BBC4's Reggae Britannia series continues tonight with another raft of excellent programmes. Following last week's Reggae Britannia documentary, tonight sees Toots and the Maytals' Reggae Got Soul film, an archival round-up of Reggae at the BBC, Toots live from Glastonbury and an Arena film on Bob Marley.
This whole series – with its attendant concerts and web content – has been a long overdue tribute to Britain's reggae scene. While there's been some online grizzling about a few glaring omissions from the documentary's roll call (David Rodigan, Misty In Roots, Black Slate etc) one would have to assume that these people were unavailable, rather than deliberately left on the cutting-room floor in favour of the distinctly un-dread Boy George and Stewart Copeland.
Condensing any 50-year-old scene down into an hour – particularly one as nuanced and fragmented as British reggae – is always going to lead to a degree of oversimplification. Overall, the series has been a good corrective to British reggae's frequent dismissal by casual observers as having been either a weak imitation of the original source material, or unimaginative mainstream fodder.
As with all the Britannia series (Pop, Synth, Metal and Festivals), Reggae Britannia attempted to place the music in the context of the society around it. While there was plenty of enjoyment to be had in the vintage clips of Dave and Ansell Collins on British television, Prince Buster arriving at Heathrow airport and black and white archive of Sir Coxsone's sound system, the real punch came from juxtaposition of the music with incidental shots of the contemporaneous wider world: black boys walking through grubby English markets, juvenile suedeheads eyeballing each other at youth clubs, tracking shots of council estates, record shops, NF graffiti and empty London streets at dawn. The combination of music and social documentary is far more revealing of the time than the resolutely upbeat, false memory that usually makes up retrospective talking heads shows. It's closest antecedent is the BBC's much overlooked Rock 'n' Roll Years (1985-1994) which also worked from the principle that pop music and the real world were inseparable and that the negative was as historically important as the positive.
Reggae Britannia at least provides an entry point to the complicated interplay between the old white establishment and the newer arrivals, the West Indies and the UK, reggae and the other genres around it which all conspired to produce some brilliant, defiantly British records: Pablo Gad's admonishing Hard Times; Steel Pulse's Handsworth Revolution album; LKJ's taut, poetic recordings; Smiley Culture's Cockney Translation; Ackie's recently reissued proto-dancehall Call Me Rambo; Aswad's early recordings; Rhoda Dakar's The Boiler. The documentary and all of these records are proof that – as has happened time and again in Britain – when cultures rub up against each other, usually imperfectly and often awkwardly, most people tend to make the best of it and produce something extremely interesting.
Of course, just like Reggae Britannia, we've only scratched the surface here. So what British reggae gems have we missed?
