence.
I was really looking forward to going to Ghana because it is a country that many of our Jamaican ancestors came from. It is very significant for us that Ghana was the first African country to declare its independence. Caribbeans like CLR James and George Padmore were instrumental in setting the anti-colonial movement in motion. We were celebrating fifty years of Ghanaian independence but also 200 years since the abolition of the slave trade. It was an opportunity for me to go to that part of Africa and recite poems there. And above all to make it clear that while William Wilberforce (an English anti-slavery activist in the early nineteenth century) did a great deal for abolition, it was the continual rebellions of the slaves over 200 years that led to it. And even more so, the victorious rebellion of Toussaint Louverture in Haiti, which led to the defeat of the armies of Napoleon, Britain and Spain, and to the establishment of the first Black republic in the Caribbean in 1804. Going to Ghana was an opportunity for me to say so, and I did.
Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian independence leader, dreamed of achieving African unity. In 2000, the Organisation of African Unity became the African Union. What does that inspire in you?
Kwame Nkrumah's vision of a united Africa is the only way forward for Africa in this globalised world. Until that happens, we will always be the oppressed of the planet. African countries realise that to survive and stand on equal terms with the great powers, they have to come together. That is why they are moving towards economic and political integration, on the European model. But there is still a way to go.
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