Filmmaker Don Letts manned a culture clash text David Katz
world and has recently launched a weekly program on 6 Music, one of the BBC’s digital radio stations. Considering that Letts has humble origins, being a first- generation Black Briton of Jamaican parentage who received little formal education, his achievements are extraordinary. In person, he is amiable and chatty, with obviously a lot to say about everything, and in these times of all-pervasive conservatism, Letts’s progressive openness, genuine conviction, and determination to keep on fighting make his presence very refreshing indeed. What follows are Don’s thoughts about the unorthodox path his life has taken and the current state of play of our contemporary reality. Tell us a bit about your family background. My parents are from St. Elizabeth, were part of the whole so-called Windrush generation, who came over here to ostensibly rebuild the country after the Second World War and were given all the jobs whitey didn’t want to do. After moving around, they eventually settled in Brixton. And the way a lot of immigrants kept their spirits up in those days was through church and through music, so my dad had a sound system called Duke Letts’s Supersonic Sounds that would play at austere affairs where they had a Bible under their arm, rather than a bag of herb. Did he have a sound system in Jamaica? No, but funny enough, in Jamaica, he showed films at church on Sundays, outdoors, so it’s definitely in my DNA. He was a
A Renaissance man of the creative arts, Don Letts is best known as director of Dancehall Queen , shot entirely in Jamaica with an all- Jamaican cast, yet the multifaceted individual has channelled his vision into various realms—an involvement with challenging music that is difficult to pigeonhole being the overriding constant. Letts codirected One Love , the forbidden romance movie starring Kymani Marley, has made hundreds of music videos for the likes of Bob Marley, the Clash, and Boogie Down Productions, and has crafted a series of compelling documentaries of musical innovators such as Lee “Scratch” Perry, George Clinton, and Gil Scott-Heron. But even before he picked up a movie camera, Letts’s impact had already been felt in other creative realms; after all, he introduced punks to reggae as DJ at seminal London venue the Roxy, and, shortly thereafter, began documenting punk on celluloid while also filming expatriate reggae stars. When the punk scene lost direction by the end of the decade, Letts started making music videos and, as part of the Clash’s entourage during their residence in Manhattan, was present during the explosion of New York hip-hop, where he became friendly with its pioneers. He subsequently wound up in Big Audio Dynamite, led by close friend and founding Clash member Mick Jones, and has concentrated on film since the demise of BAD in the early 1990s. Letts’s most recent work, screened on BBC television, explored the impact of Black music on the popular culture of the U.K., something also expounded on at length in his autobiography, Culture Clash , recently published by SAF. He has also continued DJing all over the
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Big Audio Dynamite video shoot. Photo courtesy of UrbanImage.tv/Adrian Boot.
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