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Growing up Black in Wales in the 1970s, “it was like we were cut off from the rest of mankind”, says Lawrence “Tylo” Taylor. “There was nothing for young Black people.”
Despite Cardiff being home to one of the oldest Black communities in the UK, stretching back to the 19th century, it could be a tough place. “As children, the police would abuse you, calling you a Black bastard,” Tylo says. “There was pure racism in school and you’d be singled out by teachers and belittled. We grew up very disillusioned.”
There was a cluster of people feeling similarly, looking to find their tribe and identity in Wales. Andrew “Bingham” Binns moved to Cardiff from London in 1970, when he was nine. “It was a culture shock,” he says. “I didn’t even know there was a Wales until I moved here.” As a teenager, he visited New York, Londonand Jamaica and came back changed. Bingham became a Rasta, leaning into his heritage and newfound identity as “a defence mechanism” against the turbulent times, and began to devour reggae. When a friend asked him if he wanted to join his sound system crew, it was a hard yes.
Both Tylo and Bingham became players in one of the most unheralded, undocumented music scenes in British history: Welsh reggae sound systems. While London, Bristol, Leeds and more have famously vibrated to thunderous dub rhythms in street parties and dance halls – most famously of all at Notting Hill carnival – Wales’s own “sounds” aren’t as well known. But, because of that obscurity, they ended up cultivating some of the UK’s most hard-fought and intensely cherished African-Caribbean culture.
Black International was the first sound system in Cardiff, followed by Conqueror Hi Power Sound System, set up by Gilbert Anthony Watt in 1975. A few years later, Tylo and Gary Jemmett set up their own, Countryman, which along with other crews such as Lionheart and Emperor, formed a bustling scene. Kervin Julien, who grew up in London and started visiting Cardiff in the late 1970s, later becoming part of Conqueror when he moved there, says it was “very isolated”, and felt distinctly different from the capital. “They didn’t have many venues or record shops. There was only chart radio, no pirates. No media. No infrastructure. But it created a community and a sense of belonging.”
Sound system organisers packed up their speaker stacks and travelled to London, Bristol, Birmingham, Gloucester and Huddersfield – picking up fresh records along the way – to clash with other notable systems, and they played to tens of thousands of people at Cardiff’s Butetown carnival during its heyday. “When we played, you didn’t have to find out where the carnival was,” Bingham says. “You just followed the bassline.”
When Countryman began in 1981, “there was rivalry,” Jemmett says. “We took them all on and nothing was stopping us.” Everyone claims to have the best system – Conqueror say the same – but Jemmett says rivals went to real lengths to stop their groove. “We had our speaker lockup broken into,” he recalls. “Another time someone snipped the wires while we were playing to cut the sound because the power we were chucking out was unbelievable.”
Looking to party where they could, they ended up in some unusual situations. Jemmett recalls being surrounded by police one night after accidentally tapping the mains power from the lord mayor’s house, while on another occasion they found themselves double-booked for a girl’s 18th birthday party. “But they loved us,” says Jemmett. “Their DJ blew his speakers trying to match us. It was great, until about 11pm when 80 bikers came in and then it all kicked off.”
Despite a scene with a rich history – with the crews playing alongside Aswad, Dennis Brown, Jimmy Cliff and countless others – it’s taking the work of historians to stop it being forgotten. Ashish Joshi has spent years tracking down audio and video footage of sound clashes. “I’m a Londoner and I grew up collecting tapes, going to dances and carnivals,” he says. “But there’s a lot of snobbery, with people thinking there’s no sounds outside of London that could test us. But there were brilliant MCs and sound systems all over the place that haven’t always got the attention. So, when I hear that Cardiff had a sound system scene, I’m like, ‘Where’s the tapes?’ I feel like Indiana Jones.”
