Arriving in the midst of a media-fuelled crisis over immigration and notions of nationality in the UK, this second LP from Honest Jon's could not be better timed, as the West London record shop-turned-label turns the spotlight on an earlier generation of migrant peoples.
When the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury in 1948, one of the first passengers down the steps was calypso singer Aldwyn Roberts, better known as Lord Kitchener. Calypso was a Caribbean music based on spontaneous composition of songs to commemorate or commentate on events of the day, and the weeks spent crossing the Atlantic had given Kitch plenty of time to come up with something suitable. Newsreel footage shows him disembarking with his banjo and regaling the people of his new home with a song called 'London Is The Place For Me'.
This album takes Kitchener's optimistic newcomers' anthem as its starting point, and offers a fascinating glimpse into the experiences of the Trinidadians as they sought to adapt to a strange new environment. The twenty tracks offer an oddly engaging mixture of wide-eyed naivety, homely wit and a wistful yet defiant pride in the singers' roots. There was no Tebbit test for Lord Beginner to fail, so his 'Victory Test Match' is a gleeful celebration of spinners Sunny Ramadhin and Alf Valentine's destruction of the England of Hutton, Bedser and Edrich at Lord's. But at the same time, the Trinidadians' embrace of the traditions and culture of their adopted home rings clear and true in songs like Young Tiger's wonderful tale of overnight queuing and glimpses of gilded carriages, 'I Was There (At The Coronation)'.
It wasn't all wonder and excitement, though. While Kitch's 'My Landlady' is light-hearted and cliched, there are the makings of protest in Mighty Terror's otherwise homesick lament, 'No Carnival In Britain'. 'If You're Not White You're Black' hints at the racism the Windrush generation were greeted with on arriving, at Britain's request, to help rebuild the country after the war. An innate sense of polity, though, means that Kitchener concentrates on the snootiness those of mixed race showed their black neighbours rather than on the outright hostility many Britons showed the newcomers.
This story ends in 1956, and the album offers a generally optimistic commentary on the experiment of immigration. But 12 years later Enoch Powell dragged the debate into the gutter, raising tensions and inflaming prejudices as an entrenched and insular minority attempted to "purify" British culture of the diversity immigrants had blessed it with. Depressingly, earlier this year, Home Secretary David Blunkett echoed Powell with his comments on asylum seekers as the government debased what remained of its principles in an attempt to please a scaremongering right wing media. The lessons taught by the people who wrote and sang these songs - that cultures can mix, and that people can only be enriched by learning to celebrate and cherish their differences - have never needed to be studied more closely.
