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Andrew Weatherall is running late to meet one of his heroes, DJ and filmmaker Don Letts, and has just realised he doesn’t have a Dictaphone. Not that he’s worried. Weatherall, like Letts himself, is a product of the DIY ethic.
Starting as a fanzine writer, blagging it as a DJ, finding himself as a ‘journalist’ for NME, a review turning him into a first-time producer – for Primal Scream.
Just as Letts managed to combine Black reggae and white punk cultures, so Weatherall has embraced an eclecticism which no one could ever call ‘commercial sell-out’. So when Weatherall heard one of his heroes had put out a definitive document of the punk-reggae melting pot, he contacted Jockey Slut and earned himself another music journalist commission.
Spliff in hand, looking exactly as he did in Big Audio Dynamite 15 years ago, Letts is waiting for him at the door of his west London apartment. Here’s what two generations of punk ethics had to say to each other.
Weatherall: “Do you think Acme Attractions, the clothes shop you worked at in the 70s, has been overlooked in favour of the McLaren-Westwood axis?”
Letts: “Not for the people who know. There were two happening shops on the King’s Road. Our shop was actually cooler; we represented the way London was going, because all the different factions and tribes would meet down there. I used to pump reggae all fucking day long, pissing off the people in the antiques market upstairs. And it was the music that got the people down the stairs. Patti Smith used to come and check me out. So did Bob Marley.”
Weatherall: “Did Marley buy anything?”
Letts: “He wasn’t gonna be seen dead in that stuff. He took the piss out of me for wearing bondage trousers. He said I looked like a ‘blood claat mountaineer’. He’d just seen the Daily Mirror version (of punk); he ended up hanging out, hearing it for himself and writing ‘Punky Reggae Party’.”
Weatherall: “Was the Roxy your first professional engagement as a DJ?”
Letts: “Yes, but I never felt comfortable calling myself a DJ. It was John Lydon who used to say, ‘Oi, DJ Don Letts’ to wind me up. The accountant for Acme Attractions started the Roxy, and he was thinking since this music’s getting a reaction down there, why don’t we have a go? I used to turn my back to the crowd and if people made requests I’d go: ‘Fuck off’. I had one deck. The gaps between the records were crucial.”
Weatherall: “Did they accept a reggae DJ immediately?”
Letts: “Truth be told, there weren’t any punk records. I did try and flash in the odd thing I thought they’d relate to – the Dolls, MC5, the Stooges. I’ve got big ears, man. I got every Velvet Underground album.”
Weatherall: “As with Shoom, which everybody claims to have been at, how many people do you really think ever went to the Roxy?”
Letts: “I dunno, a couple of hundred? But when a couple of hundred people are pogoing it looks like thousands. The Roxy was a shithole, but it pulled all these people together – all movements need an HQ.”
Weatherall: “Your compilation is an ideal way to introduce someone who doesn’t know anything about that music as well as a snapshot of the time.”
Letts: “Yeah, there was a lot of experimenting going on in those days, pushing the drum and the bass centre stage, the mixing desk as an instrument, the whole 12-inch thing.”
Weatherall: “I’ve got a couple of theories about the punk and reggae crossover. One, rebel music – punks are outsiders like Rastas. White kids wanting to be down with the brothers. Or like you said, you were the only DJ and played them shitloads of reggae so they couldn’t listen to anything else.”
Letts: “All three of those things. Let’s be bloody honest about this. Whenever white subculture has wanted to align itself to any music, it’s always been Black. Right back to the Stones listening to Blind Lemon Motherfucker from the Mississippi delta. But I wasn’t from the Mississippi delta – I lived next to the River Thames. I was the man next door. I grew up with people like John (Lydon) and Joe (Strummer) and Paul (Simonon). I went to this grammar school where for the first four years I was the only Black man, so I was totally swamped in white man culture. I was turned on to my white bredren by their music, like the Stooges and Beefheart, and I turned them on to reggae and maybe a bit of weed.”
Weatherall: “I’d like to ask about what I think is just as important as the music... the clothes.“
Letts: “When I left school, I was straight down the bloody King’s Road, it was like joining a magic circle. Fashion at one time was the subversive art form. We used to get our arses kicked for the clothes we were wearing.”
Weatherall: “When you get older you don’t need that so much, ‘cause you have more sense of your own identity. You don’t have to have the badges. You can create your own system and your own badges.”
Letts: “Yeah, you can’t buy an attitude.”
Weatherall: “Talking of which, what about the hair?”
