Drum Magazine Issue 5 | Page 35

DA505 main 26/7/05 7:03 pm 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