Like other Caribbean carnivals around the world, the street parade and costumed bands are a huge element of Notting Hill Carnival. But there is one element of the Notting Hill Carnival that is distinctly made in London, the sound systems. Josh Surtees explores this phenomenon and speaks to some stalwarts of the London sound system scene.
From his home in Grenada, Fitzgerald Gelly is taking the T&T Guardian on a trip down memory lane. It’s three days before Spice Mas but although the 72-year-old Jamaican says he will “take a walk down there” to see the Carnival in St George’s, his mind is firmly focused on another Carnival halfway across the world in the less exotic surroundings of Notting Hill in West London.
Gelly’s stage name is Farda Gelly and he is the founder of the legendary London sound system, Lord Gelly’s, which he began with his brother-in-law back in 1963. He was part of the second wave of the Jamaican exodus to Britain in the 1960s (the first wave having begun with the Windrush in 1948 and continued through the 1950s.)
The 1960s migration was a different thing. While those who sailed on the Windrush arrived in suits and ties and bowler hats and came seeking the “Motherland” and their Queen, the 60s arrivals were bigger, bolder and they brought with them the lifestyle and traditions of their Caribbean island. Particularly, their music—ska and reggae—and their sound system party culture.
Born in 1943 in St Andrew Parish, Gelly’s relationship to sound systems began as an 11-year-old boy near Kingston where he began following King Lattibuddier’s system in the mid-1950s: a time when the early pioneers like Sir Coxsone “Downbeat” Dodd and Duke Reid were importing American R&B records, before the Jamaican recording industry had begun.
“The sound with the deeper bass was the man who ruled the day,” says Gelly on the phone in the house he built in Grenada where he lives in semi-retirement with his Grenadian wife for six months of the year, returning to England at Carnival time.
“When a man get a sound and get deep bass they called it “downbeat.”
In 1961, Gelly moved to the UK and found that his family members and friends had brought their love of bass with them.
“The first time I heard my brother [Alfred Gelly’s] sound system in Birmingham it was the heaviest sound I’ve heard in my life. That sound system was called Dreadnought and the bass was shattering windows and I said, ‘you know something, I'm going to build my own sound.’ So I started building little boxes and ting. We got a German-made valve amp radiogram and added 15-inch speakers and we played ska records [released on the Blue Beat label] and R&B like Fats Domino.”
Gelly’s son, Andrew, now part of the extended crew that runs the sound system at Carnival keeps the equipment in the shed at his house in Croydon, south London.
“As soon as my dad gets off the plane he’s in the shed,” says Andrew. This year Farda Gelly is scheduled to arrive on August 28 just two days before Carnival. This is the first time he has ever allowed his sons to do all the organising, Andrew says. But it transpires that the elder Gelly is still making calls from Grenada to the organisers of Notting Hill.
Growing up, Andrew remembers the whole house being full of equipment. “It was like a factory. I grew up with my dad building speakers. My mom didn’t have a living room really because bits of the sound system were all over the house.”
And his earliest memories are of the regular “blues spot” nights his father deejayed in the basement of his aunt’s house in Wandsworth, playing reggae, blues, jazz and Atlantic soul records while people drank Red Stripe and danced and sang along. These parties would often happen two nights in a row on Saturdays and Sundays
“There was no industry for West Indians to go out to discos and night clubs in my father’s day,” Andrew says. Which is why Caribbean people in England tended to start their own parties, some of which became regular club nights.
His dad drove buses for a living and would come home from a shift on a Friday night, go straight to his aunt’s house to play all-night sets then go straight back out to work in the morning.
These blues nights initially began with the radiogram, which “looked like a drinks cabinet, and you would stack up records so they would drop one after the other when each finished.” But soon Gelly began building a serious sound system to rival any at Notting Hill.
They used speakers made by Goodman and Fane and these days they use Precision Device.
