Later on I apologised to the disabled kid I’d knocked out. I begged him for forgiveness, and told him I couldn’t explain what I’d done. He was so cool about it. Somebody had told him that I’d seen my mum earlier and wasn’t feeling good, and a couple of weeks later he told me that I’d saved him from much worse beatings, so he didn’t mind one kick getting through, especially from me!
Throughout my time there, Mum and Pastor never gave up on Trevor and me. They never abandoned us like some parents did to their kids. They knew how tough it was trying to survive on the streets, and they knew the police were corrupt and racist. I found out later the police said some terrible things to them. They’d sometimes take a couple of days before telling them we’d been arrested. She knew they should’ve done it immediately, as I was a minor, but there was no point complaining. The way the police were back then, it would only have made things worse.
Although approved school was a tough place, it wasn’t like you see in films; there wasn’t really heavy stuff going on all the time. Boredom was the worst thing, although we did have a record player, and by this time I was getting into a more righteous sound that would have a major influence on my life. I had this album by Big Youth, called Screaming Target, and I’d play it all the time. Some older teenagers in Handsworth had brought me into contact with a thoughtful and revolutionary black sound. Burning Spear had just released his first album and black youth in the UK, including me, were starting to grow dreadlocks and learn about Marcus Garvey and Africa. Black consciousness was rising.
13
DANCING THE BLUES
I was discharged from approved school, my formal education was officially over, but I was still just fifteen years old. With no school and lots of time on my hands, I started hanging out on the streets with other kids who had been expelled. We would spend time in cafes, playing pinball machines, or find girls who were playing truant, and then we would play together, if you know what I mean.
Around this time my name was made official by an elder of the Rastafarian Twelve Tribes of Israel church (not to be confused with the country Israel). There was a simple ceremony of burning ganja in a chalice, some drums being played, and the elder reading from the book of Zephaniah.
Most Rastafarians take names that are biblical or African. The important thing is to not go by a name passed down from slave owners. Bob Marley’s tribe name was Joseph; musician Trevor Sutherland became Ijahman Levi, and one of my favourite artists, Michael Williams, is better known to the world as Prince Far I.
At night we’d go to blues. This is how blues parties worked: someone would find an empty house, or a house that was between tenants. They would make sure it had electricity, or they would run some illegal electricity into it. Then they would buy drinks and hire a sound system, if they didn’t have one already, and spread the word. But the word, or more precisely the music, would spread itself. These sound systems weren’t just big stereos; they were powerful homemade rigs with speaker boxes the size of double wardrobes and amplifiers that looked as if they’d come from Dr Frankenstein’s laboratory.
The parties were illegal, but I’m sure the amplifiers were also against some kind of law; after all, the bottom end, i.e. the bass, was designed to blow you away. The people running the blues would move in around 11pm. The party would start an hour later and go on until about six in the morning. All night there would be hardcore reggae, reggae with very few lyrics, dub reggae, with very little on the top end of the auditory scale but plenty of bottom end. The point was not to just listen to the music, you had to feel it, and when a sound system was good you could feel it if you were down the road or a couple of streets away.
The police would raid the parties every now and then, but not as often as you might expect, considering how loud the music was and how many ‘herbal’ cigarettes were being smoked. Sometimes they’d put informers in – black guys, or the occasional white woman. If you were sussed out, my God you got a beating! If someone came to the dance and left soon after, and then half an hour later it got raided, then we’d have our suspicions. But the white kids who had won our trust and loved the music were made very welcome and were protected.
I had performed poetry in the school playground, I had performed poetry at the breakfast table, but it was in the blues dances that I really learned how to use a microphone. It was here where I learned to freestyle, and it was here where I learned that if I was different from the crowd, and had something important to say, people would listen to me.
There was always someone ready to grab the microphone and be the ‘toaster’. The toaster’s job was to be a social commentator – to use wit and verbal dexterity to talk about one’s roots and culture, or to lampoon politicians or the police. We were taking a style that had long been used by Caribbean entertainers and making it our own, adding a revolutionary edge that was pertinent to the times. The best thing about it was that it was a scene we created for ourselves; it wasn’t something invented by record companies. And the money we made from the door fee went back into our own communities.
At various times over the coming years I would toast with many different sound systems including Duke Alloy, Sir Christopher, Quaker City and, my personal favourite, Mafiatone Hi-fi. Most of the time these systems played on their own, but occasionally there would be a sound clash, when they would take on a system from London, such as Coxsone or Shaka, or head out with all the equipment in huge vans to other ‘frontlines’ in cities like Bristol. It was hugely competitive and fiercely territorial, with each system looking to outdo the other. Dubplates, exclusive and straight from the recording studio, were the thing. If you turned up with an exclusive pressing – not just a dub version but one with a special message from that artist, name-checking your crew – the place would erupt and whoever brought the dubplate would be the king.