Joshi has built up an extensive YouTube channel and SoundCloud page showcasing his digitised finds, but as people age and technology becomes obsolete, some recordings are disappearing quicker than he can get to them. “It’s a race against time,” he says. “I’m trying to rescue stuff because it’s being chucked away.”
Yasmin Begum, a young researcher and activist from Cardiff, has picked up the mantle locally. “Wanting to do something that platformed joy and happiness,” she has a dedicated Instagram page showcasing this kind of footage. “I grew up with this culture, but I don’t see it reflected within galleries, libraries, archives or museums,” she says.
Begum’s father is a ragga and jungle DJ, and her great-grandmother used to run a jazz pub in what was then known as the Tiger Bay area of the city – home to Wales’s oldest multi-ethnic community – so her connection runs deep. “I grew up hearing these glorious stories of the bay,” she says. “And that was in such contrast to my experiences after 9/11 as a Muslim Pakistani child. The stories were a wonderful world to retreat in. But all my elders either died or went to prison – I realised the onus was on me to promote and celebrate the culture.”
That promotion is well deserved, because sound systems brought a sense of purpose for those who felt ostracised. “We were nobodyies, we weren’t even looked at,” says Tylo. “We had no future, so we tried to make a future for ourselves. Sound systems were a statement for us to say: you’ve shunned us for all of your life but, look, we’ve made it in our own communities.”
Parties were thrown at places such as the Black-owned Casablanca Club, because “we couldn’t go to the white clubs in town,” says Eric “Beefy” Howard, who was part of Conqueror. “You were limited. And the police would really try and clamp down on what you were doing.” It may have been a refuge, but Tyler laughs, Casablanca was also “a right shithole. A completely decrepit building. It had lights, power and a bar. You were lucky to have a chair. You had to stand up and dance because that’s all you could do. But it was good vibes.”
Word got out about Cardiff and various sound systems from all over the UK were visiting for clashes; the Black culture TV programme Ebony ran a feature on the scene and, by 1984, Bismillah, a promising local reggae band had performed on the show. One of the group’s singers, Benji Webbe, became frontman of metal reggae outfit Skindred, who now play the likes of Wembley Arena and whose last album, Smile, reached No 2 in the charts. The Conquerer system “was where I did my apprenticeship,” Webbe says. “Without the sound system in Cardiff, I wouldn’t be here where I am now in a successful band. That was special for me.”
Bismillah, though, fizzled out, burdened by the lack of local industry and infrastructure, and Cardiff could still be hostile. The day after Julien opened a reggae record shop “the fruit and veg man from next door came to our window with a hammer”, he says. “He tapped on it and told us to turn off our monkey music.” Years later, when Julien started a radio station in the city to promote more Black and Brown music, he says he was targeted by the racist hate group Combat 18: “They sent me an envelope with dog poo and razor blades in it.”
By the early 1990s, as dance music emerged and jungle took off, the mood and demographic changed. Conqueror wrapped up, Butetown carnival stopped for 16 years, and the Casablanca Club shut down. “Since the club closed, everybody’s scattered and some people have gone sideways,” says Bingham. “What was a bona fide dreadlock man is now a crackhead. Because when the club closed, there was no way for us to link up. So now you don’t meet man, you don’t see man week toweek, you see them month to month if you see them at all. And then when you do see them, they’re on a different runnings.”
Countryman is still going strong, as is the renewed Butetown carnival, and Julien is still an active DJ locally. But there’s an overwhelming feeling that more could be done to celebrate and preserve this vital strand of Black and Welsh culture. “I can’t wait for Welsh institutions to see value in reggae culture and for Black cultural archives to make a Black Wales collection,” says Begum. Bingham points out the stark differences in how we fund, and house, this sort of culture compared to others. “Look at the hundreds of millions spent on opera houses,” he says. “All that money to get the acoustics right. They build these big, fancy buildings for posh people, so why can’t they build buildings especially for sound systems to continue the culture? Because when you have two clashes going and you kick up a sound … man, nothing better.”