“Let’s face it, the old days was nice but today it’s a cleaner sound,” says Farda Gelly.
“And back then it was all valve amps. By the time the valves warmed up the dance was over.”
Often, other sound systems would burn out their amps by playing them too loud, but Gelly had taken a course in electrical engineering and knew how to get the maximum power into his equipment without overloading the circuits.
Andrew remembers the valves glowing. And the more the valves warmed up the better it sounded. They still have some of this old equipment but Lord Gelly's current sound has evolved along with modern technology. Gelly's is still a big system but you don't need four speaker boxes anymore where one could do the same job. They also use a laptop not vinyl these days.
“You can get 40,000 tunes on a USB, back in the day it would take four men to lift our record box,” Andrew says.
He says his dad “likes to keep on top of the cutting edge sound” and is still heavily involved in the system, there on the truck at Carnival as the DJs play “bashment” (dancehall) as well as hip hop and soul.
Unlike Trinidad Carnival where the speakers are all piled high on trucks and move around the town, Notting Hill is mostly a Carnival geared around static sound systems at specific locations where hundreds or thousands of people gather round to dance for hours in the streets of a very affluent part of the capital where the houses are grand and cost a fortune. The systems and their owners are administrated by Ricky Belgrave, chairman of the British Association of Static Soundsystems (BASS.)
Belgrave knows as well as anybody what an achievement it is that Notting Hill Carnival has evolved into one of the world's biggest street parties over the past 50 years.
“Trinidad Carnival is part of a longstanding tradition and they get government backing and funding for the association, it's part of the culture there. Here we had to create everything from scratch and make it a part of British tradition,” says Belgrave.
Systems like Gelly's fund themselves, usually running at a loss, and do it purely for the love. If they can run their own bar and get a brand to sponsor it or sell the rights to their live DJ set to radio stations they have more of a chance of breaking even.
Maintenance, repairing, testing, painting and arranging things like licensing all take time and money Over the years, systems have also had to battle with police, authorities and now a new breed of residents who take issue with the noise and crowds.
“London is fighting down sound systems,” says Andrew Gelly. “Elsewhere in Europe they are more in demand than in the UK these days.”
A system that has experienced this firsthand is Channel One - a second generation Jamaican sound system run by two brothers Mikey and Kayleb and their manager Rachel Bevan.
Last year, Westminster council attempted to remove Channel One from the location their sound system has played at for 30 years. A public petition and crowd funding campaign made sure they now have a permanent licence.
Channel One is now one of the UK's most prestigious sound systems and people love them, existing since 1983, and they are well loved by Carnival attendees. The notion of moving them was sacrilege. Local residents who have followed them for years even let them plug their equipment straight into their houses, while most other crews have to bring their own generators. Sound system obsessives from all over Europe turn up early on Sunday morning just to see them set up.
“At our first Carnival we played with 20 bass speakers,” says Mikey. The most we ever played with is 28. Nowadays you play with eight or 12. The [inspectors] come round with a meter and check your decibel level. You're not meant to go over 101 but they normally tell me “Mikey, you're hovering around 110dB.”
Channel One are one of the only sound systems left that are completely analogue. Mikey has thousands of records and they still cut dub plates (one-off acetate versions) of new tunes that people send to them.
This year Notting Hill celebrates the 60th anniversary of sound systems in the UK and to commemorate that, Channel One will be playing classic, very rare, very old Jamaican ska as part of their five hour set.
“We didn't really start a system we inherited it,” says Mikey. “From young I've known boxes in my house.”
The cultural transfer from Jamaica to England is due in no small part to systems like Channel One and Gelly's. It's rarer these days that crews will battle each other in sound clashes, but Farda Gelly still remembers the old days.
His infectious laugh comes down the line with a playful boast. He recalls going on the radio and goading other systems, “If any sound out there can remember any time that you turned over Gelly's please call in because we would like to know. Because I can't recall us ever being turned over.”