Uxbridge Road

Uxbridge Road came out of the People Unite scene in Southall at the end of the seventies: a five-piece who rehearsed in a room above a shop on the Broadway where the Punjabi grocers and the Caribbean barbers shared the pavement, and who never once put a singer in front of the band. Neville Whitfield had played trombone in a church brass band in Hanwell before he heard Rico Rodriguez in a Ladbroke Grove basement and understood that the horn could do the singing. He built the group around that idea — Femi Oyelaran's tenor sax answering him, Patrick Sealy on bass, Carlton Lyle on drums, and the Hammond of the one white Hanwell boy in the band, Graham Tetley, who had learned the bubble from Studio One records and a broken Leslie cabinet.

The records are tunes first and dubs second: a melody you could hum, played on the trombone as if it were a voice, then taken apart on the desk and put back together. Hanwell Clock Tower is the one everybody knows — the theme they opened with at the Dominion Cinema benefit dances. Trombone For Southall was cut in the summer of 1981 when the town needed something gentle said about it. Wharncliffe Viaduct is the sound of the last train over the arches at midnight.