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 Filmmaker, deejay, director and author Don Letts speaks to David Katz about his extraordinary view from inside some of modern culture's moving forces.Don Letts is a true Renaissance man. Although best known as director of the acclaimed feature film Dancehall Queen, shot entirely in Jamaica with an all-Jamaican cast, Letts is actually a multi-faceted individual who has channelled his vision into various realms, with challenging music that is difficult to pigeonhole being the overriding constant.
In addition to Dancehall Queen, Letts co-directed One Love, the forbidden romance movie starring kymani Marley, has made hundreds of music videos for the likes of Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff and Musical Youth, and has crafted a series of compelling documentaries of musical innovators such as Lee Scratch Perry, George Clinton and Gil Scott-Heron. But Letts's impact has also been felt in other creative realms: after introducing punks to reggae as disc jockey at seminal London venue the Roxyduring the mid-1970s, Letts began documenting punk on celluloid whilst also filming expatriate Jamaican reggae artists. When the punk scene lost direction by the end of the decade, Letts started making music videos and wound up in Big audio dynamite (Bad), led by close friend and founding Clash member, Mick Jones. Since the demise of Bad in the early 1990s, Letts has concentrated on film; his most recent work, screened on BBC television, explores the impact of black music on the popular culture of the Uk, something that is also expounded on at length in his autobiography, Culture Clash, recently published by SAF books. He continues to deejay all over the world and has recently launched a weekly programme on 6 Music, one of the BBC's digital radio stations. Considering his has humble origins being a first generation black Briton of Jamaican parentage who received little formal educationhis achievements are extraordinary. My parents are from St. Elizabeth, part of the whole Windrush Generation who came over to England to ostensibly rebuild the country after the Second World War. They settled in Brixton and the way that a lot of immigrants kept their spirits up in those days was through the church and through music, so my dad had a sound system called Duke Letts' Supersonic Sounds that would play at austere kinds of affairs where they had a Bible under their arm. Considering his has humble origins being a first generation black Briton of Jamaican parentage who received little formal educationhis achievements are extraordinary. Growing up as a black Briton, getting empowered and politicised, I was beginning to look for an identity. We say 'Black British' or 'British Black' now and take it for granted, but back in them days, it was a confusing concept. I now describe my first generation of British blacks as the Lost Tribe, because we were getting , pre-release records from Jamaica, chanting Rastafari and Marcus Garvey, and James Brown from America, the whole civil rights, 'Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud' thing, while our parents' generation were almost made to feel ashamed of being black. When I was growing up, walking around the streets, there were the signs, KBW: Keep Britain White, on every other wall. Rasta was just beginning to make its mark and I began to realize that I could look at the essence of what appealed to wear that coat and feel comfortable; it was immensely empowering. I've stopped calling myself a Rasta years ago, but at the time, my parents cut me off. In fact, my dad said to me, 'If you don't lose the dreadlocks, I ain't going to give you the land we have in Jamaica.' At the time I was obviously devastated, but with hindsight I can see they were doing what they thought was best. Then I moved to King's Road in '73 or '74 the best move I ever made. It was a hive of counterculture, where like-minded people gravitated that weren't satisfied with what they were being offered, and I ended up managing a shop called Acme Attractions, which was signposting the multicultural direction London was heading in, and out of that interaction came the punk rock scene. Then the guy that was an accountant for Acme Attractions decided to get this club together and they needed a DJ.Considering his has humble origins being a first generation black Briton of Jamaican parentage who received little formal educationhis achievements are extraordinary. With punk, white kids are all picking up guitars, and the energy was infectious. I want to pick up something too, so I picked up a Super 8 camera, because years before, I'd seen The Harder They Come and decided I wanted to express myself visually. But I couldn't see how to do it until punk came along and a woman called Caroline Baker, who was running a fashion magazine at the time, gave me a camera. The Punk Movie was the first thing that I ever did when I was trying to learn my craft; it first showed at the ICA in 1978, broke all the box office records, though looking at it now is quite painful. The bands started to get successful and get record deals, so they asked me to make their music videos and I began to make a name for myself; today I've made nearly 400 videos. Then, in the early '80s, I joined Big Audio Dynamite, something I'm immensely proud of, because it was the forerunner of a lot of the musical moves that are going on now: we had Jamaican bass lines, New York beats, and white rock and roll, all the things that are really capturing people's imaginations now. While I was in BAD, I made videos for other people and ended up acting in a couple of films, and when Big Audio Dynamite broke up, I threw myself into documentaries, in which I look at the essence of what appealed to me in these artists and try and pass that on. I had a longstanding relationship with Chris Blackwell, made music videos for Island Records, so Blackwell presented me with the situation of directing Dancehall Queen, conceived to launch a DVD label. As women really keep the fabric of Jamaican society together, it was great to do a story that was based around a woman. More recently I've been doing some reggae compilation albums that got a really good response, which got me deejaying again, so I'm out there, still playing my Jamaican music. I describe my DJ set as history and legacy, because people have to understand that Jamaica, which spent all these years under colonization, is now culturally colonizing the planet! But in general, I really see my role more as a facilitator. Other than that, I've just followed my instincts, which to this day have never let me down. I'm not a rich man, but I can hold my head up. ©david katz |
