and-roll thing. Then there’s me, who can’t play an instrument, and I was doing a lot of the sampling and the dialogue, so I did actually cowrite a lot of the songs. We had singing and rapping on the record, so all the elements of Big Audio Dynamite are all the things that are really capturing people’s imaginations now. How did you end up in the group if you can’t play an instrument? Punk rock. I had keyboards with colored stickers, showing me what to play while I was onstage. Serious thing! We were the first band to have a serious hit using samples, but a lot of people don’t realize, Jamaica had records with babies crying and phones ringing that Lee Perry did, all those great things that he did with two four-tracks, bounced together. So I maintain that the creation of reggae itself is punk rock. None of them couldn’t do the Eric Clapton twiddly bits, so they made what would be a problem, i.e., not being a musical virtuoso, their asset. So that’s punk rock. At some point, you turned up in New York? I went to New York with the Clash, when they played these twenty- three nights, at Bond’s, in ’80, ’81, when the hip-hop thing was kicking off. So I’m right there with Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa when this whole thing exploded, but, again, I was coming from a totally different angle, because I knew that they got it from Jamaica; I knew about Kool Herc and all that stuff. And years ago, I went to do a project with Chris Blackwell called “Reggae Chronicles,” where I got to interview Count Machuki and King Stitt, the original Jamaican deejays. And what was mind-blowing to me was that they got their style by listening to the White jocks broadcasting out of Miami who had their little buzz phrases, and Machuki and them were trying to emulate that. So it’s quite funny that Kool Herc, a Jamaican, had taken the concept to America; there’s a constant kind of circular thing going on here. What did you focus on when BAD split? While I was in BAD, I made videos for other people and ended up acting in a couple of films. One’s called Midnight Breaks , with Toyah Willcox and Robbie Coltrane, the other was Gummed Labels , with Leslie Grantham. And when Big Audio Dynamite breaks up, I throw myself into documentaries. I like to work with people that are using the whole potential of music; it’s not just about selling records, it’s about engaging people in conversation, information, and inspiration, but the music video thing became more pop orientated. Musical Youth, for example: I make that video, it’s number one in eighteen countries, the record company says, “That’s okay, but we didn’t really like what you did. You made the kids look too rude.” And when I went to Jamaica to do a video with Musical Youth, one of the record company people came up to me on the beach and said, “Look, Don, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I don’t want too many Black people in the video.” That guy ended up getting pinned against the wall, and that was the end of Don Letts working for them. I guess it was after Big Audio Dynamite and my disillusionment with the pop industry that I threw myself into the documentary thing, made documentaries on Sun Ra, Gil Scott-Heron, George Clinton, the Clash; I made a documentary for the BBC called Planet Rock , which is about the explosion of Black music in the ’80s, and just did one called Soul Brittania , which again was about the impact of Black music on the U.K. and how Black culture has changed the identity of this
With punk, White kids are all picking up guitars, and the energy was infectious. I want to pick up something too, so I picked up a Super 8 camera, because, years before, I’d seen The Harder They Come and decided I wanted to express myself visually, but I couldn’t see how to do it until punk came along. I must pay respects to Perry Henzell, who passed away last year; he made the most inspirational film of my life, because it was entertaining, inspiring, and educational; it was a plus for me to see a film where you could do all those things. So punk rock happens, I’m inspired by The Harder They Come , pick up a movie camera, start filming punk groups. Where did you get the camera? A woman called Caroline Baker, who was running a fashion magazine at the time, gave me a camera. There were all these like- minded people who tried to help each other out; it wasn’t like you got through the door and slam it shut. The Punk Movie was the first thing I ever did; I was trying to learn my craft, so all I did was film the bands I liked, then, actually, I read in one of the music papers, “Don Letts is working on a movie.” And I’m like, “Boy, not a bad idea.” Fortunately for me, I was the only person around with a camera, and, for better or for worse, it is the only document of that period of time. It first showed at the ICA in 1978, broke all the box office records, though looking at it now is quite painful—me not knowing what I was doing, coupled with the fact that seventy percent of punk stuff was rubbish. And when I say rubbish, I mean rubbish! When the Sex Pistols broke up, you traveled to Jamaica with John Lydon. He asked me to go with him; I’m his mate, I’m Black, he figures that’s going to make his trip a little easier, but I’ve never been, the closest I’ve been was Harder They Come ! That was a mind-blowing trip. [Virgin Records’ boss Richard] Branson books a whole floor at the Sheraton, and it was almost like the jungle drums went around the island: “Rich White man on island, looking to sign up reggae artists.” Talk about exodus! Every artist came: Big Youth, I Roy, U-Roy, Gladiators, Abyssinians, [producer] Prince Tony. And another shock was how these people that had legendary status in the U.K., you go to Jamaica and you realize some of these brothers were almost on the breadline. And I remember a funny situation where some bright spark at Virgin decided, wouldn’t it be good to get Lee Perry to do reggae versions of some of the Pistols’ tunes? In the studio, Lee Perry’s gotten some musicians, and they’re there doing a reggae version of two punk tunes, “Holiday in the Sun” and “Anarchy in the U.K.” or something, and I ain’t gonna lie, they were awful. You know why? Because it was being done for all the wrong reasons. It was more about bread at the control than dread at the control. After The Punk Movie , you made music videos for a time, then started making music yourself. The bands started to get successful and get record deals, so they asked me to make their music videos, and I began to make a name for myself; today, I’ve made nearly four hundred. The next big step might have been in the early ’80s, when I joined this group with Mick Jones called Big Audio Dynamite, something I’m immensely proud of. What was interesting about that is it was the forerunner of a lot of the musical moves that are going on now, because we had Jamaican bass lines, New York beats, we had the White rock-
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Don with John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten. Photo courtesy of Don Letts.
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