In 1979, Janet Kay‘s piercing falsetto was one of the defining sounds of the summer. Silly Games, her bittersweet ode to a faltering relationship, enjoyed heavy radio play, thanks in part to a subtle arrangement by songwriter/producer Dennis Bovell, a distinctive drum pattern from Aswad‘s Angus Gaye and distribution on a Warners subsidiary. The song reached No 2, the highest chart placing for a black, British woman at that point. It also signalled a coming of age for lover’s rock, the softened, British reggae sub-genre that focused on romance, but, as noted in Menelik Shabazz’s documentary The Story of Lover’s Rock, involved so much more than setting teenaged heartbreak to a reggae beat.

Though a primarily underground phenomenon, lover’s rock influenced pop acts such as the Police, Culture Club and Sade, and offered an antidote to the male-dominated space of Jamaican roots reggae, whose Rastafari iconography and political specifics were often alienating for many black Britons. Lover’s rock became crucial to the formation of a black British identity during a politically and socially turbulent era.

“Lover’s rock is a genre that black Britons can claim as their own,” Shabazz says. “This music, which reached global proportions, yet was virtually unrecognised in the UK, was also a vehicle for a special kind of intimacy. It opened up our chakras, although we didn’t realise it at the time – this music about young males and females dealing with their emotions. And it was also a coping mechanism for what was happening in the streets.”

Kay says: “People of our generation gravitated towards lover’s rock because it was created here. And it wasn’t only black people that enjoyed the music. It crossed over to everybody of our generation.”

The Barbados-born Shabazz is best known for his 1981 drama Burning an Illusion and the BBC docudrama Catch a Fire. He describes the new film as a “fusion documentary”: “It looks at lover’s rock through interviews, comedy, live performance, dance and archive footage. It tells the story of its south London origins to success in Japan and becoming a global brand. In between, we look at the underground scene around the music – its intimate dance, the soundsystems, the social backdrop in the volatile era of the 70s and 80s – as well as the lack of mainstream success in the UK.”

Lover’s rock emerged in the mid-1970s, when the owners of London’s soundsystems began cutting romantic ballads with young women singing: Count Shelly issued Ginger Williams’s Tenderness in 1974, only to be surpassed the following year by 14-year-old Louisa Mark’s Caught You in a Lie, a peculiar rendition of an obscure soul song, put together by Bovell for Lloydie Coxsone’s soundsystem. The emerging genre solidified after a Jamaican immigrant, Dennis Harris, opened a recording studio in south-east London, with Bovell and guitarist John Kpiaye as the in-house players. They crafted reggae cover versions of Motown and Philadelphia soul ballads with vocals from TT Ross, Cassandra and the harmony trio Brown Sugar, featuring future Soul II Soul vocalist Caron Wheeler. Once Harris formed a label called Lover’s Rock, borrowing the name from an Augustus Pablo dub B-side, the new music had its name.

“The name came from the record label, in the same way that early ska in this country was named after the Blue Beat label,” says Linton Kwesi Johnson, the reggae poet whose regular backing band has featured Bovell and Kpiaye since the late 1970s. “It was a way to give women a voice in reggae music in Britain, and an alternative to the social commentary of the male-dominated productions. Like British reggae in general, lover’s rock provided cultural continuity for the second generation [of black Britons], albeit with a distinctive British sound.”

“Dennis Harris was a visionary,” declares Neil Fraser, the London-based record producer better known as Mad Professor, whose Ariwa label has enjoyed widespread success with lover’s rock and roots alike. “You’d go to parties, and when his records started to play, that’s the time to grab a girl and dance.”

Bovell adds: “He made such a contribution to helping youngsters have a sense of purpose. We were going to make the equivalent of Motown in reggae, with the new Supremes from south London, and the music we were making was supposed to be tough enough to stand up to any Jamaican import.”

In its early phase, lover’s rock was largely a south London phenomenon, but following the unprecedented success of Silly Games, its centre temporarily shifted east, as producers such as Leonard “Santic” Chin and Bert “Ital” Campbell abandoned roots reggae for lover’s rock. “Santic and Ital were recording out of a small studio in the East End called Easy Street,” Fraser says. “Leonard Chin had been recording Augustus Pablo and Horace Andy in Jamaica, but one of the first songs he did in England was I’m So Sorry by Carroll Thompson, and that went mega. He followed it up with Jean Adebambo’s Paradise, and Ital had a chart success with Love Me Tonight by Trevor Walters – a really jazzy record – so east London had a hit factory going on, and lover’s rock stayed in east London until we developed our sound enough to compete.”

In the 1980s, as labels such as Ariwa and Fashion started tapping into the market, lover’s rock became associated with south London again, at a time when Jamaican singers such as Sugar Minott, Gregory Isaacs and Johnny Osbourne were tailoring their output for British lover’s rock fans. The Ariwa breakthrough came in 1985, with Sandra Cross’s rendition of the Stylistics’ Country Living. “My studio was a crude eight-track affair that couldn’t match up to the competition,” Fraser says. “Once I saw that the east London sound was getting stale, I changed my studio and came up with a cover of Country Living, which the Mighty Diamonds had already done in reggae, and got Sandra Cross to sing it. The first thousand copies sold out in two days. Then we had big hits with Lorna G, Kofi and John McLean. So we held the lover’s rock thing from 1985 till 1992, when it didn’t really make sense no more.”

Although singers such as Peter Hunnigale, Lloyd Brown and Donna Marie would continue to enjoy success with it, lover’s rock began to wane in the early 1990s, superseded by digital styles but also co-opted by Jamaican artists. “There’s always been people in England who didn’t quite believe in lover’s rock, who thought real reggae comes from Jamaica,” Fraser says. “Also, mainstream radio was reluctant to play reggae – especially British reggae – unless it was on a major label. But I think lover’s rock was hijacked by the clever Jamaicans like [producer] Donovan Germain, who was coming to England all the time, and who came up with Audrey Hall’s One Dance Won’t Do, which had a nice Jamaican bass line. Records like that took the whole lover’s rock scene back to Jamaica, as well as people like Maxi Priest, who went to Jamaica to record once he started to make hits. All those things helped the British scene to become less significant.”

The music has now gained a new lease of life in Japan, inspiring local singers such as Sandeii, Machaco and Iria to delve into the form; Kay recently inked a multi-album deal with Sony Japan. “[A gig in Japan] was the first time I’d ever experienced people crying in the audience,” Kay says. “They don’t necessarily understand all the lyrics, but they understand the sentiment of the music.”

Shabazz says: “Many of today’s young people were born out of the lover’s rock experience, yet express themselves in very different ways in music and in dance. So for me, the film is important not only in telling an untold story, but as a vehicle to bring younger generations into our story. The media focus has often been on our parents’ generation, the ‘Windrush generation’, but my generation, the ‘rebel generation’, who came in the 60s, and those who were born here in the 70s, we have been very influential to mainstream British culture – just like lover’s rock.”

“Lover’s rock was the black soundtrack of the era,” Fraser says. “A lot of kids who are in their 20s and 30s now, their parents would have been making love to lover’s rock records, so undoubtedly, it’s in their DNA.”

• The Story of Lover’s Rock opens at selected cinemas from 28 September