Linton Kwesi Johnson “Live in Paris” DVD and CD

I must be showing my age.  Every decade, I’m sure, has its defining music, songs that will stand the test of time.  But, the more I listen to most of today’s music, the more I I’m convinced that the late 1970’s was a great era for new music.  For a while there, between about 1978 and 1980, there was such an embarrassment of riches that every week seemed to bring about a new masterpiece, a new record to challenge all that had gone before.  For me, most of the best music of this time came from England.   The Clash, The Jam, The Buzzcocks, all the two tone music, and even those first few albums from the Police and Dire Straits had something magic and special about them.  I was a teenager and what was on my record player defined and articulated all that I was feeling.  Lots of people have this experience.  Music is powerful and has the ability to evoke through word and emotion experiences that otherwise elude expression. So, in reviewing Linton Kwesi Johnson’s new CD and DVD “Live in Paris”, I can’t even pretend to be objective. Of all the music of the late 1970’s British renaissance, no performer affected me more than Linton Kwesi Johnson. The first time I heard him, the way I listened to music was changed forever. 

It was 1980, and I was 17 years old, sitting in my friend Ian’s basement listening to the Stranglers.  After several repetitions of the same disc, I was trying to subtly nudge the record off the turntable so I could hear “Survival”, Bob Marley’s new album.  Ian and I were at a bit of a musical impasse when our neighbour, Taylor the disgruntled, came in the house and showed us an album he had just bought.  It was an imported copy of “Forces of Victory”, LKJ’s second album.  It was like nothing I’d ever heard before.  The rhythm and cadence of the singing was every bit as new to me as Bob Dylan’s vocal phrasing of 1966 must have been to his listeners.  The music with its heavy bass, scattered keyboards and emphatic horns put me in another universe.  I wasn’t unfamiliar with reggae.  I loved Bob Marley, Toots and the Maytals, and Jimmy Cliff, but the tales they told and the music that delivered them were mythic and seemed to happen in some kind of removed Biblical plane of tropical landscapes and saints in the hills.  LKJ’s was an urban music, a dispossessed and radical voice demanding change and justice, appealing to human logic and decency rather than a higher power or distant Zion.  There was something about Johnson’s music that was more disturbing and radical than anything I’d ever heard.  Furtively smoking weed in our safe middle class neighbourhood basements, songs like “Sonny’s Lettah” (recently quoted by David Bowie as being one of the best songs of the 20^th century) were messages from another world where everything seemed immediate, real and dangerous.  Before hip hop was used to sell everything from cars to Coca Cola, LKJ delivered unsponsored truths from a world where life and death decisions were made, and safety and peace were enjoyed briefly at a blues dance on a Saturday night, snatched away suddently as the police smashed down the door.

England in 1978 was bursting at the seams.  Punk music articulated the white working class disaffection with the queen and tradition, and then LKJ came along with “Dread, Beat, and Blood” to describe the immigrant experience in post colonial London.  At the time, his voice and music were a revelation and his debut LP was greeted with almost unanimously positive reviews.  Johnson nailed the black immigrant world view in a way that was brash, uncompromising and totally unique.  At that time, the fusing of dub poetry and reggae music was a completely new sound.  When I spoke to Johnson on the phone last year, he was reluctant to take any credit for influencing today’s performers, although he is obviously pleased with the tributes artist pay to him.  “I don’t take any credit at all, but quite a few people have said I’ve influenced them and I’m happy to hear that I’ve had an effect on other people.  There’s a woman in this country called Dido who’s quite big and she said she used to listen to me when she was younger.  Stuff like that I’m quite flattered to hear.  But, the people who really influenced rap are people like James Brown and the Last Poets.”

If Johnson prefers to be modest about his influence, his slow but steady string of releases over the past twenty-five years speak for themselves.  1980’s “Forces of Victory” and 1984’s “Making History” still rank among the best political records ever released (and you can dance to them) and manage to avoid the pitfalls of most topical music by discussing particular issues in a way that is both universal and timeless.  More recent CDs like “Tings and Times” (1991) and “More Time”(1999) remain both musically challenging (when was the last time you heard a violin used as a lead instrument in dub music?) and reveal the careful work of an artist who has continued to truly develop his work at a pace that suits him. 

For me, listening to the new CD and watching the new DVD “Live in Paris” is like the best kind of reunion with an old friend.  A reunion where the trepidation and questions about whether your friend will have changed, mellowed, or sold out are all dispelled within a moment of meeting. Backed up by his long-time musical director, Dennis Bovell, LKJ is in fine form in this film and recording of his 25^th anniversary concert in Paris last year. He treats his older songs with respect and carefully sets each one up in its cultural and historical context. He needn’t have done that though.  Chillingly, songs like “the eagle and the bear” “want fi go rave” are every bit as powerful as they were 25 years ago.  There is an unspoken irony in LKJ’s delivery that suggest history has taught us nothing, but that it is the duty of the thinking person to “stick to his guns” and rail against the darkening night.  LKJ is a veteran who has remained dignified and alert in a world that seems to get stupider every day. If some of the brashness and youthful anger of his early work has subsided, it has been replaced by a more optimistic, if no less insistent humanism.  The characters in his songs are still politically engaged, but they are wiser, reflecting the lessons of lives fully lived.  When a character in a song wants “more time” to enjoy life, he is not driven by hollow complaints reflecting a lack of experience. His perspective takes in the daily struggle of those who care, who try to make the world a better place, and who come back time and time again to take a fresh set of blows from the faceless forces of persecution and dehumanization. Idealism has been tempered by loss, renewal, and a faith in the ability to keep on surviving in the face of adversity.  There is no concession to defeat in this music.  There are no losers.

Linton Kwesi Johnson’s music is a gift to the human race.  Along with artists as diverse as Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Miles Davis, Johnson shows us that it is possible to continue to live and perform with dignity in a world and a music business that often seems to have none.  This is absolutely essential music wherever you’re from and whatever life has shown you.  Find one of his discs.  Listen carefully.  You’ll feel better about your life, your world and your place in it.

Doug Heselgrave

December 2004