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I managed to get somewhere of my own, a housing co-operative place in Stratford. Although I had been out of touch with my family for some time, my mum started to visit and this gradually eased into her living with me. She would complain about the London air, and that the water wasn’t as good as in Birmingham, but after being abandoned by Pastor Burris I think she wanted a fresh start and some familiar company in the form of her firstborn son.
Around this time I frequently performed at weekend fairs in community centres, in mid-sized venues at African-Caribbean cultural events, at music gigs and at large political rallies. At one particular anti-racist gig, the band Aswad were getting ready to go on stage. I went to the side of the stage and asked their manager, Michael Campbell, if I could ‘drop’ a poem before they played. He asked the band and they said okay, so I went on stage with no introduction.
Most people just carried on talking. I could hear others saying, ‘Who’s this?’ and some saying, ‘I think I’ve seen him somewhere before.’ But I told myself not to be distracted by anything in the crowd; this was punk, so anything could happen. I began to chant a poem called ‘African Swing’ and slowly the background noise faded as everyone started to pay attention to me.
It’s a great feeling when you begin to turn an audience around, but it’s a feeling you must ignore because you are there to deliver the poem and not to congratulate yourself. Then I delivered the last line: ‘And look at me now, I’m an African’, and the crowd went wild. It was time to get off, but they wanted more. I looked to Michael, who was now surrounded by members of other bands who had come to see what all the noise was about, and then they all started to encourage me to do one more. I ended up performing another three poems, and I could have done more. Now I knew I could perform alongside well-known bands, and not just other poets. I’d managed to hold an audience on a big stage and I started to think, Yeah, this is gonna happen. I wasn’t arrogant about it; I just knew.
I began to do this often. I would go along to a gig, stand at the side of the stage and ask a band member or the stage manager if I could do a poem between bands. Or sometimes the bands would hang out in the audience watching the support act and I would have a word with them there. Soon they started to approach me and ask me to go and turn the crowd on for them. This was before rap was big in Britain, and before the appearance of spoken word gigs. Crowds had never seen or heard anybody like me. There was John Cooper Clarke and a handful of punk poets, and there was Linton Kwesi Johnson, whose delivery was more relaxed than mine, but they had never heard the fast reggae version of dub poetry that I delivered.
Not only were the audiences shouting for more, sometimes the bands would encourage me from the wings, urging me on, telling me to ‘give it to ’em’. Bands would never be concerned with me eating into their time; they thought of me as complementing them, and I was easy to work with. I had fire in my belly, and all I needed was a microphone, so roadies could change the bands’ gear as I performed, and I didn’t ask for any money, although many bands were happy to get me a little something for my time.
I felt at home at these gigs. I had admired the Rock Against Racism movement and now I was part of it. I used to watch groups like Buzzcocks, Subway Sect and Matumbi, and Birmingham’s finest, Steel Pulse, and now I was playing with them. Their fans had become my fans.