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I had a strange and quite unique experience this week. I introduced a film, Menelik Shabazz’s Step Forward Youth (1977), to a crowd at Brooklyn venue Light Industry, took my seat, and then, just under twenty minutes in, saw a person that looked rather familiar staring straight into the camera lens.
That person was my Dad.
There he is on the left.
He’s at a reggae dance with his friends somewhere in south London, he’s just taken a cheeky drag of a cigarette. He is, at a good guess, sixteen years old. I was so stunned by this sudden opening of a public portal into my personal history that I tapped the shoulder of the spectator sitting next to me, and stage-whispered “That’s my Dad!” “That’s so special!”, came their earnest and slightly surprised response.
The whole dance sequence is wonderful—and you can watch the whole film here—because it’s a pure snapshot of an era long before the ubiquity of cell phones fundamentally altered how young people interact with, and present themselves, on camera. It’s all a bit awkward and shuffly; you can see that the kids don’t quite know how to act in front of what would have hardly been lightweight, inconspicuous equipment at the time.
But hang on—I’ve seen this film before. That’s why I programmed it. Did I just forget he was in it? Or was it that when I watched it before, I wasn’t paying close attention? It’s a blink and you’ll miss it moment, and perhaps I blinked and missed it. The truth is, I’m not sure. I certainly had seen the clip. My Dad had posted it on Facebook some years back, but it had been removed from its original context, or if the context was cited, I’d missed the connection. I checked in with my Dad about it, and he said he couldn’t remember where the footage was shot. Our memories fail us in all sorts of curious ways.
As it happens, I did mention my Dad in my introduction to Step Forward Youth and David Koff’s Blacks Britannica, which I’ll repurpose in slightly condensed form under the image:
“It’s a bit of a coincidence that this screening is happening in the week of 75th anniversary celebrations of the arrival, in Tilbury, England, of the Empire Windrush, a ship that docked in 1948 bringing people from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and other Commonwealth islands to help fill vacancies caused by postwar labor shortages.
This generation, the so-called Windrush generation, includes my Grandparents, who moved from Jamaica to London in the 1950s, and the family of Step Forward Youth director Menelik Shabazz himself. He was born in Barbados in 1954, and came with his parents to England in 1959, the same year that my Dad was born. In more recent times, though, some of you may have heard of the Windrush scandal, which revealed that hundreds of Commonwealth citizens—many of them senior and frail—had been detained, denied legal rights, and in many cases deported as a result of a disgraceful 2012 Conservative government policy to systematically create and enforce a ‘hostile environment’–their words–for immigrants. The effects of this scandal are still reverberating now, and a lot of the issues raised in tonight’s films do sadly persist over forty years on.
Shabazz sadly passed away at the age of just 67 in June 2021. He was a trailblazer of Black British filmmaking. He was a founder member of the Ceddo Film and Video Workshop, one of a handful of influential collectives, alongside contemporaries like Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa, who, against the explosive social and political backdrop of early 80s Britain, engaged in programs of film and video production, training, seminars and screenings.”
Amusingly, my Dad’s cameo in Step Forward Youth is not his only cameo in a Menelik Shabazz film. If you look to the left of the above screengrab from the 2011 documentary The Story of Lovers Rock, you will see him again, this time a few years and a substantial accumulation of facial hair older, captured in a promotional photograph for his early-80s lovers rock band Natural Touch. Now you’ll know who to look out for when you watch these films.
Speaking of cameos, let’s play out with one of my favorite tracks from the R&B/funk band of the same name. “Love You Anyway”, with its glutinous slap bass undertow, is a highlight of Cameo’s 1984 LP “She’s Strange”. Great chorus, great sax solo, great George Benson-esque vocalized guitar lines. Fire it up!
Until next time!
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