Reggae was a thick and impenetrable jungle in the early Eighties. A great thing to come of age to. Exotic and erotic and infused with energy and soul. Blood and fire. A greenhouse of orchids. I can almost taste and smell the spliffs that were passed round the common room of my tertiary college that my school friends gravitated to to an excessive and unwise degree. Youth someone said is wasted on the young.
In the locus shift we all made after leaving Secondary School in the early Eighties, Reggae was the essential backbone The lead instrument was Robby Shakespeare's bass. Our spine was his bassline. As we moved unknowingly from adolescence to our late teenage years. towards our twenties. From Petersham to Richmond College for O Level Retakes, vocational training or A Level pathways.
Richmond College was confusingly located in Twickenham. A Phil Bennett drop kick from the rugby union stadium. Black Uhuru supported The Rolling Stones and J.Geils band there around about that time. My parents moved from Richmond to Teddington , my elder siblings had left home leaving me and my sister in the nest with mum and dad and a neurotic middle class cat called Pandora..
I had the top floor of the house. .Privileged status at last. I got John Lennon / Leon Trotsky rimmed spectacles and my confidence grew. I learned to ride a bike in Bushy Park. Dad had never taught me. A family joke. I was unsteady but willing and practised puncture repair and made my way shakily to college, I never felt secure on the back of a bike. I don't cycle now. Have never learned to drive. .
I rationed my visits to the common room in my A Level years. I wanted to go to university and was discovering the abiding loves of my life. Literature and Music. Constructing my identity around records and books. Echo & The Bunnymen and Aswad. Scott Fitzgerald and Graham Greene. Albert Camus and William Shakespeare. Agatha Christie. Left Wing politics. Girls.
I focused to a greater degree on my studies though I didn't actually fully manage this until the final year of my university studies. I was taking. Literature, History and Politics A Levels. Resitting Latin O Levels, with lessons with the college principle who was trying to tighten down both our understanding of the gerund form and the preposterous dope smoking fixation of rootless teens. The common room, in a separate annex at the end of the cafeteria corridor was mostly a blokes enclave and was shrouded in a rising mushroom cloud fug of sensimilia..
Listening to Black Uhuru before my morning bath takes me back forty years and more. Reggae was a fundamental strand of that teenage experience. Growing up in South West London. A short train ride from Brixton. My dad worked there encouraging the world to dole out christian aid. Black Uhuru were on Island Records. They had the tightest rhythm section on the planet. Sly and Robbie anchoring and martialing the beat. You could virtually smell Jamaica, Right Stuff is right. Chill out. That's an order !
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