LONDON CALLING
One summer night in 1978, I lay on my bed looking up at the ceiling, wondering what life was all about. The ceiling (with its adjoining walls) seemed to represent the limits of my ambitions, but these ambitions were related to the circumstances I found myself in, some of the bad choices I made, and some of the bad people I followed. It was time to really think for myself. I recalled the teacher at Broadway Comprehensive telling me I was a born failure, and that I would soon be dead or doing a life sentence in prison. I didn’t have to be a mastermind to see that if things carried on the way they were going the teacher would be proved right.
When I was eight, I told everyone, even the big moustache in the Boys’ Brigade, that I wanted to be a poet when I grew up, and there I was looking at a ceiling that belonged to Birmingham Council, with a gun under my pillow, thinking I was some kind of triad gang master don or ghetto godfather. Just as the eight-year-old me had done, I spoke the words out: ‘I want to be a poet. I want to prove that teacher wrong.’
I reached under the bed and pulled out a big folder containing some of my poems and the letter Bob Marley had sent me. I read the letter again; the last words were ‘Britain needs you, so forward on.’ Right then I thought only the police needed me, and I wasn’t forwarding on. Something had to change.
The next day I told everyone it was over – that I wasn’t doing this anymore, and they should stop too. I told my boys I had no bonus money for them, no pension, it was now every man for himself. And then I told them I was going to London. I can remember that day vividly. They all protested. A normally quiet guy called Testa said, ‘Come on, man. You know you can make good money here. Why do you want to leave us?’ The guy almost had tears in his eyes.
I reminded them of how good I used to be on the sound systems, that that was where my heart was. I told them I wanted to be a revolutionary poet, thinking about the big questions, talking about human rights, peace and the things I used to care about. I looked at Testa and said, ‘It’s crunch time, mi breddrin. Me a go kill a man, or a man a go kill me. Or we can just stop now.’
They looked at me stony-faced, and I ended by saying, ‘What I’m doing right now is like saving your lives. So set up yourselves and do another ting.’
I paid them what I owed them, told them to leave, and that was that. When another of the group asked me when he would see me again, I said, ‘Next time you see me, it’ll be on TV.’
Of course, the moment I’d made the decision to pursue my dream I began to wonder how I would actually do it. What would it involve? I had so many questions and so few answers. I knew I had to get away from Birmingham otherwise I’d be drawn back into crime. London felt like the logical place to go. I’d been down to the capital many times with various sound systems, but I felt there would be opportunities for me there that weren’t possible in Birmingham. It’s hard to reinvent yourself when you’re surrounded by familiar things and familiar people.
To add to my troubled mind, the police had started looking for me. They were just behind me all the time. On numerous occasions I found that places I’d just been to would be raided shortly afterwards. I thought the police were investigating my business affairs, until I visited Cathy, another girlfriend. After leaving her house she was also raided, and she got a message to me: ‘Disappear,’ she said. ‘The police want you for murder.’ I made some enquiries and found out they wanted me because my fingerprints linked me to the murder of a man whose body had been found in a car. I instantly knew which car, and which body, they were referring to: it was my night of training the new recruit, when we’d gone looking for tools and found a man’s leg in the boot of a car.
I didn’t tell anyone about this, not even family. The only people who knew were the ones tipping me off. I was chewing it all over, thinking on the one hand it was surreal, and on the other that this was really serious and was upsetting other people. Even though the pressure was on, I was reassuring myself that the police would soon find the real culprit; they must know that I hadn’t committed murder.
Looking back, that confidence was probably optimistic. In the late 1970s the police were fitting people up left, right and centre if it suited their agenda. It was like the TV series Life on Mars, but with much more racism and brutality. They wouldn’t have cared if one more black man with a history of juvenile crime was banged up for a murder he didn’t commit.
A friend gave me the address of one of his ex-girlfriends in London. Her name was Clara. I had met her only once, when she came to visit him in Birmingham, so I hardly remembered her. I packed up a few things, jumped into my Ford Escort and started driving across Birmingham in the direction of the M6. On the way there, I stopped off at a music rehearsal space in a cellar in Moseley, where a band was rehearsing. The band didn’t have a name then, but they went on to call themselves UB40. I didn’t know them particularly well, but I knew a couple of guys they knocked about with. I also knew Astro, the percussionist; we’d been around the same sound systems.
When I arrived, there was a girl watching them. She was very glamorous and interested in Astro. I walked up to her and told her the band was going nowhere. I said they sounded too white for a reggae band and that I was going to London to be a famous poet, so she’d be better off with me. I remember thinking I’d have to spend some time chatting her up and working on her, for at least half an hour, but she said, ‘Yes, I want to go with you.’ She just got in my car and we headed off to London.