Sound systems were always looking to get an edge on the opposition. The scene was exciting, full of expectation, and would instil loyalty in a crowd similar to that of following a football team. But you had to be good to hold the crowd and ride the rhythm. Only the fittest would survive. I’d been practising toasting around people’s houses and in youth clubs, where table tennis was going on at the same time, and I’d had a bit of space to learn the craft.
But when I first took up the mic in a blues it was like I’d been in the Championship and was suddenly plunged into the Premiership. All eyes were on me, and my main concern was not to be put to shame. My strategy was to chat about something positive and inspiring. The majority of guys who took up the mic would be referencing Jamaica, which for me felt a bit phony, as many of them had not even been there; no one thought of chatting rhyme about Handsworth or Aston. In later years Steel Pulse would mention Handsworth in their songs, but that was a different style of music. Toasting and dancehall and, later, ragga, were rougher and faster, and if the guy that followed you could verbalise better than you, then you could lose face.
I didn’t want some guy to slam me down. I wanted to stand out and be different. I’d always been fascinated by what was going on in other parts of the world, and I started chatting about South Africa and the Vietnam War, rather than about girls and hustling. The person who followed me at the mic that first time said something like, ‘Wise words, brother,’ and then did his thing, and I knew I’d survived at the turntable. I had not been put to shame. I would never have said it at the time, but I wanted to bring poetry to the dancehall in a toasting style.
By now Trevor was living with a girlfriend, so I moved in with them. Now there was nothing to stop us; we could go to blues every night of the week. We became creatures of the night. Sometimes we ventured into other cities like Manchester, Leeds, Nottingham, Leicester and, one of my favourite places, Wolverhampton. We would be heading home when everyone else was waking up, which made us feel a bit superior. They were working themselves to death, and we were having one big party.
The police were arresting us all the time, though. Sometimes for nothing at all, sometimes to get
a reaction, sometimes because they were bored. We all know that cops get away with things now, but one copper once said to me, ‘Most of us are hardworking racists with the power of arrest.’ I’d been roughed up by the police a few times, so I was getting toughened up, and there wasn’t much they could do to scare me. But one officer did manage to scare the hell out of me without raising a finger.
I was in Thornhill Road Police Station, being questioned about some robberies I genuinely knew nothing about. When he realised he wasn’t getting anything out of me he took me into a room that had a mixture of hats in the Rastafarian colours of red, gold and green, and people’s dreadlocks pinned on the walls. They were like scalps. The officer stood there and, with great pride, he named the victims one by one and then he looked lustfully at my newly grown dreadlocks, warning me that I’d be up there soon if I didn’t co-operate. I didn’t co-operate, even after he offered me a ‘rewarding’ deal if I were to turn informer for him.
On the street they would come up and ask what we were doing. If you said you were doing nothing they would tell you that you weren’t allowed to do nothing; that would be called Loitering with Intent, and if we walked around our postcode we were told that to walk around in circles is suspicious. It was a game of cat and mouse.
Among our own community, though, apart from the police, it was an exciting time to be young. A film had just come out of Jamaica that blew everyone’s socks off. It was the first time the rude boy lifestyle had been committed to film on a general release around the world. It was The Harder They Come and it starred reggae singer Jimmy Cliff as Ivan Martin – a Jamaican musician forced to live like a fugitive. The soundtrack was a landmark in music history, and some of the tunes made the UK charts. It helped to establish reggae music as a serious force in Britain, and attending the cinema when it played in Birmingham was an incredible event.
I can’t think of another Jamaican film before that, and when we went to see it there was some thirty or forty of us. Everyone was saying, ‘Haf fi see Harder They Come, man.’ A lot of big Handsworth names went to watch it, sporting the fashions of the time, like long leather coats and smart shirts with wide collars, and velour hats. In recent years, young people have talked about ‘representin their endz’ – well, that’s how it was for the Handsworth delegation back then.
I don’t think the cinema was quite ready for this audience, though. Instead of sitting in their seats, maybe going ‘Oooh’ quietly when something happened on screen, you had guys standing up, roaring, ‘Yah man!’ If they’d had pistols they would have been firing them in the air. Can you imagine, thirty or forty of us doing that while in the aisles there’d be these old white ladies selling ice creams, who had probably been at Carry On Matron the previous week.
The atmosphere was amazing. We British-born kids would go ‘Yeah, Jamaica . . .’ but there were also Yardies from JA in the audience, who actually recognised the places on screen. With that film you heard, for the first time in the movies, people speaking the way we spoke. I saw it again years later and it was subtitled. And a lot of subtitles weren’t correct. They’re often wrong when it comes to subtitling Caribbean dialects and slang. I’m not sure if it was that film, but I definitely saw one where a character said, ‘I shoot you to pussyclaat’ and the subtitle was: ‘I’m going to shoot your cat.’
I don’t want to be accused of glorifying crime, but around that time I loved pick-pocketing. I was able to bump into someone and take their wallet from their inside pocket. I could empty the money from it with one hand and, if I felt like it, I could apologise for bumping into him and, when so doing, replace the wallet. Or I could throw a note on the floor and tell someone they must have dropped it. If they were greedy enough to pick it up I could relieve them of money they had in their pockets. It was slick work; it took confidence and quick thinking and I had a great technique.
