The Coltman Street Players

The Coltman Street Players took their name from a street they no longer lived on. Winston Brevett came from Kingston to Custom House in 1962 and his first London address was a rented room on Coltman Street, a few doors from the Royal Docks; by the time he had a tenor saxophone, a wife and a front room in Dalston, the name had stuck to the Sunday-afternoon sessions he ran there. What started as a horn player's habit — Winston, Delroy Campbell's trumpet and Hassan Mehmet's trombone working out Rico and Tommy McCook lines over a record player — became a band when Pauline Edwards brought her organ down from the church on Stoke Newington Road and Errol Bryan and young Joe "Bagga" Lindo turned up with a bass and a kit. By 1980 they were rehearsing over a shop on Kingsland Road and playing the Four Aces on a Thursday.

The sound is the horns. Where the heavier East London bands led with the bass, the Players wrote the brass first: a riff for three horns, then a tune for Delroy to sing over it, then the Hammond and the rhythm underneath. Delroy sings the way he plays — warm, soul-boy, never straining — and the horns answer every line like a second voice, jazzy, arranged, with an eight-bar break in every record for one of the three to stretch out. Dalston Junction is the band on a Friday evening, the whole of the High Street walking past the pub door. Sunday Morning Hackney is the same street at half past ten on the Sabbath, flugelhorn instead of trumpet, church bells over the one-drop, Pauline singing the harmony under the chorus.

They were never a militant band and never pretended to be. Their subject was the ordinary week — the market, the bus stop, the kitchen, the dominoes — played by people who had learned their instruments in church brass bands and youth-club jazz groups and carried that into reggae without leaving any of it behind.