Lord Kitchener - London Is The Place For Me (Honest Jon's)
UK release date: 24 June 2002
track listing
1. London Is The Place For Me
2. I Was There (At The Coronation)
3. Mix Up Matrimony
4. My Landlady
5. Kitch's Bebop Calypso
6. Victory Test Match
7. Birth Of Ghana
8. Aguiti
9. Jamaica Hurricane
10. Kitch in The Jungle
11. No Carnival In Britain
12. The Underground Train
13. Housewives
14. Some Girl Something
15. Saxophone No. 2
16. Fed-A-Ray
17. Bulldog Don't Bite Me
18. Spanish Calypso
19. If You're Not White You're Black
20. Sweet Jamaica
In times before R&B, reggae, or even ska, the soundtrack of black Britain was calypso. Far from being imported from the Caribbean into newly-arrived immigrant communities, this music became a genuine hybrid of the experiences of and influences on people who hailed from Trinidad and London in equal measure.
Some of the Caribbean's greatest entertainers of the time were busy composing songs about travelling on the tube, the Queen's coronation (Young Tiger - he was there, don't you know) and, needless to say, the British weather.
Calypso offered a varied but always exciting and frequently hilarious commentary on 1950s London life, spiced up with political asides about the relationship between the immigrants and the indigenous population of the capital. It is music that couldn't have been made anywhere else.
Honest Jon's, for their second release, have dug up recordings by immigrants with imperial-sounding names like Lord Kitchener, Lord Beginner and The Lion and put them together on what amounts to a sample of album of times gone by. And if your only experience of this easy-going, sunkissed music is plodding along behind a float at the Notting Hill Carnival, this is a record that suggests you've been missing out.
What we find here - and it is a real find - is an album that is at once an historical documentary and an idiosyncratic prelude to summer. You'll find out as much about life in the mother country in those days in this record as you could from any textbook. But of course it is far more fun to listen to Kitchener and co's laid back beats than to read about such things. Let's hope this is only the beginning of an appreciation for this music.
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