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Blackstock Road
The drum before the bass — Finsbury Park, N4.
Blackstock Road started as a groundation, not a group. In 1977 a handful of Twelve Tribes brethren from the Finsbury Park end of the road began meeting on Sunday evenings in a church hall off Gillespie Road with three hand drums and a Bible, the week after Bob Marley had played the Rainbow round the corner. Joseph Amos led the chant because he had the lowest voice in the room. Two years later, when a friend with a four-track in a Mountgrove Road basement offered to record them, they brought a piano player and a bass player from the Stroud Green Road blues dances, and the drums stayed exactly where they had always been: at the front.
The records are slow because the drum is slow. Every one of them opens the way a groundation opens — one line chanted by Joseph, answered once by the drummers, then given to the echo while the funde keeps the heartbeat. Rainbow Theatre Chant is the Sunday meeting with the roof off; Clissold Park Dawn is the same brethren walking home at first light through the park gates. Binghi On Blackstock is the nearest they ever came to a dance record, and it still has a psalm in it.
Key tracksRainbow Theatre Chant · Binghi On Blackstock · Clissold Park Dawn
- Roots
- Finsbury Park / Blackstock Road, North London
- Lineup
- Joseph Amos, chant · Ezekiel Tomlin, repeater drum · Vernon Latty, funde and bass drum · Cynthia Rowe, piano and organ · Linford Dacres, bass
- In the lineage of
- Count Ossie, Ras Michael, the Twelve Tribes groundations