Busking reggae sax player triggers Brixton tube station epiphany

Approaching Brixton tube station early on a cold, dark November evening, the sublime rhythms and
haunting saxophone melody of some early Jamaican reggae warmed the air. You could even see people's walking pace change to get into step with the beats coming out of a small portable speaker-amp.

The sax melody was provided by one of the many talented buskers this location is famous for - and in this case I was almost certain I knew who she was. A tall, slender young woman of Japanese appearance, in a beautiful full-length striped and tiered silk dress, matching silk scarf, her jet-black hair pulled back tight in a bun, and secured with a huge crimson flower on the right side of her head, swaying to the music, playing what looks like an old, much-loved alto sax, the case open on the floor in front of her feet.

If you like ska or reggae and live in London you will almost definitely recognise this striking young woman - she's unmistakably the sax player who joined The Trojans onstage at Gaz Mayall's set at the Notting Hill Carnival, who's a key member of the wonderful south London ska band, The Top Cats, and a truly big name in the international reggae/ska world.

And here she is - I was 98 per cent certain it was her, that is Megumi Mesaku - busking outside Brixton tube station on a cold November evening.

She's already something of a legend. She's played sax with many of the great names of Jamaican music, and many of the greats of jazz, soul and funk too. They include Max Romeo, Maceo Parker, Rico Rodriguez, Dennis Alcapone, Laurel Aitken, and numerous other big names from the ska and reggae world, young and old.

So is this really Megumi, busking? I am 99 per cent sure it is. Look at her. One hundred percent certain. But I was too shy and stupid to ask.

It's still rush hour at 7.30pm around here, crowds surge out of the station as each new train arrives, and her music always catches a few of the people as they leave, detaining them, some just stand and smile and nod, some  are swaying, but only one person is really dancing. A young black woman with shining eyes, she's already been taken over by this gorgeously fluid music and is using the whole pavement outside the station as her dancefloor, deftly avoiding the commuters as they swarm around her.

The sax player - yes, it has to be Megumi, also known as "MissMegoo" - has that characteristic
modesty, always smiling in response to any applause, always acknowledging any donation, there, alone with her mini-sound-system, filling the air with promises of warmth and love and a better future.

She's playing lots of reggae and ska classics, but also some old soul and R & B numbers. At one point I could've sworn she even played some Glenn Miller.

So that was it - the epiphany thing, it was the sort of very much wanted antidote to weeks and months of gloom and fear and anger, from Brexit through to Trump. A tonic, a reminder of what we could be.

A realisation how grateful we should all be to all the people who come here from other continents and countries.

Here was a Japanese woman playing her interpretations of the music of the Jamaican ghetto outside a tube station in one of the most racially-mixed areas of London. All happening, just like that, perfectly normal.

Anyway, if that was you, Miss Megumi, thanks for providing some light in the gloom.  You are surely one of this city's many musical treasures.

The best of times, and the best of times: Notting Hill Carnival 2015

Noon Sunday 29 August, some lone skanking on Ledbury Road before the crowds build. Although things got rammed later, it was still one of the least-uncomfortably-packed Carnivals  in decades, or so it seemed.

Here's a surprise - an unremittingly and relentlessly cheerful post from this blogger. Obviously and inevitably, it's about the Notting Hill Carnival - the 49th edition of which ended this evening around 9pm (well, that was when I left).

Although the weather ranged from grim to vile, this was still one of the most enjoyable carnivals I can remember. Maybe this was partly because the numbers were reduced by the bad weather. It becomes difficult to enjoy anything when it seems the air is being squeezed out of your lungs by the bodies of fellow revellers.

But the great thing about Carnival 2015 was a shift back to classic roots music and plenty of great live performance. Whether or not it was "Europe's biggest street party" (and oh how heartily sick we all are of hearing this particular cliché being about the only thing mainstream media have to say about the event for the past 20 years, apart from the arrest figures) is beside the point. The thing for Carnival lovers is that this is the one chance in a year to really forget troubles, to find complete release in music and dance on the streets of this  totally bonkers city, where every square foot is now up for sale for thousands of dollars. This event is the biggest and most reliable expressions of sanity in a mad city, and that's the truth of it.

Lovers of old school Jamaican roots reggae and dub are still lamenting the loss of Jah Observer's sound system on Ledbury Road. This year though, the replacement - Solution Sound System - was making a very good bash at filling that chasm-sized gap.

