Linton Kwesi Johnson

The work of Linton Kwesi Johnson has had an immediate and far-reaching effect. From the 1978 release of his first LP called ”Dread Beat & Blood”, under the name of ”Poet & The Roots”, Johnson has produced uncompromising, incantatory calls to consciousness. A born writer, much of his material is published in a British magazine called Race Today, a leading voice in the struggle for racial justice and equality.

LKJ, as hi is commonly known, was born on August 24, 1952 in the rural parish of Clarendon, Jamaica. he spent his childhood living with his grandmother, a peasant farmer, who provided LKJ with his first literary influence, the Old Testament. To this day Johnson can quote freely from the Psalms. He read them, he says, regularly to his grandmother.

Johnson left Jamaica in November 1963 to join his mother who had emigrated to England two years before. Trading the moist verdure of central Jamaica for the concrete reality of Brixton in South London, LKJ was enrolled in Tulse Hill School. Johnson was ”thirsty for knowledge” although he was quickly disillusioned with the learning process because of the racism with which he was confronted. ”I think I had one black teacher, two black teachers at different stages of my school life in England”, he says. Neither had any influence on him.

Johnson quit school at the age of 16 although, some years later, he resumed his formal education by entering Goldsmith College at the University of London. He emerged with an honours degree in sociology.

His political education also took shape during the early Seventies. He joined the Black Panther Youth League in 1970, a decision that was to have a profound effect on LKJ. the Youth League was a department of the Black Panther Movement, one of the many black power organisations that flourished in England and America during that period.

There was a strong cultural orientation which ran alongside the political activities of these groups. It was in this milieu that LKJ began writing poetry seriously. Along with other members of the Youth League, Johnson organised a writers ”workshop”, the Panthers introduced him to established political thought, disciplined political action and the growing American black power movement with its compelling literature.

In this period Linton Johnson began reciting his poetry in public. Indeed, in June 1973 the poem ‘Voices of the Living and the Dead’ was dramatised at the Keskide Center in London. The poem was performed with musical backing supplied by the band Rasta Love. It was an embryonic form of the reggae poetry style LKJ was later to pioneer.

Meanwhile his poems were published in the journal Race Today, Which was later responsible for LKJ’s first book of poems, Voices of the Living and the Dead. By 1975 his second book, Dread Beat and Blood, had been published by Bogle L’Ouverture.

Linton Johnson’s poetry sprang directly from his life and experiences growing up as a black youth in largely hostile environment, and his involvement with the struggle of the black working class movement. He soon became known as ‘Poet’ in Brixton.

From the outset his poetry was revolutionary - not only in the radical, disaffected messages it contained and its stark grass roots realism, but in the format used. With no literary precedents to fall back on, Linton was forced to innovate form and language to fit the demands of this subject matter. The result was poetry written to be read aloud, set down in appropriate form, so-called ‘patois’ or ‘creole’ - in reality the language of Jamaica, a living language spoken by millions of Brixtons yet still ‘underground’.

The main source of creative energy for Johnson’s poetry was reggae. ”Whenever I wrote I had reggae rhythm in my head,” he says. And beside the reggae rhythm which permeate his poetry his poetry, LKJ took much from the style and language of the reggae DJ lyricist, artists like Big Youth, U Roy, Dillinger and many counterparts.

LKJ, the recording artist, was an obvious step. It was taken with the album ‘Dread Beat And Blood’ for the Virgin label. By that time his reputation as a poet had been long established: in 1977 for instance he was awarded a Cecil Day Lewis Fellowship and was writer in residence for the London Borough of Lambeth.

In 1979 LKJ switched labels and recorded the classic ‘Forces Of Victory’ album for island. The themes-police oppression, racist politics, the confrontations between the authorise and black youth-made it, in many ways, a profoundly uncomfortable record, but one which could not be ignored. The album included ‘Sonny’s Lettah’, one of the most moving statements ever made in reggae music, together with the strident ‘Indipendent Intavenshan’ and ‘Fite Dem Back’, tracks that succintly encapsulate LKJ’s political stance.

”Independant Intaveshan is simply making a point that blacks aren’t helpless victims who need the white left to organise our struggles for us. That we have a history of struggle against colonialism from our countries of origin, and that struggle didn’t stop when we got on the boats and trains and came to Britain. We’ve been waging the same anti-colonial struggle here because we’ve been placed under colonial conditions. We don’t need nobody to organise us. We can and do organise ourselves adequately” says LKJ.

It was followed, a year later, by the ‘Bass Culture’ album, an album that was wider in its theme than its predecessors. Both ‘Reggae sound’ and the title track, for instance, sought to make the connections between art and experience. ”It might sound very intellectual but I’m trying to understand the relationship between experience that goes into the music, into reggae music, what implication that has for the listener when he hears his own experience on record” says LKJ.

‘Bass Culture’ was followed by a dub compilation - called ‘LKJ in Dub’ - before, in 1981, Johnson decide on a hiatus in his recording career. He still toured extensively, first with backing tapes and, more recently, with the nine-piece Dennis Bovell Dub Band. Johnson, of course, also continued his journalism with Race Today in addition to work for the BBC, most notable of which was a 10-part radio series on the history and development of Jamaican popular music. He researched the programme in Jamaica between November 1982 and January 1983. The result, From Mento to Lovers Rock, was aired on the British radio in 1983.

He also launched his own record label, called simply LKJ Records, releasing the first version of fellow reggae poet Michael Smith’s ‘Mi Cyaan Believe It.’ The following year, 1982 he introduced Smith to Island and co-produced (with Dennis Bovell) an album of the same name. Johnson also acted as consultant in Arena’s BBC-2 television production of Michael Smith’s work, Upon Westminster Bridge.

”I regard myself as a serious writer, a serious poet, and I write my poetry when I get the time and inspiration. that’s why I didn’t do anything for two years” says LKJ.

By the end of 1983 LKJ decided the time was right to return to the studio. The result was ‘Making History,’ released at the start of 1984, his first album in over three years.

‘Making History’ was a brilliant exposition of LKJ’s radicalism. The title track, for instance, was a celebration of black Britain, while ‘Reggae Fi Radni’ paid homage to Guyana’s assassinated union leader Walter Rodney. The album also included ‘Di Great Insohreckshan,’ a poem about the summer riots that hit many of Britain’s major cities in 1981. It was a triumphant return to LKJ’s recording career.

From 1985-88 he was a reporter on Channel 4's The Bandung File. He also toured regularly with the Dennis Bovell Dub Band and produced albums by the writer Jean Binta Breeze and by jazz trumpeter Shake Keane.

Recorded at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, the album LKJ Live in Concert with the Dub Band was released independently in 1985. This was followed by Tings An' Times in1991, also the title of his Selected Poems co-published by Bloodaxe Books and LKJ Music Publishers the same year. In 1992 Linton Kwesi Johnson and Dennis Bovell collaborated to produce LKJ in Dub: Volume Two. In 1996 the album LKJ Presents was released, a compilation of various artists including Linton Kwesi Johnson. His most recent album is LKJ A Capella Live, a collection of 14 poems including some unpublished works.

Linton Kwesi Johnson has been made an Associate Fellow of Warwick University (1985),an Honorary Fellow of Wolverhampton Polytechnic (1987) and received an award at the XIII Premo Internazionale Ultimo Novecento from the city of Pisa for his contribution to poetry and popular music (1990). He has toured the world from Japan to the new South Africa, from Europe to Brazil and his work has been translated into Italian and German: unsurprisingly, he is known and revered as the world's first dub poet.