Don Letts: Where Punk Met Reggae
Don Letts’s archive is testament to the profound cultural exchange between the black and white youth of London in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Armed with a Super 8 camera, Letts recorded influential figures of London’s most prominent two countercultures of the time; Reggae and Punk.
Their ideological meeting place was in youth rebellion and social action. Against the backdrop of social fragmentation and rampant unemployment, Reggae and Punk rallied against a system which seemed to offer no social mobility, opportunities or future.
Punk predominantly represented disaffected white youth, whose aesthetics reflected the chaos and decay that they saw around them. Punk forged its own methods - built upon refuting traditional rules and a DIY philosophy. Don adopted this attitude in his filmmaking.
Roots reggae and dub has a long history of social commentary, and criticism of hypocrisy in government and social organisation. When it was imported into the UK with Jamaican musicians, its scathing indictments of corruption were applied to Britain, with its overt and covert racist practices, and economic and social marginalisation.
Punk predominantly represented disaffected white youth, whose aesthetics reflected the chaos and decay that they saw around them. The stomping ground of the Punk movement was The Roxy, a basement club in which bands including Generation X, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Slits and The Clash played. Don toured with The Clash, band managed the Slits, and DJed at the Roxy, playing heavyweight dub tracks in between sets and, in doing so, has been said to have turned a whole generation of Punks onto Reggae.
Don went with John Lydon to Jamaica in 1977, and recorded the encounters of Jamaican artists and the previous Sex Pistols frontman, including U-Roy, Prince Hammer and The Congos.
Rastafarian rebellion runs through the veins of Jamaican bass culture, and music is often punctuated with calls to ‘burn down babylon’. Don filmed Jamaican reggae musicians in Jamaica and the UK. His archive bears witness to the lifestyles and indelible messages of these artists, from the commanding chants of Prince Far I and the defiant dub poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson to the antidotal verses of Big Youth and Culture.
Followers of the Punk and Reggae movements found common ground, being united in their disenfranchisement with mainstream culture and rejection of the status quo. Both countercultures called for destruction and reformation of current unjust and unfair systems of oppression, and built an aesthetic of expression, protest and expansion.