Review: Beyond The Bassline Tracks Black Music In Britain At 140bpm

The London of the 1950s often conjures up a dour, ration-blighted place where the highlight of your week might be avoiding a puddle or having a particularly good mug of Bovril. If you knew where to go though, this couldn't be further from the truth.

The midcentury metropolis shook with the melodious pan tickling of the Russ Henderson Steel Band in Carnaby Street, while Frank Bowling flicked luminous streaks of paint on the canvas as he jived to calypso. Yes, the Windrushers were in town, but so too were Nigerian Highlife bands (a fledgling Fela Kuti was doing the rounds) and South Africans like jazzer Dorothy Masuka. In a bitter letter to Scotland Yard, one Wardour Street nimby squinnied about Soho's Shim Sham Club as a "den of vice and iniquity," serried with lesbians, people of all colours and deafening music. We wish we were there.

Thanks to centuries of forced migration, Black musicians were in Britain aeons before the post-war era. At the beginning of Beyond the Bassline, a colourful cameo on a 1511 court scroll tells us the earliest recorded musician of African descent in this country was John Blanke; he played trumpet in the court of Henry VIII (though possibly not with the liberality of some of his descendents). Then of course, there was Croydon's Samuel Coleridge-Taylor — a rock star of the late 19th/early 20th century, as evidenced in this show by a then-newfangled cylinder gramophone. You can just picture his fans cranking up his big hit Song of Hiawatha while the neighbours banged on the walls.

Fisk Jubilee Singers, Southern Syncopated Orchestra, Winifred Atwell (the first Black artist to score a UK number one), Cleo Laine — name after name here is worthy of their own exhibition. But realising it needs to get on with packing half a millennium into a mid-sized exhibition, Beyond the Bassline quickly accelerates away from scrolls and sheet music, screeching into a riot of colour featuring a Leeds Carnival peacock outfit, and the restored Mighty Ruler sound system — a source of endless joy in dancehalls and West Indian living rooms in the 1960s — which blinks away furiously in the corner like some demented sci-fi Christmas tree.

And still, there is no time to get bogged down: whisked from 1970s/80s activism (Steel Pulse's KKK masks are powerfully jarring; and even Eddie Grant's jaunty Electric Avenue is a call to arms) through roots reggae, jungle and into the incipient days of grime (by which time kids had binned sound systems in favour of PlayStation's Music 2000 programme) this is a high-speed crash course in Black British music that moves at 140 beats per minute — ending all-too-soon with a breathtaking installation from Tayo Rapoport and Rohan Ayinde.

Yet on the train home you'll be frantically punching in names of artists and record labels into your Spotify. And so this journey continues long after you leave the British Library.

Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music, British Library, 26 April–26 August 2024

Featured image: © Terna Jogo