The Artists on the Frequency — the station's own singers, bands and sound systems. One act at a time; pick a name to hear who they are.
Fordham Park
Heavyweight roots from New Cross — the park where the Moonshot stood.
Fordham Park is named for the scrap of green in New Cross where the Moonshot Youth Club stood, the hall where Jah Shaka first strung up his sound. Neville Hutchinson grew up a mile from it in Deptford: a father off the Windrush who spent thirty years pouring iron at the Woolwich foundry, a mother on nights at the hospital, church on Sundays. At nineteen he saved six months' wages for an eighteen-inch speaker, built the rest of the rig on the kitchen table, and carried it up the hill from Brockley station to the Moonshot on a Saturday night. He started singing over it because the toaster didn't turn up.
The records are that sound and that life: the rig going up in Moonshot, the dance at three in the morning with the bass in the wall, twelve hours on the factory line and the dubplate collected on the way home, his father's hands, the 36 bus on a Saturday afternoon. Heavyweight steppers — kick on every beat, the bass carrying the tune, horns that mourn rather than shine — and a gravelly, UK-born voice that never preaches. The deep-hour dubs are versions of his own riddims, cut for the small hours.
Key tracksMoonshot · Three In The Morning · Twelve Hours · My Father's Hands
- Roots
- New Cross / Deptford, SE London
- In the lineage of
- Jah Shaka, Aswad, Misty in Roots, Steel Pulse