I was never a snatch-and-run merchant, but one morning a large group of us were coming from a blues, bragging to each other about the bad weed we’d smoked and the bad girls we’d been with. I had done so much with these guys, we were close, but most of us still only knew each other by nicknames. There was Bunny, Badfoot, Snappa, Ruggs, and a few more. There was also Cheesey, whose real name I did know. He was the kind of person that, if you met him, you would never forget him. He was tall, incapable of standing still, and he spoke in a very nasalised, high-pitched voice: ‘Mi name Cheese, Ronald Cheese. Come, we go look fe some gal.’
When people first met Cheesey they would think he was playing some kind of game, showing how long he could speak through his nose for, but they’d soon realise this was what he really sounded like. The pitch of his voice was so high that at first you simply wanted to laugh, but you couldn’t, because if you did he wouldn’t hesitate to drop you to the floor.
As we walked down Witton Road at five o’clock that morning we saw a woman on her way to work. Cheesey then said, ‘I’m going to snatch that woman’s bag.’ Some of us told him not to and we started to disagree. Half of us were saying no and the other half were saying yes. I was completely against it, and I said: ‘No, don’t do it, that’s not cool, what’s she going to have in her bag? She’s just a cleaner.’ But then Cheesey went and did it. When something like this happens you all have to run, and we scattered in different directions. The police caught us later and we were arrested and had to appear in court.
14
BORSTAL BOY
I was sentenced to borstal training. This time it was the big time. Well, big time for little me. When you get sentenced to borstal you’re actually told the sentence is eighteen months to two years. That’s the minimum and the maximum. First you’re sent to an assessment centre, where they determine how mentally stable or dangerous you are, and then you’re allocated a borstal. When I was sentenced I was told that all the assessment centres were full, so my assessment had to happen in prison, in Winson Green. I was there, in G Wing, for about four months. G Wing was supposed to have been a remand wing, but because the prison was full there were long-termers and even lifers in there. Down in the basement were the Rule 45s – prisoners who had committed crimes that even the other prisoners wouldn’t approve of: sex offenders . . . and six men called the Birmingham pub bombers.
Going from approved school to prison was like leaving junior school and going straight to university – a really bad university, with bullies that could kill you or rape you. I went from being up with the top dogs to being pretty small fry. I never got beat up though. Fortunately, coming from Handsworth gave me status, and my family was seen as fighters, so I was never a target. What prison had in common with approved school was the racial segregation. It was black and white, straight down the middle, so in effect if somebody started on me I’d have a rather large posse of black guys to back me up. Once you had a posse you were cool.
But if I was okay with the rest of the prisoners, I wasn’t prepared for an onslaught from a man of the cloth. When I first went in, I was waiting at the reception, the place where you get kitted out with your uniform, and some kid had said to me, ‘Say you’re Catholic. It’s easier to get weed,’ so, without thinking too much about it, I did.
A couple of days later a priest came to my cell. Now, this guy wasn’t what you might expect. We’re not talking a gentle humanist. He looked like he’d spent his whole life on a chain gang. He was huge, thuggish, with a head like a block of concrete, and he spoke in this rough cockney accent. He took one look at me and bellowed, ‘You’re not fackin’ Catholic. Alright, if you’re Catholic, I want to hear you recite ten Hail Marys.’
Of course, I was at a loss.
He comes up really close, jabbing his stubby finger in my face. ‘You fackin’ nigger. Answer me or I’ll fackin’ thrash you, you bastard.’ And he starts pushing me around the cell, threatening me – all this with his dog collar on. The next time someone asked me my religion, I told them I was Hindu.
A surprising and much more rewarding relationship developed with an Asian officer, or ‘scr
ew’, as they were called. He was unusual in that he was the only non-white screw I ever saw, and one night we got to know each other. He peeped through the spy hole in my cell door late one night and saw me stretching and doing my martial arts workout. He opened the door slowly and I addressed him aggressively. As far as I was concerned he was black, so if he was a screw he was on the wrong side.
‘What the fuck do you want? I’m not doing anything wrong,’ I shouted.
‘I just wondered what you were doing,’ he replied.
So I replied in rhyme: ‘Kung fu, so what’s it to you, and what you going to do, screw?’
I carried on training and he stood watching, almost drooling, like a perverted gym instructor. I jumped to me feet. ‘What’s your problem?’ I said. Almost as if confessing, he replied, ‘I do karate. Do you want to fight?’
We went to his office. He was on night duty, so there was no other staff on our landing. We cleared a space in the office, and then we sparred. After that first time we did it every time he was on duty. It was the best thing that happened to me in prison, apart from visits from my mum. Our styles were very different. The Japanese art of karate is rigid and low; Chinese kung fu is a lot more fluid and light. Sometimes we would spar for hours. In the morning he’d tell the other guards to leave me because I was tired. We both had a passion for martial arts and we weren’t going to let our prison statuses dampen our enthusiasm.
The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah Page 8
