Life Between Islands

Images of musicking and dancing feature heavily in the exhibition 'Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art' at Tate Britain.

Paul Dash - 'Dance at Reading Town Hall' (1965). Dash played piano in a band, the Carib Six - this is a view from the stage.

'As unofficial 'color bars' restricted access to public social spaces, homes became places of sanctuary. The front room, full of reminders of the Caribbean, became a site for intergenerational connection and somewhere to socialise with family and friends. Sound systems provided the soundtrack to the period. DJs, engineers and MCs set up in homes, on the streets and in community centres. They offered a way to connect with culture coming out of the Caribbean, especially Jamaica. For young Black Britons, music created opportunities for collectivity and celebration but also a means to address hostility and discrimination with a spirit of defiance. Dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson named them the 'Rebel Generation' (exhibition notice)

Tam Joseph - 'The Spirit of Carnival' (1982)

Denzil Forrester - 'Jah Shaka' (1983)

from Liz Johnson Artur, 'Lord of the Decks' featuring photos from the early UK grime scene.

'The various musical styles created in widely defined Black Atlantic history have proved so influential that we are obliged to consider the consistency with which they have summoned the possibility of better worlds, directing precious images of an alternative order against the existing miseries, raciological terrors and routine wrongs of capitalist exploitation, racial immiseration and colonial injustice. Those gestures of dissent and opposition were voiced in distinctive keys and modes. They carried the cruel imprint of slavery and were influenced by the burden of its negation.

However, that is not the most important observation we can make about them. The transcoding and transcendence of suffering made productive, becoming useful, but never, in spite of what Bob Marley had said, seeking redemption, directs our attention towards more elusive possibilities. Energised by political and social movements, those musical formations were anticipatory. They helped to construct and enact a 'not-yet' and enchanted it so that it could be both pleasing and seductive. It could be intoxicating and it could be enhanced the ingestion of intoxicants. 

Here we encounter the possibility that, under optimal conditions, singers, dancers and audiences, DJs and selectors might be able to collaborate so that they could glimpse the edge of their world, grasp the fragility of the order they inhabited and apprehend the fleeting but fundamental possibility of Babylon's overthrow'

(from Paul Gilroy, 'Colour Bars and Bass Cultures, Dub Aesthetics and Cockney Translations: Music in the Creole History of Black Life in Britain' in 'Life Between Islands' (Tate 2021)

The exhibition closes on 3 April 2022