There was another rootsy system further up the street, just before you got to Channel One, which has  almost become a victim of its own success. Even with the smaller crowds overall this year, the Leamington Villas system was uncomfortably rammed for most of the two days. Mind you, Rampage was always like that - that, it seems, is how the youth like it.

It was good to see Gladdy Wax still going strong on Portobello, as well as the Afro-Cuban system a little further up. And the knee-deep roots dub scholar's choice, Abu Ashanti-I, up at the northern tip of the carnival was bringing great joy to assorted old rastafarians, Euro-dreads with stringy locks,  W11 trustafarians and old buffers and puffers (self included) alike.

A real highlight this year was a package of lovely surprises on the balcony stage of the always astonishing Gaz's Rockin Blues on Talbot Road.

Drummers on the world music stage, Powis Square Gardens

I've always loved Gaz's set-up with its various themes, desert isles with bits of shipwrecks or crashed air places, palm fringed rumshacks, blues party shabeens, pirate lairs etc etc….and always great rhythmy- bluesy-bluebeaty-rare-groovy-afro-celtic-skatalite sounds, everything thrown into the mix.

This year there were real treats here which more than compensated for the crowds of W11 party kids who tend to congregate here with their cocktails and their pushed-up designer sunglasses. First time I went past a band was stirring up the crowd with a convincing rendition of Legalise It. Turned out the little singer, all in black, was Peter Tosh's nephew.

Such a brilliant band, the Trojans. A bit later, passing again, it's your actual Max Romeo donning his iron shirt and chasing the devil out of town. All this to that  little bit of street - your own personal reggae heritage concert, if you happen to be living in one of the flats opposite.

The crowds here were daunting at times, but very close by, Powis Square Gardens had its own mini-festival of world music with loads of space to sit or dance, always the oasis.

Legalise It! A junior member of the Tosh family with the
Trojans at Gaz's Rocking Blues

It was not far from here, early on day one, there were suddenly people running with iPhones held high:  Jeremy Corbyn was passing through on some sort of official walkabout with Carnival elders. He looked like he'd just popped out of an intense political meeting, tired and drawn.


Jouvert, pigment and chocolate

The revellers and masqueraders who had got up early enough to take part in the opening J'ouvert ceremony are an increasingly conspicuous element of day one, which is usually referred to as Children's Day.

It is  the day when kids strut their stuff behind the floats, but it's also when adults throw powered pigment at each other, along with a bit of liquid chocolate if you're lucky. Hence the sight of people covered head to toe in dye, or sticky with chocolate, or both. I thought I'd missed them this year, until I came across a whole tribe of masqueraders, covered in colour.

Just look at this guy…

…and then see what happens when he meets some friends….I hope they are still friends….

 …and here, waiting a few yards on, are Mr Green and Mr Yellow, just waiting to coat you…..

and then, if you think you have escaped, hiding somewhere there must be Mr Blue….

 End of Carnival

At the end of the second day, another revelation and new favourite - the Fun Bunch sound system. So, it's what sort of music? House you say?


No. Well yeah, but for the last hour of this year's carnival they were blasting out some great old school hip-hop and rap, and really got the crowd three or four feet off the ground and rising.

It was a sweet crowd, and many sweet things happened. Right at the end, the sweetest thing  - a guy in the ground floor flat right behind the system, whose weekend must have been very noisy indeed, was dancing happily on his own behind the window. Suddenly everyone was pointing at him and cheering. He responded by dancing more vigorously,  and the crowd went wild, whistles, horns, the lot, and he seemed to love it. A beautiful little ending to that part of the day for many of us.

Happy dancing resident of Talbot Road, last minutes of Carnival 2015
at Fun Bunch sound system

Except, it's not the end. Yeah, they cut-off sound system power at 7pm, but someone always manages to squeeze in one more track. And then, all those floats nose-to-tailing right the way up Chepstow Road have to get back to Ladbroke Grove, and these days they are as loud as any sound system, with their own power!

They inch forward, the music cranks up again, their masqueraders (who never stop moving their feet) step up and up, jumping up, spinning, with  their acquired followers, like pilot fish on a whale,  hanging on to their tails.

