Rudeboy: The Story of Trojan Records (UK 2018)

Rudeboy: The Story of Trojan Records is a conventional but very enjoyable music documentary about the brief period of independent success by the record label that introduced Jamaican popular music to the wider British public in the late 1960s/early 1970s and in doing so fostered the development of Black British music. In an interview, the director Nicolas Jack Davies says that he hoped that his documentary would record the history of black and white fans coming together in their love of Jamaican music in the 60s and early 70s and also present the context of an inhospitable and racist culture that young Jamaican migrants were forced to confront. I think the film does achieve this through its interview format and specifically its choice of ‘witnesses’. It’s a useful marker of the 50th anniversary of the emergence of an important record label and a distinctive music culture.

The film is a fairly straightforward chronology of the development of Jamaican popular music from the early 1960s Jamaican interest in American rhythm and blues and soul through to the development of ska and rocksteady and then the emergence of heavier ‘roots’ reggae and lighter ‘lovers rock’ in the UK in the mid-1970s. Much of this history can be found in a range of written music histories, including the detailed study, Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King by Lloyd Bradley (2000). The history might have been familiar to me but it was good to see it brought to life in this film and there were certainly things I learned. Many of the original record producers from the 1960s are sadly no longer with us and others were perhaps not available. Davies decided on a three-pronged strategy. His principal ‘witnesses’ tell us their own personal stories which together provide the historical record. Brief filmed re-enactments alongside archive footage provide the context and illustrate some of the stories. The innovation here is that young actors play some of the older witnesses. This seemed to me to work well. We see a young Dandy Livingstone (played by Kyle Reece Bell) arriving in the UK and his initial reactions alongside the real singer and his memories. Similarly we get witness statements by producer Bunny Lee, performers Derrick Morgan, Pauline Black and Neville Staple, each I think with a younger actor playing their younger selves. Black and Staple were part of the later ‘Two-Tone’ movement, one of the important developments that followed Trojan’s success. Don Letts, Lee Scratch Perry and Marcia Griffith also contribute. The specifically Trojan story is presented in archive footage of founder Lee Gopthal who set up the Trojan label in 1968 in a deal with Island’s Chris Blackwell. Gopthal already had music shops and Jamaican music interests. The story is mainly told through statements by Trojan’s employees at the time plus fans and other commentators.

One of the pleasing aspects of the film is its careful preservation of aspect ratios for the archive material (much of it shot for TV) presented inside the 2.35:1 frame used for the witness statements and dramatic reconstructions. The careful presentation of archive footage helps in one of the film’s major aims – to provide younger audiences with a visual representation of how white working-class audiences became early supporters of Jamaican popular music. This is the history which informs Shane Meadows’ ‘personal’ story, This Is England (UK 2006). The two films together would make an interesting double bill. It was later in the 1970s that white skinheads would be targeted by the racist National Front. This in turn was resisted in the emergence of 2 Tone from 1979.

The actual story of the rise and fall of Trojan as a record label is perhaps the least successful part of the film for me. The label grew very quickly between 1969 and the early 1970s and at one point Trojan had five Top 40 records in the UK with most of the stars of Jamaican music making an appearance on the label at some point. The decline appears to have been a combination of a lack of resources and infrastructure necessary to fully exploit the popularity of the music and a classic ‘over expansion’ which raised costs when the business didn’t have enough capital to sustain its operations. The result was that the label had to be sold and, although it still exists today, most contemporary music fans will have come across Trojan (a name inspired by the type of truck which carried Duke Reid’s sound system around Jamaica in the early 1960s) as a re-issue label. It’s difficult to convey the economics of the music business in a film like this when the natural urge is to hear another interesting anecdote or simply to play another classic song. Music fans will be pleased perhaps to learn that one of the ‘wrong decisions’ was to attempt to ‘sweeten’ the sound of the early 1970s reggae records by adding string arrangements in order to attract more mainstream record buyers. This raised the production costs and alienated the ‘roots’ fans – a familiar story from several periods of music history. The result of the collapse of Trojan became part of the story of the divergence in the 1970s between the heavier ‘roots reggae’ with its deeper Rastafarian political and spiritual tones and the emergence of the lighter ‘lovers’ rock’ in London. But that’s another, and just as complex, story.

Rudeboy: The Story of Trojan Records has had successful festival screenings and is now lined up for VOD and physical media, initially in the US. I saw it as part of the ‘We Are One Festival’ online and it fitted in very well. I’d love to see it on a big screen and hear the music from a quality sound system. The official website has some info on releases.