Musician Don Letts: ‘It took a bloody long time for black British to mean something’

Don Letts is a pacer. He walks back and forth in the studio shed at the bottom of the garden at his London home, surrounded by mementos of a prodigiously active life at the artistic crossroads. Now and then the film director, DJ, occasional musician and scenester pauses to ponder a response, then he’s on the move again. “I can’t sit still, literally,” the 67-year-old explains.

A large print mock-up of a vinyl single by The Clash hangs on a wall behind him. (Letts worked as filmmaker with the punk band; that’s him on the cover of another of their records, Black Market Clash, striding dauntlessly towards a hostile line of police at the Notting Hill Carnival in 1976.) Nearby is a picture of him with Bob Marley. The child of Jamaican immigrants to London, Letts befriended Marley during the reggae star’s visits to the UK. (They once had an argument about the sartorial desirability of Letts’s bondage trousers; a few months later, Marley’s disdain for punk fashions had softened sufficiently for him to record the song “Punky Reggae Party”.)

Other tokens of Letts’ role as a cultural “conduit” (his term) are all around: film posters, framed gold records, flyers, books, a close-up photograph of a boombox. Stacks of cassettes include one labelled BAD, standing for Big Audio Dynamite, the band he formed with The Clash’s Mick Jones in 1984. And sitting in pride of place at the front of a row of vinyl records is his latest musical venture — a debut solo album called Outta Sync.

“For better or worse, it’s me, man,” he says of this release, the first set of original songs to come out under his own name. It caps a busy period of retrospection for him, including a memoir published in 2021, There and Black Again, and last year’s documentary film about his life, Rebel Dread. All of which seems to run counter to a statement he made in his earlier book, 2006’s Culture Clash: “I prefer staying in the shadows.”

“Bloody good point,” Letts says, his aquiline face topped by a wide green rastacap for his dreadlocks. “But half the problem these days is letting people know you bloody exist. There’s so much of everything that nothing means anything. That’s a lyric on my album, by the way.” A smile, and the pacing resumes.

Outta Sync came about by happenstance, a pandemic diversion that snowballed into something more. It was prompted by the producer Martin “Youth” Glover, former bassist with post-punk band Killing Joke, who gave Letts several basslines. “I’m a sucker for a good bassline,” Letts says. This was the foundation for him to make some songs with another producer, Daniele Gaudi. One thing led to the next, and lo: he found himself with an album that occupies a Lettsian space between various styles of music, from reggae to pop and rock.

On the title track, he talks about the “duality” of his musical identity, “raised on pop and bass”. He was born in 1956, when Elvis Presley released “Heartbreak Hotel”, which, Letts likes to say, makes him “as old as rock and roll”. That was the year after his parents arrived in London, among the Windrush generation of Caribbean people who settled in the UK. (The Windrush was the ship that brought the first arrivals.) His father initially worked as a bus driver and later as a chauffeur for the New Zealand High Commission. His mother was a dressmaker.

“I describe myself as black British now, but it took a bloody long time for that to mean something. It took a long time for us to embrace what we were, which was this hybrid existence: black and British,” he says. A turning point, for him, was Musical Youth’s 1982 pop-reggae hit “Pass the Dutchie”, whose video he filmed. It’s among the gold records on his wall. 

“I don’t think a lot of people realise but it was a major cultural totem for black British people. It had the same impact on my generation as Millie Smalls’ [1964 hit] ‘My Boy Lollipop’ did for my parents. In other words, it gave them a sense of pride, a sense that ‘we’re here’. For me, [‘Pass the Dutchie’] was the beginning of black and British beginning to mean something.”

Now based in north-west London’s Kensal Rise, where he lives with his wife and their two daughters, Letts grew up south of the river in Brixton. His father ran an amateur sound system, Duke Letts Superstonic, playing Jamaican records in the local church on Sundays. The son took the father’s hobby and ran with it. He was the first resident DJ at the Roxy in 1976, a hub for the emerging punk scene. He played roots reggae songs to his mostly white, spiky-haired clientele, a linkman between different rebel musics.

“As far as I’m concerned, my only real discernible talent is having good taste,” he says. This is a crucial quality for Letts, a form of self-fashioning. He reckons that style is the gift that Caribbean immigrants brought to the UK. “Take the Windrush generation out of the mix and what you got left? You’ve got ‘Greensleeves’ and fucking Coronation Street.”

He has been in bands other than Big Audio Dynamite, including a shortlived stint in the reggae outfit Basement 5, the support act at Public Image Ltd’s inaugural gig in 1978. But his real musical gift is curatorial, as with the compilation tapes he used to make for punk acts such as Blondie and Patti Smith. The Beastie Boys, whom he met when he lived in New York in the early 1980s, were among the beneficiaries. “For some reason, he likes us and gives us some dancehall reggae mixtapes that changed the way we thought about making music,” they wrote in their band memoir Beastie Boys Book.

His time in New York is commemorated on Outta Sync by “The Doorman”, a ska tribute to a celebrated figure in Manhattan nightlife in the 1980s, Haoui Montaug. “He’s everybody’s friend,” runs the chorus — a sentiment that might equally be directed at the well-connected Letts.

He’s joined by an eclectic range of guests on the album. US actor John Cusack turns up on one track, The Flaming Lips’ singer Wayne Coyne is on another. Several feature Hollie Cook, reggae-singing daughter of the Sex Pistols’ drummer Paul Cook. But one vocalist has had to be axed from the finished album: The Specials’ Terry Hall, whose final recordings before his death last year were done for Outta Sync.

Hall was a willing participant in the project — he was an old friend of Letts — but permission to use his vocal parts was withdrawn after he died. The two songs with him appear on the vinyl pressing of the album, a batch of 5,000, which now can’t be sold. Letts is tight-lipped about the circumstances but he halts his pacing when asked about his disappointment. 

“That’s an understatement, mate,” he says. The pictures on the walls — Bob Marley, his father standing by his sound system, The Clash and so on — look on silently. “All I can tell you is, there’s no one on this planet alive who can look me in the face and say that’s what Terry would have wanted. As far as I’m concerned it’s a business versus art thing. It raises the question: who owns the culture?”

‘Outta Sync’ is available now