So, up to 9pm and later, there's a queue of massive lorries with scarily high-tech sound systems, blasting out hard music almost like a weapon of dance, the DJs swinging around on the poles and railings on the top deck, shouting out instructions to their crews and greetings to the crowd, and another great wave of exhausted, beautiful dancers, dancing farewell to summer, dancing like there'll never be another summer, just wanting to keep it all going another minute, another song. It's almost painfully beautiful. Carnival at its best, after dark on Westbourne Grove as the floats stack up and the cops begin to move in. It's never the last dance!

On the 452 bus home, I sat  behind two young women who had both been at the Carnival. The first, a Hungarian, had enjoyed it but had also been disappointed by how managed it all was, how corporate. She thought there would be more spontaneous performance, more individual, amateur contribution.

The second, an American, also had little good to say about the event: she had been shocked by how much violence she had witnessed, fights around sound systems, boys kicking each other and throwing drinks around, cops plunging in to make arrests.

I felt moved to intervene. But I did not. I just sat there, thinking, yes, there's  too much corporate involvement now, the floats and the song systems are all sponsored, licensed, and yet - there is still room for a bit of private enterprise, whether the young couple with a soul sound system outside their flat in Ledbury Road or all this epeople flogging tins of drink from their front room windows. Or letting out their loos at a pound a pee.

No, no  intervention. The odd thing about this London Carnival is that it is so easy to understand why it is the best possible thing for some people and the worst possible thing for others.

Close friends, impassioned lovers, can so easily be torn asunder by their views on this event. It makes no sense really - what could there be to like about wandering around a former slum quarter of west London, now largely occupied by a particularly ostentatious breed of the super-rich, in filthy weather, with head-splitting noise emanating from huge sound systems, static and mobile, every few yards? Being pushed and shoved and getting into almost insanely dangerous crowd conditions? Tripping over bottles and splashing though pools of urine, vomit and worse?

And all of this in driving rain?

And not being able to escape quickly because the cops shout the road, and the tube's closed?

I'm not just a lover of Carnival, I am an addict. I have to get my fix of it. Once a year, two full days. Back against a bass stack in Ledbury Road, my vital organs being bounced out of their normal locations by absurdly heavy baselines.

Knowing how stupid I look trying to dance, when some of the most beautiful dancers in the country are dancing nearby, not caring, and even getting some positive feedback. The thing here is that you do have to dance: the resistance, so strong, so understandable, has to be jettisoned. In my case it can take a whole day of carnival, three or four tins of Red Stripe, a great deal of passive smoking to get to that point where I can't help it, I have to dance.

Once that happens, you will be on the open road to becoming a carnival lover.

Following the floats - it was all steel pan the old days, Trinidadian, calypsonian, St Kitts and Nevis, quaint and sort of Commonwealth. Then came soca and it all changed, Hot Hot Hot, the real hard sounds of Caribbean Carnival blast the soot off the wall of the crumbling stucco terraces of Ladbroke Grove and Chepstow Road,  this music much dirtier than grime, beautiful rough filthy dirty music that cleanses the soul.

I bore my daughter and her friends to death with talk of how Carnival was in the 70s - how Aswad used to play here and Burning Spear played there, and that's where I saw Neneh Cherry in her Rip, Rig and Panic days.  I hope they'll bore their kids to death with tales of Carnival from the 2010s….how they just wouldn't believe how crazy it used to be.  And I hope their kids say back to them, "Well, it's just as crazy now, just a lot bigger and louder, but just as crazy….if only you knew".

Please god.

Have to report that not even the Notting Hill Carnival can claim to be a Jeremy-free zone. It was nice to see him but wish he looked happier.

Can't get enough...of that Brockwell Park reggae stuff

"Lucifer! Son of the morning, I'm gonna chase you out of eart!" 

Thank God for south London, for Lambeth, Brixton, and Brockwell Park. Thank Jamaica for the music that burned with a soul-healing heat on the second day of the Lambeth Country Show.

I would never have expected this - but these two days of music amount to the best I'ver experienced, the most joyous, since the early 1980s. Was it my age, was it the sunshine, the beautiful crowd?

Was it the great attitude of nearly all the performers, who seemed determined to give their very best to this free event, when they could so easily have cranked out the old numbers by numbers and gone  home for a shower ?

Something about Brockwell Park this weekend caused both young and veteran musicians to really extend themselves, to give their best, or so it seemed.

