What Black Londoners did for London — soundfile uncovers.
It’s frustrating enough not being able to tell what you consider a good story to a sizeable audience, when you notice others are.
I mentioned in a previous post how “Hidden Figures” by Margot Lee Shetterly was a narrative previously ignored in the powerful all-American NASA story.
The legacy drama of the contribution of women, African American women at that: Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, just didn’t seem to be dominant theme until 2016, almost forty years since NASA’s flights.
The Oscar contender “Killers of the Flower Moon” by Martin Scorsese, is also a lesson learner. Interviewed on Channel 4 News, Scorsese talks about what happened when he read the book ‘The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI’ written by David Grann (that inspired his movie). He flipped the focus of the book and the protagonists after visiting Osage Natives. Scorsese says speaking to News Presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy:
As we worked on it ( the script) I began to realise in effect I had seen this kind of thing before before, police procedural, which is quite good. It’s just that I don’t know that I was interested in doing that.
It may seem obvious there are two sides to a story in any ecosystem but that doesn’t, for various reasons, help the apparently lesser focused stories from being told.
But what happens when the opportunity arises to tell stories about a culture and soon after any record of it is diminished? Take the NHS, and British Army — each one of them relies heavily on workers who come from abroad. In the Army’s case for international campaigns recruitment continues from its commonwealth members.
Having seen and heard about these remarkable NASA women can we unlearn them. Our human capacity for memory and impact sets up an analogy for this piece.
London circa 1990s was a zingy period of breakout creativity. You had Brit pop (blur and their rivals Oasis), a new crop of creatives in Young British Artists with Tracy Emin, Damien Steven Hirst, et al (YBAs). London Fashion Week was establishing itself as a force to reckon with against Millan and Paris with new talent like Alexander McQueen. Arena (Men’s fashion) magazine had come into its own. And the airwaves were fizzing with new programmes, such as Friends, Reportage and the Big Breakfast.
But this narrative, which you might often read leavened in papers even now ignores the story from several other perspectives. For this piece, I’ll flip the script to the vibrancy, as well as struggles of London’s second generation of Black Brits who were creating visible significant footprints, expanding or otherwise taking on new directions to their parents.
Their influence was sizeable, but diminished in mainstream tombs looking back into London’s cultural vortex. That was until groupings that included second generation producers and editors, Black, had the wherewithal to their attention on these “hidden figures”.
Julian Isaac’s Young Soul Rebel, a young dynamic women Kanya King remortgages her house to set up an award that focuses on the music of Black origin. The Famished Road dreams big for Booker Prize winner Ben Okri, and a fashion designer called Ozwald Boateng creates a fashion show in Central Asian and Paris to get noticed in the UK.
London culture was in its stride. Pirate radio e.g. Kiss FM, Horizon FM amplified multi-faceted successes. The rebranding of BBC Radio in London to GLR would yield several community programmes and burgeoning talent, such as Vanessa Feltz on Jewish London and Olga Buckley and Peter Curran on Irish London. Wednesday’s was Black London.
It was a show that came on the shoulders of pioneering radio host Alex Pascall who created Black Londoners. Black London was two grads, Sheryll Sims and I with the platform to capture Isaac, King, Ozwald, Okri and so many other stories. Then there were the stars coming to London like Maya Angelou, Spike Lee, the Jacksons, Alice Walker, Walter Mosley et al.
It’s talking points weren’t only about successes, which was important to us, but the bad and ugly: police stop and search, racism, and our coverage of Rodney king.
These stories were their own threads and at some point bound to become small pieces of tapestry. That tapestry weaves the past to where we are now, or should do. But what happens when that tapestry is shredded?
That’s what happened when my co-presenter and I left the station. The recordings, voices of the many who had come onto the programme and shared their own stories was no more. Life moves on and for me they could leave in my head rent-free for ever. The time when Fula Kuti lit up a spliff in the studio and I begged him to put it out, or Eartha Kitt “mothered” me after the show, and then a band by the name of D-Influence were bouncing off the walls having been asked to support Michael Jackson’s UK tour.
Black London’s programmes were dumped in a skip, but in lockdown I discovered some duplicates, and with the help of a professional archivist Jose we digitised them. I found the number of D-influences lead member and played his interview 30 years ago back to him.
Pure Gold!
In the international journal of Radio & Audio I document Black London and its impact, the impotannce of its progenitor Black London, and the impact the BBC’s decision for a reorganisation of local radio is likely to have on Black and Brown radio listeners.
Now it’s time to re-share them. If you’re a commissioner, creative podcast producer the drop me a line, I have an idea and would love to chat.
