London – More than 125 years of black music in Britain is being celebrated in the inaugural exhibition at the new V&A East museum in Stratford, London. RFI was at the opening to explore how music from Africa, the Caribbean and North America merged to make a distinctly British sound.
V&A East, the latest offshoot of the world-renowned Victoria & Albert Museum, opened in Stratford – the area regenerated by London's 2012 Olympic Games – on 18 April.
Its inaugural exhibition, entitled "The Music is Black: A British Story", charts the rise of black music in the UK, from early drumbeats brought over from Africa to the present day, in which African and Afro-Caribbean music reflect British multiculturalism.
Dr Gus Casely-Hayford of the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) is the director of V&A East.
He says that young people – in the boroughs of East London in particular, where the museum is located – "were absolutely critical" in choosing the subject of its first exhibition.
"We wanted something that would speak to their hopes and dreams. Young people go to football matches here, spend their money on music, but would they come to an exhibition? Would they spend their money on exhibitions?" he asked.
He said he hoped to find ways to make sure they did.
"Black British music is the music we fall in love to, the music that we listen to at great events," he continued. "It's also the music that tells those informal stories and reflects our political history as a nation."
The team has created a show, he said, that tells "the unreflected stories... in ways that inspire and offer hope".
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A long and winding road
Reggae, dub, ska, drum and bass, jungle and grime all emerged in the UK as the offspring of African music, after it had travelled to the West Indies and the British Empire in general.
Other genres explored in the exhibition also include funk, lovers rock, 2 Tone, rocksteady, dub, trip hop, garage and drill.
Famous voices are featured, including those of Dame Shirley Bassey, Joan Armatrading, Sade, Seal, Tricky, Skunk Anansie’s Skin and Little Simz.
But so too are black composers who contributed to classical music, such as Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912), and to jazz and British soul music, including Winifred Atwell – the first black artist to have a number one hit in the UK singles chart.
There are more than 200 objects on display, from iconic photos to records, documents, stage costumes, instruments, films and art pieces from contemporary creators, including Thomas J. Price, whose father's family hails from Jamaica. His work frequently honours the Windrush Generation – those who arrived in the UK from the Caribbean between the 1940s and 1970s.
Curator Jacqueline Springer, a former music journalist, told RFI the exhibition explores the place of African and Afro-descendant people through the history of the British Empire and modern Britain, divided into four acts.
"The first act provides the vertebrae, the spinal cord for all the acts to follow. It provides a deeper history," she said. "It tells us a long story about the way in which humans, as a species, have the need and compulsion to express themselves, also in relation to social politics, cultural ideas, emotions."
The show then moves on to events on the West African coasts from the 1400s onward, when first Portuguese then British explorers first arrived on African shores – ushering in "a sense of competition continentally for the riches of the African continent".
Act one also examines the role of spiritual beliefs in music, and forced conversions to Christian religions.
"We also look at how the transatlantic African enslavement was permeated and legalised in the United Kingdom," Springer said, "with documents from the British Library providing empirical evidence of that."
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Sounds and stories
"Act two travels from the 1900s to the 1960s, looking at music and the world wars," Springer continued. "It looks at the phenomenon that is jazz, the presence of the blues."
For her, the centrepiece of the exhibition is Atwell's piano. Born in Trinidad in 1914, the pianist and composer migrated to Britain and enjoyed great popularity from the 1950s with a series of boogie-woogie and ragtime hits, selling more than 20 million records.
"That's the very piano that she played on," Springer said. "She would play with two pianos – a classical piano, and this kind of broken down, ragtime piano, showing her versatility as a musician, but also the fact that she could play jazz as well as classical music."
Act three, which forms the core of the exhibition, is dedicated to the black music genres that emerged in the UK after the Second World War, and with the arrival of the Windrush Generation.
"The stories in Act III are what inspired the title [of the exhibition]. This is the British story," said Springer.
One example of this is lovers rock, a romantic genre of reggae that emerged in London in the mid-1970s.
"Lovers rock is the first reggae form of music created outside of Jamaica. It's slower, but it is as political. It can be escapist, it's romantic, but the vocal delivery of artists like Janet Kay, Louisa Marks, Carol Thompson, Jean Adamo, Adebambo, offers a deployment of warmth and authority of sensuality never heard."
Springers adds that this was important at a time when the UK, in the 1970s, "was going through the political climate that it did" – referring to immigration, the rise of the far right and the counter movement against racism, then to Thatcherism.
From Pauline Black, lead singer of the 2 Tone group The Selector, to Sade, Seal and Tricky, the exhibition also shows the creativity of black music beyond London, found in cities such as Coventry and Bristol.
Springer gave trip hop, originating in Bristol with bands such as Massive Attack, as an example.
"Soundsystem culture from Jamaica and reggae was coming in again in these towns, and then that's smoothed out for trip hop. It still has the ingredients of turn-tablism, of singing like lovers rock, but there's a political undertone, but there's also an emotional interrogation."
Springer added that trip hop retells a complex, rich but often cruel history too, linked to colonial exploitation and the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, in which the port of Bristol played a key role, which includes police brutality and inequality in the media.
Looking forward
If the 1950s, 60s and 70s saw black British music defined by musicians with strong links to the British West Indies and Guyana, from the 1980s African voices increasingly made themselves heard – as seen in act four of the exhibition.
Neneh Cherry, Sade, Keziah Jones, Skepta and Stormzy – two rappers who have brought British hip hop to new prominence in the past decade – all have links to West Africa, from Sierra Leone to Ghana and Nigeria.
Festivals such as the world music-focused WOMAD, founded in 1982, also contributed to popularising African music in the UK.
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In more recent years, a long list of African artists, such as Wizkid, from Lagos, have collaborated with other black British musicians like Arlo Parks and Greentea Peng.
"We're thus also looking at how art was reconfigured by British artists responding to imported music," concludes Springer.
"The Music is Black: A British Story" is at the V&A East in London, until 3 January 2027.
