Pitch black - Britain's Caribbean influence

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ONE MIGHT be excused for believing Britain's musical history is as white as a new sheet. Ponder, if you will, the pale faces hovering above the drums and guitars of the key bands associated with most British musical movements.

You have the 1960s' pop of the Beatles, The Kinks and The Rolling Stones; the gender-bending glam of Bowie and T-Rex; the snotty punk of Sex Pistols, The Jam and The Clash; the art-damaged post-punk of Joy Division, The Fall and Wire. There's those gloriously hazy "shoe-gazing" bands My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive and Ride; the "Madchester" sound of The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays; the Brit-pop of Oasis, Pulp and Blur; the Brit-metal racket of Motorhead, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest.

Even today, most British guitar music still seems an almost total honky-fest, if you exclude the black lead singer of Bloc Party.

But British music has always been a far broader proposition than just white guys with guitars. From the late 1940s onwards, successive waves of wide-eyed and shivering black immigrants arrived in England from the Caribbean. These new residents brought with them a deep appreciation of ska, rocksteady, calypso and reggae from the West Indies, and R'n'B, jazz and soul from the United States.

Over the decades, reggae sound system culture transplanted from Jamaica flourished in its new home, with hundreds of British sound systems springing up to meet the needs of the immigrant population and their British-born children. To feed this new market, tiny back-street studios began cranking out locally made reggae, funk, soul and R'n'B.

Slowly but surely, the music changed to reflect the experiences of its makers. While hip-hop and dancehall reggae arose in America and Jamaica respectively, both genres were comprehensively altered by practitioners in Britain, who used local accents, tempos and lyrical references to create a cunningly customised sound rather than merely a slavish imitation.

More recent genres such as jungle, garage, grime and dubstep, meanwhile, are uniquely British forms, paying homage to the monster basslines of Kingston and the hefty breakbeats of New York, but piling on punk and rave sounds that have a distinctly English pedigree.

Based on an earlier podcast by London's Heatwave sound system crew, the latest offering from London's superb Soul Jazz label is An England Story, a compilation celebrating 25 years of urban black music. In particular, the focus falls on the many strands of British music built around a social commentator known as an "MC" in the US/UK and a "deejay" or "toaster" in Jamaica.

Making the point this is perhaps as much about style as skin colour, the collection kicks off with title track "England Story" by YT (ie, "whitey"), a white dancehall MC from Ipswich who name-checks the predominantly black leading lights of British MC culture who have inspired him. Tracks follow from most of the artists he mentions, and there's barely a dud among them.

Included are key singles by Top Cat, Tenor Fly and General Levy, men who made their names fronting British sound systems during the 80s and early 90s. Their tracks still sound as fresh as the day they were minted, weaving together politics, sex and self-promotion and sparkling with a stoic ghetto wit honed by their parents' generation in Kingston but now applied to their own lives in working-class, black British communities such as St Pauls, Toxteth or Brixton.

Also included is Papa Levi's "Mi God, Mi King" from 1984, a mind-boggling showcase of the Saxon sound system's innovative "fast-chat" style, and the first song by an English MC to hit No1 "back a yard" in Jamaica.

These dancehall pioneers were a substantial influence on early British hip-hop acts such as London Posse and contemporary rappers such as Ty, Roots Manuva and Blak Twang, all of whom favour reggae-influenced basslines and flip effortlessly from Cockney to Jamaican patois on their tracks.

Some British dancehall toasters enjoyed a second career when rave culture created an unexpected market for fast-talking microphone controllers in the early 90s, and a new breed of young MCs arose in recent years to have their say over grime and dubstep instrumentals.

Key tracks from each style are included here. There are, however, some significant omissions. This collection should feature work by Tricky, who acknowledged his roots on Massive Attack's Blue Lines album as "English upbringing, background Caribbean", and Birmingham's Apache Indian, who pioneered a mix of Indian bhangra music, Jamaican ragga and Brummie humour in the early 1990s.

For me, the song that has the most to say about the frequently uneasy relationship between white and black British citizens is Tippa Irie's "Complain Neighbour", from 1985. Rather than deal in abstractions, Irie personalises cultural collision in a South London street, situating a Cockney family next to a family of Jamaican immigrants, the former drinking beer and watching EastEnders and the latter smoking spliffs and blasting loud reggae records. After complaining that "this reggy wot they play is worse than opera", the Cockney bloke heaves a few bricks through his black neighbour's window, narrowly missing their baby daughter. "Dem coulda committed murder," muses Irie. "All because the bass was high 'pon the amplifier."

VARIOUS ARTISTS: An England Story (Soul Jazz/ Southbound). The sound of black Britain

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