From Harlesden to Zaire

The really talented observers are not like travellers or journalists reporting colourfully on the unknown (‘Anyone here been raped and speaks English?’), nor even like the real insiders, who risk taking for granted what strikes us as strange, but somewhere in between. They have to mix perception, curiosity and information. Roy Kerridge demonstrates their ambiguous gift in this misleadingly modest booklet. Like the Alexandrian poet Kavafy (in E.M. Forster’s famous phrase), he ‘stands at a slight angle to the universe’, being both outside and part of the scene on which he comments.

Though the title From Blues to Rap suggests that this scene is transatlantic, and Kerridge has made the traditional European blues buff’s pilgrimage to the American South, essentially he is writing from a very British point of view, both as someone formed in the 1950s, the first era of a musically defined British youth culture, and as a member of a family combining white and black, in a milieu that combines hedonism and salvationist religion.

His roots lie in the London of his friend and mentor, the now neglected Colin MacInnes (City of Spades, Absolute Beginners). Unlike MacInnes, whose writing was recognisably that of a visiting alien, he belongs, or half-belongs, to the territory through which he continues to guide us on his perambulations. It is the territory of multicoloured London:

Strolling by [the Mason’s Arms on the Harrow Road, near Harlesden] with the dog on a warm evening, I could hear the lilt of country-and-western music coming from the brightly lit downstairs bar full of Irishmen. Through the window of the upstairs bar I could both see and hear a black bluesman play an electric guitar with fervent intensity.

Kerridge’s blues is the American black music seen and heard via the Harlesden experience married to the impassioned heritage of a few dozen British blues zealots, a socially conscious minority even among the modest community of jazz-lovers, who made the blues, via the folk movement and trad jazz, an integral element in British pop music.