Black History Month: From punk to funk – how my musical world got bigger and better

I grew up in the 80s. Big clothes. Big hair. Big music. At first it was synths – Gary Numan, Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys – then guitars. LOTS of punk and indie guitars: The Smiths, The Wedding Present, The House of Love. And New Order, who somehow did both. Geniuses.

I didn’t do football or sport; music was my connection to the world, still is. Music was tribal, and it was how I defined myself when I didn’t have a team to connect me to my peers. Through the 80s and early 90s I was variously a Futurist, New Romantic, Goth, Shoegazer and Baggy (God, that was ill-advised…). But if it was four skinny blokes with floppy hair, cardigans, black jeans and guitars, I probably liked them and probably saw them live.

Then came Britpop: some great music, but also flag-waving, beeriness, sexism and a scene that was very, very white. At first, I didn’t really question it. I thought I was politically aware: I marched against apartheid, wrote letters for Amnesty, boycotted companies trading in South Africa and saw Nelson Mandela speak in 1990. But eventually I looked at the music that defined me and realised it was overwhelmingly male and pale.

There were two big exceptions. Prince entered my life through my schoolfriend Martyn: I bought New Order albums; he bought Prince, and we swapped. Two innocent second-generation Irish Catholic teenagers, blushing as the small purple one sang rather obscene lyrics while our parents brought us tea (and thankfully didn’t notice). Later though, Prince tackled inequality, poverty, drugs and gang violence with songs like Sign O’ The Times, while refusing to be confined by musical categories or racial stereotypes and fighting for artistic freedom.

Then there were The Specials. They had the tunes, a mixed heritage identity and the politics. They made anti-racism matter to a working-class 12-year-old in Dartford who mostly knew white Irish and Italian Catholics and pretty much no one else. Through songs such as Racist Friend (with the refrain "If you have a racist friend, now is the time for your friendship to end."), and simply through Black and white musicians standing together during a period of deep racial tension, they showed why racism had to be challenged. Ghost Town captured the frustrations affecting working-class communities of all backgrounds. And they had TUNES!

Still, when I examined my CD collection in the late 90s, I didn’t like what I saw. I loved bands inspired by Black music: The Rolling Stones worshipped the blues; The Beatles drew on Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Motown. But I owned the records of the white bands, not the Black artists who had shaped them. Were those bands dedicated students, or were they appropriating another culture’s music? And was I any better?

I decided to do something about it. This was the 90s: no streaming, no instant access. If you wanted to hear something, you bought it, borrowed it or taped it. Northern Soul compilations were an affordable starting point, followed by Motown, Stevie Wonder and Nina Simone. Ska compilations led me back to the music that inspired The Specials and Madness; Trojan Records became a treasure trove to blast out while clearing a Saturday-morning hangover.

Then I went deeper: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bo Diddley, Funkadelic and George Clinton. I can take or leave jazz – OK, largely leave it – but funk is fabulous. Hip-hop such as Public Enemy and NWA didn’t really click, although Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five did. Trip-hop became a staple in our house, and the latest Tricky album is as good as anything he has released in 30 years.

Soul was a revelation: James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Mavis Staples, Al Green. I once crawled through mud to squeeze under the side of a marquee at a festival and into a rammed James Brown show. I was filthy, but it was worth it. He was amazing, although his wig was ridiculous. He did indeed get on up like a sex machine; after the mud, a washing machine would have been handier.

Don’t get me wrong: the right skinny-bloke guitar band can still make me weak at the knees (I’m currently obsessed by Radio Free Alice). But I’m still questioning my choices. Stephanie Phillips of the Black feminist punk band Big Joanie has published We Were There, reclaiming Black artists too often overlooked in alternative music. The book has sent me down a rabbit hole listening to A.R. Kane: a hypnotic mix of dream-pop, dub, noise and shoegaze that I somehow missed in the 80s.

A.R. Kane were there, but not among the music we were told we had to love to be “cool”. Phillips argues that Black artists were routinely written out of alternative music’s history. Their sound helped shape dream-pop and shoegaze but did not fit assumptions about who made alternative rock. Without the internet, we depended on what the music press allowed us to find. In my own tiny way, I’m correcting that now.

As we celebrate Black History Month, I’m spinning Prince, Mavis and Pop Staples, Toots & The Maytals, Charles Bradley and Sharon Jones, alongside the 80s and 90s recordings of A.R. Kane. I’m grateful to all of them for making my world a little bigger, a little brasher and a lot less narrow.

JO’B

Five of my favourite songs by Black artists:

1. 100 Days, 100 Nights – Sharon Stone & The Dap-Kings

2. Black Steel – Tricky

3. Sign O’ The Times – Prince

4. Pressure Drop – Toots & The Maytals

5. A Minute To Rest And A Second To Pray – Solomon Burke

Drop yours in the comments!