On 22 June 1948 the Empire Windrush tied up at Tilbury in Essex, carrying close to five hundred Caribbean migrants drawn by the offer of work in a Britain short of labour after the war. Among them was the Trinidadian calypsonian Lord Kitchener, who came ashore singing “London Is the Place for Me” for the Pathé cameras.
The city gave them less than the song promised. Their first nights were spent a hundred and eighty steps underground in the windowless deep shelter at Clapham South, and the search for lodgings ran into a colour bar, landlords turning Black tenants from the door and skilled arrivals taking whatever work they could get. The nearest labour exchange stood on Coldharbour Lane, so many stayed and built in Brixton, and Windrush Square, the civic space at its heart, was named in their honour and still gathers the city’s commemorations each June.
On Windrush Day itself, Monday 22 June, Kobo Town play Hootananny, bringing that Trinidadian calypso back, 78 years later, to the neighbourhood those arrivals built. Drew Gonsalves, born in Diego Martin just outside Port of Spain, founded the group in Toronto in 2004 and named it for the district of the capital where kaiso was born among the stickfighters’ chants; his own ear for it was set as a teenager in Lord Kitchener’s Calypso Revue tent.
Gonsalves keeps the calypsonian’s oldest brief, the singer as newsman, and peoples the songs with the cornered and the overlooked: Joe the Paranoiac, shut in his flat by rolling terror bulletins and certain a satellite hangs over his bed; Mr Monday, scavenging bottles to drum on while the street files him under madman. Both sit on Jumbie in the Jukebox, the band’s 2013 breakthrough, its title a jukebox haunted by a spirit replaying old Trinidadian sound. The debut, Independence, had set the method before it: calypso’s wordplay wired to roots reggae, ska and rock. The line runs back to the picong and reportage of the 1930s, Roaring Lion, Lord Invader, Attila the Hun, who slipped the week’s politics inside a punchline.
Over the years, that writing has travelled. Calypso Rose and Carlos Santana have both recorded his songs; Where the Galleon Sank took a JUNO for its passage through five centuries of Caribbean history, and the latest, Carnival of the Ghosts, drops a reveller at the roadside to wake among the jumbies (Back in 2022, we had a nice chat with Gonsalves about the album, and he took us through it track by track. You can hear that conversation on our podcast).
Few rooms in London suit their sound the way Hootananny does. Afro-Caribbean music runs through its week, dancehall, and reggae sound systems shaking the back room while a domino game carries on in the front bar and jerk smoke drifts in from the garden. It holds the whole line the Windrush brought, calypso through to ska, roots reggae, dub, raggamuffin and dancehall under one Brixton roof, and runs now as a community-owned non-profit, anything over costs going back into the local scene.
The Toronto band arrives at Hootananny midway through a European tour, rolling into Brixton just twenty-four hours after playing Liverpool’s Africa Oyé. They carry with them “London Town,” Gonsalves’s calypso addressed to the city and the knotted history it shares with Trinidad. Playing it here on Windrush Day is about as close as a song comes to a homecoming.
Kobo Town play at Hootananny Brixton on Windrush Day, Monday 22 June Tickets are available on DICE