17 October 2023 , 21:25
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Lloyd Coxsone did not want to come to England. Leaving his mum behind in Jamaica when he was in his late teens was his “saddest day”, and he arrived with the Windrush Generation in 1962 to a find a bleak, unwelcoming country.
But within a few years, his legendary Coxsone Sound System was bringing the joyous music of the Caribbean to thousands of Brits, shifting the cultural landscape forever. Lloyd, 78, who went on to become an influential reggae producer, recalls: “I didn’t think I would leave my mum to go anywhere.
"I didn’t want to go, but knowing my mum when she’d made up her mind that she wanted to do something then you have to do it.” His father and brother were already living in Balham, South London, and when Lloyd arrived the weather was a shock. He says: “I wanted to go back to Jamaica immediately because I didn’t like it.
"It was snow and deep winter, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t see any rivers to go swimming in, I didn’t see any sea, I didn’t see any fruit trees I could climb like I used to do in Jamaica. My dad said, if I want to go back to Jamaica, I must get a job and save the money to buy a ticket back to Jamaica.”
Lloyd Coxsone (Philip Coburn)But he stayed and now features in new ITV documentary Pride of Britain: A Windrush Special. He is surprised in the show by Britain’s Got Talent judge Alesha Dixon, who tells Lloyd she thinks her parents met thanks to a sound system, and asks him to explain his music. He tells her: “A sound system was created in Jamaica in 1930, and Jamaica brought it to England. A sound system is boxes and speakers.
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“The people used to take the furniture out of their house and put it in the yard. And then we would string up three boxes in a room and have a party, play some rub-a-dub plate.” Lloyd, who decided to stay in London when he realised he was to become a dad, spent a year out of work and used the time to cultivate his music, playing in a bar opposite his house.
He says: “One night I went over there and I said to the selector, ‘Can I spin a few tunes?’ And he said, ‘Yes’. That was the first time I played a sound system in the UK.” But he was still looking for a regular job and tells how on one visit to a labour exchange, he asked why he could not get work, only to be shown a job card that read, “NCP: No Coloured People”.
Lloyd says: “Then one day, he says, ‘OK, I have a job for you.’ He gives me a job to go to Wandsworth Common British Railway as a porter.” While working as a porter, Lloyd acquired his own music equipment. He says: “I was there for three years. Then, when I built my first 2200 amplifier and buy the turntable and get some speakers, I left.”
Lloyd and Alesha share a joke during filming (Philip Coburn)By 1965, Lloyd had started his own sound system, Lloyd the Matador, but when this was destroyed in a fight he began working for record producer Duke Reid the Trojan as a selector, but the men fell out after playing a west London venue together. Lloyd says: “I was going up to play a song when a white man grabbed me.”
The man was an undercover police officer and Lloyd ended up in court charged with possessing a machete he had never seen before. He asked Duke Reid to testify as he had seen the altercation and knew Lloyd did not have a machete. He says: “Mr Reid lived just round the road from the courthouse, but he didn’t turn up.
Lloyd and Alesha discuss his past in the new documentary (Philip Coburn)"The judge gave me six months in Brixton prison for a machete that I didn’t have.” In jail, Lloyd decided to rebrand, and go out on his own to rival Duke. He says: “I said, ‘I will not come out of this prison and go and play Mr Reid’s sound anymore’. In Jamaica, there are two big sounds, named Duke Reid and one Coxsone Dodd, so I am going to do my sound and call it Sir Coxsone. The rest is history.”
In the 1970s, he secured a residency at the Roaring Twenties club in Carnaby Street. He says: “Every nationality would go and dance together. I played it for five years, seven nights a week.” He took his music to Europe, and says: “When I got to Europe there was no reggae, no sound system. Coxsone was the first song to go to Germany.”
Lloyd was honoured at the Daily Mirror’s Pride of Britain awards this monthAfter a short retirement in the early 1980s, he returned with Sir Coxsone the Outernational sound system. While he enriched Britain with his music, he also stayed true to his roots, and would often visit Jamaica. He says: “Bob Marley was a good friend. Whenever I went to Jamaica I would visit Bob and Bonny [his wife]. It was the Wailers at that time and I had good times with them.”
Lloyd was at the Daily Mirror’s Pride of Britain awards, with TSB, last week, where he was among the recipients of a Special Recognition award for the Windrush generation. He says: “We brought our culture. We brought our workforce, and we brought a lot of knowledge. We changed a lot of things in this country. The Windrush generation people should be respected.”