5. Tapper ZukieM.P.L.A.
I really love the title track, and I really love ‘Pick Up The Rockers’. We were all listening to a lot of this heavy roots reggae back then, and this is one of the ones that I just really like. It’s a brilliant record. It was quite rebellious because of how the whole Rasta thing was cracked down on in Jamaica. It was in the attitude and the sonics and the feel of that bass – I think that’s a universal language. And they had a revolutionary vibe to the iconography, not just the Haile Selassie stuff, but you know – Tapper Zukie was going on about the M.P.L.A., and you’ve also got Johnny Rotten going ‘Is this the M.P.L.A.’ [on ‘Anarchy In The UK’]. There was a kinship, I think people really felt that. Obviously Jamaican music has played quite an important part in British youth culture since the mods and the skinheads in the mid-1960s. And I think it’s important to remember that as punk and everything like that was happening, white British kids were also listening to the stuff that their Black mates were listening to, picking up on reggae and ska, and that it continued that interest and love for Jamaican music.
I think a lot of it is also to do with Don Letts being the DJ at the Roxy, because there simply weren’t that many punk records to play when he started, so he would start putting records on from his own collection that people really loved. Because of bands like The Clash there was quite a West London focus, and when the Notting Hill Carnival in 1976 ended with the police starting a riot, it was quite totemic. I didn’t go in 1976, but I went the next year on the back of a friend’s motorbike which he parked somewhere on Harrow Road. We were walking along and they were playing a dub version of the Alton Ellis cover of that Paul Anka song ‘Diana’. The whole of the road was just shaking.