Letts: “I was looking for my own identity in all this white culture. You have to be careful, like they say, ‘You can cross over, and you can’t get Black’. Through reggae music, I identified with Rastafari and got the dreadlocks. Now dreadlocks don’t mean diddly squat.”
Weatherall: “My one regret about acid house was I was too busy getting twatted to realise I was in the middle of important social history. Did you have a sense of that? Is that what made you pick up the camera?”
Letts: “The great thing about punk rock was everybody could do it. It wasn’t, you’re the fans and you’re the star. The stage was full up, so I became a Super 8 terrorist. And then I read in the NME one day: ‘Don Letts is making a movie’, and I thought: ‘Oh, that’s a good idea’.”
Weatherall: “Was Steel Leg vs The Electric Dread (1978 PIL side project) your first musical outing?”
Letts: (laughing): “You dug up that shit! Keith Levene and Jah Wobble had blagged some extra time out of Virgin. Then they asked me to make up some lyrics and I came up with this thing of ‘Haile Unlikely’. The next thing I know there’s a record out and I was a bit pissed off. The lyrics, they were like: ‘Everybody’s wearing red, gold and green, they look like fucking traffic lights’. I was putting my head on the chopping block. But that doesn’t count.”
Weatherall: “What’s the first thing that counts?”
Letts: “BAD. Which I’m really proud of.”
Weatherall: “With the recent Clash hysteria, do you think the importance of BAD has been overlooked?”
Letts: “I keep seeing these things – ‘I love the 80s’ and ‘I love the 90s’ and the 80s is Boy George, padded shoulders and cocaine. But BAD was one of the most interesting musical propositions of that time. Jamaican basslines, Mick Jones’ hardcore white man rock, Greg’s New York beats and my samples and cut-ups. A potential fucking nightmare, but when we got it right it was a beautiful thing.”
Weatherall: “I don’t think people see it in its proper historical context. I remember going to see you in 1985, so house and techno wasn’t that much of a surprise to me.”
Letts: “Exactly.”
Weatherall: “Do you think that we look at punk rock times through rose-tinted glasses and by doing so negate the punk ethic, which was never about nostalgia?
Letts: “I’m really uncomfortable with this whole culture of nostalgia. The only thing that’s interesting about punk is to look at it and see how you can move forward. If you look at the shit that’s going down now, the lunatics have taken over the asylum, the kids are being fucked over, they’ve become fans again, which makes it really easy for the music business to take their money. The backlash is remarkably overdue. End of the 50s, 60s, 70s, the end of the 80s, was creatively and culturally interesting. Now I don’t know what the fuck is going on.”
Weatherall: “Does ease of access – which should be the ultimate culmination of punk ideals – lead to cultural overload and lowering of artistic standards?”
Letts: “Yes, but you can’t control that, it’ll eventually find its rightful role in the scheme of things. Right now it’s a bit out of whack.”
Weatherall: “Any parallels in the last 20 years with what you experienced with punk?”
Letts: “Hip hop – that was Black punk rock. I was in New York with the Clash when the whole hip hop thing was first happening.”
Weatherall: “What about two-step? Kids on council estates doing their own pirate radio?”
Letts: “So Solid Crew and Oxide Neutrino – for the first time the Black British music scene is looking really happening. Drum’n’bass was too radical for the business to put it on the shelf, but right now they’ve got over the emulation of the American sound. Fuck you, America, this is us!”
As he admits himself, Don Letts’ entire career is a classic case of ‘right place, right time’. A Black Rasta should have been a fish out of water in the white punk scene, but Don Letts was at its apex. He worked in the right clothes shop (Acme Attractions) where his reggae tunes were so popular that despite no DJing background, he got the right DJ gig at the right club – punk haven, the Roxy.
Simply filming his punk friends for his own amusement, he found he was documenting a moment in history, and – by default – his first film, ‘The Punk Rock Movie', was born. Letts became punk’s in-house filmmaker, making videos for everyone from The Clash to the Pistols to Public Image Ltd. What’s more, as the crucial link between punk and reggae, he also created videos for Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff, and surprise 80s number one, Musical Youth‘s ‘Pass the Dutchie'.
In 1984, he wound up ‘playing’ keyboards for ex-Clash man Mick Jones’ Big Audio Dynamite – one of the first white acts to incorporate hip hop rhythms and ideas (Letts was essentially sampler-in-chief). He still writes lyrics for ex-BAD-ers Dreadzone, but these days mostly works as a filmmaker, making documentaries on Lee Perry, Marley and old compadres The Clash, while his 1997 feature film ‘Dancehall Queen’ was an enormous hit in Jamaica.
