Imported from Jamaica in the 1950s, sound systems offered UK audiences an alternative music industry with a nighttime scene of blues parties, makeshift dancehalls and word-of-mouth clubs. Lloyd Bradley considers sound systems' DIY culture, entrepreneurial innovation, and sonically superb technology.

Quite understandably, music is the most widely-accessed manifestation of the black presence in the UK – unless you worked really hard at it, it would be so much easier to avoid black people than to hide from black music. Maybe it’s because of such casual and widespread accessibility that one of the most significant aspects of British black music tends to get overlooked: it’s a commercial success story of astonishing proportions. If Eddy Grant or Jazzie B or Skepta had got to where they are making machine parts instead of music they’d be fêted as titans of industry, and that’s before you consider how these achievements happened in spite of rather than because of the mainstream music business.

Since the early years of the 20th century, when different musical flavours from across the Commonwealth came together in London bands to forge a unique take on jazz, the UK has been a world centre for black music invention. However, as the 1940s rolled into the 1950s – the Windrush years – along with the huge influx of Commonwealth immigrants to the UK, sound systems arrived from Jamaica.

Originating in Kingston in the late 1940s, sound systems were large, powerful and sonically superb PA-type rigs, purpose built to play records as a downtown dancehall alternative to costly live orchestras. Sound systems were moveable, self-contained collectives of various skill sets – the operator who manned the controls at a dance; the selector who decided what records to play and when; the deejay who toasted over the records; the engineer who maintained the equipment; security; transport; and a crew of youngsters willing to carry things (so-called box boys) – all ruled over by the owner, who might have more than one rig. Putting on dances and selling drinks at them was a lucrative, ghetto business in music-mad 1950s Jamaica, and critically, this was an enterprise that kept the money generated in the community. More than that, however, the sense of ownership of these operations by people who had very little, elevated sound systems far beyond mere entertainment.

The combination of DIY skills, entrepreneurial innovation and business savvy flourished to such a degree that sound systems became the beating heart of the island’s ghetto-regulated music industry, as operators seeking to stay ahead of their competition with exclusive tracks, began recording for themselves. This was pretty much the methodology that fetched up in the UK in the 1950s, where it found a ready-made and eager audience and began to build an underground circuit of blues parties, makeshift dancehalls and word-of-mouth clubs. Within a decade or so it had facilitated an alternative music industry that 50-odd years later, virtually unchanged, has rewritten many of the mainstream’s rules.

Firstly, the rhythms of choice shifted from Trinidad and calypso to Jamaica and ska as UK soundmen used their connections back home to source new music. Naturally, it wasn’t long before they started recording for themselves and, again in accordance with how things played out in Jamaica, they eventually started offering records for sale. They were sold in a network of small, specialist outlets, not all of which were record shops; some weren’t shops at all, but barbers or cafes or anywhere where black people congregated. A business model was in place that remains as efficient and self-contained today: sound system operators put on dances, charging on the door and selling drinks – their own drinks ('Licence? What’s that?'); crowds support a sound system by virtue of its exclusive music; with an audience established, unique recordings go on sale, pressed and distributed by the sound system owner. Sales figures won’t have given U2 too many sleepless nights but, crucially, there was, and is, a self-sustainability in place that could support the constant evolution audiences expected.