Fundi - None Shall Escape: Radical perspectives In The Caribbean

It was one of those moments in your life when suddenly you hear something and it changes everything. Luckily in my life I’ve been near to where things have been kicking off – early Cockney Rebel gigs, the beginning of punk, seeing a lot of the really good dub reggae artists, a lot of good funk people, the post-punk thing with Joy Division, the industrial thing and then when techno kicked off and now with all this dubstep stuff happening. Same goes for political things. And with all of it, certain things conjure up a time.

When I was kid I had this guru who ran a bookshop called Political Bookshops and on the way home from school we’d go to the junk shops and look at the records and in the bookshops we’d look at these weird, political theory things. There was this book called Vodka Cola, which destroyed the whole myth of the Cold War, and those things really blew my mind.

I picked up this record from Compendium Books and [a lot of spoken word records] and it blew my mind in the same way that music does. I thought, “Fucking hell! There are situationists in the Caribbean!” Finding out there are working class people in the Caribbean who are into situationism is just mental to me. Obviously, I’d been buying loads and loads of reggae and people who I really like such as Michael Smith and people that we’d worked with like Linton Kwesi Johnson so I’m drawn to that spoken word stuff as well. My stuff is kind of in that tradition.

This is just so out there and weird and it adds a new slant on situationism. For a certain period of my life I’d just leave this out when people came round. I dined out on it for a while! I didn’t have a lot of time to check up on it but there was this Jamaican guy called Fundi and they were talking about collective revolt in Jamaica and he gave this weird speech in patois and it hit me more than hearing some middle class French guy talking about it.