From ‘old people music’ to owning the streets: 60 years of Notting Hill carnival and me

My earliest memories of the Notting Hill carnival are of being mildly irritated. In its 1960s infancy, the event was strictly a Caribbean affair, transplanted to Ladbroke Grove as authentically as was practical. Its purpose was as obvious as its origins: giving Caribbean arrivals a chance to celebrate themselves by bringing the vibrancy of the home they left behind to these drab streets for a couple of days.

Vital as this was – and it really was – it didn’t cut much ice with surly 10- or 11-year-olds like me, being dragged around behind parading steelbands. Yes, it was great to see so many Black people out in the open together and your mums and dads laughing and having a good time, but did we need to be here? There was football to be played and bikes to be ridden, yet so many of us were being forced to walk for what seemed like miles following “old people music”.

Then as the 1970s got under way, everything changed. The London sound systems that had been establishing themselves over the previous few years – Coxsone Outernational, Jah Shaka, 6X6, Sufferah HiFi, TWJ and so on – assumed a growing presence at carnival, under the flyover or on the street. They were operated by men and women not much older than us, who understood how the post-Windrush generation defined their Blackness as they came of age in London and how, although roots and heritage were always important, we didn’t need to simply recreate the Caribbean.

The sound systems played the same choice of music we heard at dances and parties or in our own record collections, so we could find the reggae, the lovers rock, the soul and funk that soundtracked our lives right there set up outside accommodating pubs, caffs or people’s front doors. The big plus point was the sound systems were static, meaning if you weren’t dropping some foot you could stand around with your hands in your pockets, always a teenager’s default setting. Indeed the only walking you were obliged to do would be if the music wasn’t up to it or there weren’t enough people – ie women – at that particular sound, so you’d find another one. This might involve a bit of float-following, but, then again, it might not.

Refreshment was never a problem. Some Kentucky or a kebab when we were gathering at Turnpike Lane station, then load up with “supplies” before leaving, thus avoiding the so-called “carnival tax” temporarily inflating prices in Notting Hill off-licences. Our drinks of choice usually involved pre-mixing dark rum or Bacardi with Coca-Cola, or vodka with orange juice; beer was too heavy to lug around until they started selling it in those four packs held together with plastic rings. You’d drink a can, undo your belt, thread it through the empty ring and you were away. Some guys, more hardcore than me, would hang a pack off each hip then swagger round like a western gunslinger. (At this year’s Arsenal victory parade my son turned up with an insulated backpack containing rum, mixer, beer and ice that didn’t melt over the course of six hours, and I thought: “Wow! How we could have done with that at the carnival in the 70s!”)

Suddenly, the Notting Hill carnival made sense. Youngsters came down in droves because this was our carnival now, and while we appreciated what it stood for historically, we wanted to enjoy ourselves, too. You wouldn’t dream of missing it. Carnival was the place to run into familiar faces who you probably didn’t know by name and might not have seen since last year’s event but you were glad to have a quick chat with.

Just as the crowds swelled so did the area the event occupied. Sound systems would mostly set up outside the parade route, and by renting front gardens for the weekend there were smaller rigs as far as the canal up by Harrow Road to the north and Colville Terrace to the south – gentrification hadn’t been invented at that point – in between Ladbroke Grove and Chepstow Road. There were street dances of varying sizes everywhere, many doing a roaring trade selling drink or barbecue to the foolishly unprepared, and this takeover created one of the most attractive features of the weekend.

In the early 1970s, when police harassment was commonplace, racist microaggressions were a part of everyday life and the hospitality industry wasn’t living up to its name, just being able to walk about such a large area of London seeing far more people that looked like you than didn’t, enjoying a drink and a dance or just pissing about and not being bothered by anybody was simply brilliant. It was as if we owned those streets for four days. Everybody I knew went to work the following week with a bit of a spring in their step. And most likely exhausted: back in such unregulated times, revelry tended to kick off on Friday evening and go through to Monday night and Tuesday morning, with sound systems playing until the J’ouvert celebrations welcomed the sunrise.

My peak carnival years were the early 1970s through to the early 1980s; the riot of 1976 changed things. How and why it kicked off is a different conversation, but the aftermath of overpolicing, increasing regulation and media that used violence and criminality as the starting point for reporting: all of this squeezed out a degree of the joyful anarchy and spontaneity that had made it so beautiful. Many people, especially out-of-towners, became scared to go and the tens of thousands that did were aware of a palpable tension, especially around 7pm when the police moved to shut down the sound systems.

Naturally this changed the way we approached it, and perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of the shift was that an essentially self-regulating event was becoming subject to decisions being made elsewhere, giving the carnival the flavour of something being done to us rather than by us. It didn’t really matter how the content carried on evolving; the whole affair had become far too orderly. It doused the spark one bank holiday at a time, far from that untidy, magnificent era of mass-participation when anybody, just by showing up, knew they were genuinely contributing to the true essence of carnival.

But of course the Notting Hill carnival kept going. And as it reaches its 60th anniversary it seems to have been regenerating in size and spontaneity again as the next generation bring back that joyful anarchy. May the streets feel like theirs.