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.
Winston Merrick
The word before the bass — Forest Gate, E7.
Winston Merrick was born on Romford Road in 1957, the son of a Jamaican bus conductor and a hospital cleaner from Clarendon, and he has never lived more than a mile from it. He trained as a teacher at the polytechnic in Stratford and taught English at a secondary school on the same road he grew up on, which is where the poems come from: the register, the playground, the mothers at the gate, the boys stopped on the way home. He read them first at a Poets and Players night above a pub in Stratford in 1979, dry, no music, and a bass player who happened to be there told him the lines already had a riddim in them.
The records that followed were cut with a studio band in the Bovell manner — upright-feel bass, piano, a muted trombone — and they keep the rule Winston set on day one: the voice is spoken, never sung, and when the poem stops the band gets the room. Romford Road Riddim is the manifesto. Sus is the sus law from the wrong end of a police van, written the year it was repealed. Concrete Psalm is the quiet one, four in the morning on the balcony, the docks going dark for good.
He is still teaching. He still reads the register out loud, and the kids say it sounds like the records.
Key tracksRomford Road Riddim · Sus · Tell Dem · Concrete Psalm
- Roots
- Forest Gate / Stratford, East London
- In the lineage of
- Linton Kwesi Johnson, Michael Smith, Benjamin Zephaniah