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26/7/05
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Page 33
Drum: PHOTOGENIC 33
I was born in
Brockley, in 1966, but we moved
to Jamaica when I was about four years
old. It was kind of crazy, really, but it was good.
We were lucky enough to be part of that born-here
generation who could make it back to the Caribbean. Unfortunately, for me, the situation didn’t work out too well. I found
myself caught between adjusting to Jamaica and then coming back
to London to adjust to England all over again. I couldn’t understand
what was going on here. There was this strange anger I found in a lot of
the young guys, particularly the black guys. It was that fear of anything
different, and back then, we didn’t know about cultural differences, you just
thought, why the aggression?
When I moved back to London in
1977, we were proud to live in
a community. I was at school
with Dave Rocastle and in
the same block as Ian Wright,
and it was a nice community. I’ve always had a
strong sense of community. It was always more
sensible to band together to
survive in times of adversity
or otherwise, than to be just
every man for himself in that
dog eat dog world. It wasn’t
until large numbers of people
started owning their own homes that we started to become more insular and
isolated ourselves from so-called communities. And owning property is good
because it is a form of progress, but the whole point now is that everyone
just forgot. We got involved in consuming the world’s consumables
and forgot about our common struggles. Then all of