Arriving in the park around 2.45 this afternoon, there was the powerful magnetic tug of high-precision reggae rhthyms which surged up the hill and seemed to fill the entire Brockwell/Herne Hill valley like a lake of sound. As people approached, they walked faster and more and more in time with the rhythms, all the more eager to reach this already packed natural arena.

At first I thought it must be a record, then saw the main stage down the hill with a band on it, a tiny figure with a distinctly Marleyan look about him  singing songs of justice and struggle and so on ....I get closer, the little guy is really singing from his heart, he has an acoustic guitar but also a brilliantly sharp band who give just enough bass and drum to raise the thing, to raise the crowd.

I realise it's this  new star, name of Natty,  with his band the Rebelship. His songs are sharp and full of the righteous anger that marked the best of this music from the early 1970s - righteous anger, youthful idealism, that plaintive voice, again with a little of Marley's grain in it, but fast, the rap inflections just adding bite. Apparently he's born in the USA yet he sounds like a Jamaican Londoner. Check out his music, there's loads of great stuff on YouTube etc.

He's well loved and realises it and is all smiles after a while. He goes down a storm, and he's generous too, bigging up the old guys who will follow him as he leaves the stage.

It's a great taste of what's to come, this fresh  take on old old roots, fresh and new minted, yet with echoes of deep roots decades and the centuries of suffering that preceded them.

On comes a local mixed-race reggae band, The Soothsayers, they are good but are they good enough for this place? Natty's a very hard one to follow, but this band has a trump card to play - they bring on the veteran singer, Cornel Campbell, and things suddenly catch fire. There's a whole segment of the audience - chiefly, I'd say early-middle-aged Brixton mums, who seem to know every word of his back catalogue.

Each time he starts a song, he gets about four bars in and then  cries , "pull  it back", and it grinds to a halt. Then he starts again to a new surge of cheers. Is this him telling the band they're getting things a bit wrong or what? No-one seems to mind, and there's just so much good feeling around, and some to spare - it surely need to be bottled for future use.

This Cornel, in his dark suit and shades, his 1978-look dreadlocks, still jet black, he sings high and clear like a young man, his moves are supple, and yet he must be not too far off 70 maybe? Or at least mid-60s.

The sun is getting hotter, the crowd is still building, and Brockwell Park is beginning to look like a raggae sunsplash site from back in the 80s. What helps is the clarity of the sound in this still, warm air - it'sa very good sound system.

The next act up is the "special guest" Mikey General, backed by the Charmax band. He bounces onto stage in a big fawn corduroy suit and black shirt and big black dreads and you think, "hang on, what?"....but he's already many steps ahead and delivers a blistering short set, enjoying every second of it and working the crowd with great expertise.

You begin to wonder if poor old Max Romeo, the headliner, is going to be able to carry this crowd, so expertly built up by each  act, and even the failings of the sound system (a couple of records seem to have had a few too many plays) are happily tolerated .

And then, here he is, in a mustard yellow, loose-fitting ensemble,  dreadlocks now ash-grey but still full and extending down to knee-level, and god he is moving so well, and his voice is still  fluid as he rushes in with War in a Babylon.

The man has real mastery of this crowd, he has a powerful dignity about him, a deep presence, and he seems to have no doubt how much we love him. He expects us to know the lyrics of each song even before he's two bars in, and amazing;ly, a substantial  proportion of the audience does know them, but not well enough perhaps...

( "I'm gonna put on a iron shirt, and chase the devil out of earth....Brixton, you cannot be serious, I cannot hear you. Again: "I'm gonna put on an iron shirt, and kick satan out of the eart....send him to outa space, to find another race....!)

Near the end  he gives his little speeech on the problerm of poverty - where's the serum, to eradicate it? - and then he slink offstage, and then he's come back, and does a blistering, initially unaccompanied Redemption Song. Tears well up above impossibly wide smiles. Bliss, emotions cranked right up past maximum.

Astounding. Two short afternoons of beautiful music in beautiful weather in a beautiful location, and I am ready to fly the flag for Brixton,  for South London, for reggae music, and - OK this is a joke, Lambeth Council -  and everything that goes with it, just like it's still  1981.

And as for LoveBox, etc, Victoria Park and Hyde Park and what have you? North of river?

Whaaat?

One love!