I can’t even remember her name, but she had nothing with her, not even a change of clothes. I had a bit of money and a few clothes, but that was all. I was also worried about my old Escort; it wasn’t in great shape and I wasn’t sure it would make it. It was halfway through being sprayed and had been rubbed down with patches of body filler and primer, so it was quite conspicuous. Also, I still wasn’t a legal driver because I didn’t have a licence, so I was quite nervous about driving to London, but we did it anyway and of course I kept my worries to myself.
A few hours later we arrived in south London and knocked on Clara’s door, but she wasn’t there. In fact she didn’t show up for two days. So there I was; this was the big time . . . well, at least the beginning of it. I was in London with a beautiful girl who I’d promised a life of fame and the bright lights, sleeping in a Ford Escort in a car park in New Cross. ‘Well,’ I told her, ‘this isn’t too bad really, and things can only get better.’
When Clara finally did show up, she was happy. She was in the money. She was a ‘clipper’, fleecing gullible men of their cash. She would go through the routine of soliciting for sex, but once she got the man in a vulnerable position, usually with his trousers down, she would take his wallet and disappear. Or she would find tourists or an out-of-towner looking for an illegal smoke, and take him somewhere that looked like a dealer’s house, tell him to wait around the corner, then she’d disappear with his money. So, after two days of hustling, she’d come home to find us waiting for her. She was very welcoming, even though at first she had a bit of a shock because she wasn’t expecting guests.
Me and my new girlfriend shared a bed with her. That may sound a bit strange but that’s the way it was, and nothing happened. Honest. We had to sleep where we could. All kinds of ladies of the night and men of mystery were passing through Clara’s place, so she thought if we slept with her it would guarantee a place for us, and the others could fight over the remaining beds.
One night, about four weeks after we’d arrived, my new girlfriend had a telephone conversation with one of her mates in Birmingham who told her that UB40 were beginning to get noticed. The friend talked them up and said she should have stayed because they were really going places.
So that was it. She upped and left me. She didn’t even have things to pack. I was told that she went back to Birmingham and, although I never saw her again, her mother once turned up to one of my performances, where I told that story. She came to me after the show and said, ‘That was my daughter, that was. She was a right one. But she’s doing OK now.’
One day Clara told me a reggae toaster called Dillinger was coming to stay, along with a singer called Horace Andy. I jumped off my seat with excitement. I didn’t particularly like Horace Andy’s music. He’d done a couple of rootsy tunes but I thought he was a bit too sweet and loverboy-ish, but I was mad about Dillinger. He was a militant Rasta who’d released a legendary album in 1976 called CB 200, a massive hit with the title track being about a couple of Rastas flashing their dreadlocks as they rode on a then-popular Honda CB200 motorbike.
From the moment Clara told me they were coming I could hardly control myself. I was going to meet the great Dillinger. I’d come to London to mix with the stars and now it was going to happen. But when it did happen it wasn’t as I’d imagined. Dillinger was very arrogant and show-off-ish. He dressed like Elvis Presley, in a shiny jumpsuit, and all he did all night was talk about his gold rings and money. Horace Andy was totally different. He was a very humble guy, and charming, and I’ll never forget how he sat me down and spent hours showing me how to play a few tunes on an old guitar.
I’d picked at the guitar a little since the days of going to church with my mum, when I’d been given an old instrument by one of the musicians who played there. Although it was a rhythm guitar, I played it like a bass. Horace Andy was amazed that I could do vocals and play at the same time. I don’t sing, but doing vocals and playing bass (to reggae) at the same time is very difficult, because the bass is going in a different direction from the voice.
Horace also gave me some really good general advice about the music business and how to get on in it. By the time they’d left I’d completely changed my view – I didn’t like Dillinger anymore and Horace Andy had become a true brother. And the time I spent playing guitar with him inspired me to keep practising the instrument.
By then I was starting to think like a poet, and I was looking for ways of making myself known. I wasn’t writing much but I was resurrecting some of my old poetry and performing it to people. Most importantly, when people asked me what I did, I told them I was a poet. I had to, to get myself in the right frame of mind. I now had no interest in crime. Some of the people Clara mixed with were good pickpockets and occasionally they’d follow her to the West End. I was on the periphery of that, and they’d ask me if I wanted to go with them, but I never did. As much as I loved pickpocketing, and as good as I was at it, I resisted the temptation because I didn’t want to go back down that road.