Coldharbour Lane

Coldharbour Lane was never a band so much as a room. Alton Reid came from Spanish Town to Brixton in 1961, learned to solder for the Post Office, and by 1979 had built a twelve-channel desk out of ex-BBC and GPO parts in the basement under a shoe-repairer's at the Loughborough Junction end of the road. He called it the Rig. He never played a note on a record in his life; he mixed. The band came to him — Fitzroy Hamilton's bass from the sound-system dances at the Old White Horse, Ricky Beckett's drums from the Loughborough Estate youth club, Yvonne Greenidge from the piano stool of a Pentecostal church on Stockwell Road, Everton Samuels with a melodica in an army-surplus pocket, Terry Nolan with a trombone from the squats on Villa Road — and cut the riddim live, four or five takes, and then went home. What came out of the basement afterwards was Alton alone with the tape.

That is why there are no singers. A voice on a Coldharbour Lane record is one more thing to clear out of the way of the bass, and the bass is what the road is for: Loughborough Junction Dub and Acre Lane are Fitzroy's lines with everything else stripped back to let them walk. The slow sides are the reverent ones — Effra River Dub, the version of the Effra sessions Alton cut here, drifting on Everton's melodica over the river buried under the market; Brixton Hill At Dawn, Yvonne at the upright at four in the morning; Loughborough Road, sixty-two beats a minute and a spring reverb. The only human voice in the whole catalogue is Yvonne, humming one "ohh" at the piano while the tape was rolling, which Alton kept and turned into Streatham High Road.

Where the New Cross dubs went to war, Coldharbour Lane went to church. Railton Road Memories does not say what it remembers; the melodica does the remembering. Pope's Road, the last record, has the synthesiser Alton bought in 1984 and Terry's horns sharpened up for the market on a Saturday, and then the shoe-repairer sold up and the Rig went into boxes.