Staff WriterThe Story of Lover’s Rock Repeat screening! Your last chance to see this wonderful film in Toronto
WHERE: Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussez Avenue,
Toronto. (On U of T Campus)
WHEN: Tues. Sept 11, @ 5.30p
Progrm: “Sort out Yuh Life Jamaica”
Music video by Kush Asher for the J’can hit band No Maddz
“In Stereo: Joyce and Herman” by Keston Neunie
Starring a warm West Indian couple that now live in London. Joyce, 69, and Herman, 70, talk about their own experiences, arriving in the Sixties England by boat. They dispute what really happens when we die and spell out the things that matter most in life!
FEATURE
The Story of Lover’s Rock Menelik Shabazz
“We were the first generation from the Caribbean who’d gone to school here….
Lover’s Rock was like an escape for us. It was almost a coping mechanism.”
The Story of Lover’s Rock has already screened to sold out audiences in Great Britain, as well as to full houses at New York’s African Diaspora International Film Festival, the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles, and earlier this year at the 3rd annual CaribbeanTales in Barbados.
The film traces the evolution of a new genre of reggae music in the 1970’s, created by West Indian immigrants in the British capital. It is about a generation – the first to be raised and schooled in Britain - coming to voice, and creating a vibrant sub-culture within, even as it struggled to come to grips with an increasingly oppressive and aggressive “mainstream” culture without.
Much like Motown before it, “Lover’s Rock” began as a small record label before its sound blossomed into the wider public’s consciousness as a genre unto itself. For years Lover’s Rock was played exclusively at London house parties by Jamaican immigrants who, according to Slant magazine reviewer Chuck Bowen, “were often banned from pubs”.
As with most things West Indian, the new music was a fusion of elements: reggae bass lines provided the foundation for the soulful melodies which soared above, usually punctuated by sultry female vocals .
jamarch
