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In the late 1970s, whenever young Birmingham reggae band Steel Pulse performed their song Ku Klux Klan, the group’s vocalists would theatrically wear white KKK hoods onstage to illustrate the song’s lyrics, which excoriated the Klan’s violence, racism and cowardice. British audiences loved it and understood the power of a black band making such a striking visual statement, but in America it was different.
“American audiences were sort of dumbstruck and flabbergasted,” says lead singer David Hinds, now 68, remembering their first US visit, in 1981. “They told us they didn’t even know there were black people in England, let alone would do a song like Ku Klux Klan. In Boston a white guy jumped out of the audience and started a struggle onstage. In the end the police came and dragged him off. Our elderly African American T-shirt seller said he was scared for us every time we went onstage. He’d say ‘You don’t know America. This place is something else.’”
When the tour reached Birmingham, Alabama, where a black man had recently been lynched in nearby Mobile, they wore the hoods in front of a visibly segregated audience. “We could see the divide from the stage,” Hinds remembers. Founding guitarist Basil Gabbidon, 69, is no longer with the band but still marvels at what he now puts down to youthful bravery and naivety. “Looking back, we could have been shot or anything,” he says, “but I suppose if I saw a band doing something like that, I’d think, ‘These guys are serious.’”
The song – and the hoods – certainly made an impression on Bob Marley, when they toured together. “The expression on his face was simply ‘What the …. ?’!” Hinds chuckles. “He’d never seen anything like it. Nobody had, but after a while we didn’t need to wear them any more because the song had done its job.”
Today, ahead of their 50th anniversary celebration tour, Steel Pulse can look back on many such milestones. They were the first British reggae band to score a Top 10 album, with their debut Handsworth Revolution in 1978, and one of the first on Top of the Pops. “The first non-Jamaican act to win a best reggae album Grammy [for 1985’s Babylon the Bandit],” says Hinds. “The first – maybe only – reggae act to perform at a Presidential inauguration” – for Bill Clinton, in 1993. “There are a lot of firsts with Steel Pulse, but sometimes I feel we’re overlooked.”
Still, none of it could have seemed remotely possible when they started rehearsing in various parents’ houses with, as Gabbidon remembers: “My brother Colin playing the sofa with sticks, like a drum kit.”
A group of former Handsworth Wood Boys schoolfriends, they started the band in 1975 as teenagers wanting to play a British take on reggae. “We lived in an industrial area, so the music had a kind of metallic edge,” the guitarist explains. “Plus, we listened to everything from jazz-funk to Elton John. We didn’t want to sound Jamaican.” With Ronnie “Stepper” McQueen on bass, the songs reflected the British Black experience, not the Caribbean one informing most reggae at the time.
“We sang about our lives,” explains keyboard player Selwyn Brown, 66. “Institutionalised racism in the police and education, civil rights, injustice – and the treatment of our parents, the Windrush generation, who’d been invited to the UK to rebuild the country after the second world war. We wanted to be a voice for people who didn’t have a voice.”
Initially, gigs were hard to come by. Black clubs felt they were too militant or rebellious. “Or they’d say we were ‘too interesting’, musically,” chuckles Gabbidon. “They’d ask, ‘Can’t you just play some Dennis Brown?’” Things changed after the band’s management had the radical but inspired idea of putting them in punk clubs. “We were like: what?!” Brown chuckles. “In those days punks would spit and throw things if they liked an artist … so we thought, what happens if they don’t like you? But we took the chance.”
Thus, in the punk summer of 1977, the young Brummie reggae band nervously found themselves sandwiched between the Lurkers and Generation X at the Vortex club on London’s Wardour Street. “I was dreading going on,” Brown admits. “But before we played a note we introduced ourselves as a reggae band, not punk, and said, ‘You’re welcome to pogo or whatever but can you please not spit at us?’ To our surprise, nobody did. Instead, they listened. We stayed and watched all the other bands and the following week we were all over the music press.”
This was the beginning of a deep kinship and tours with the likes of the Adverts and the Stranglers. “The punks empathised with us because they went through similar experiences,” says Brown. “The sus laws [‘suspected person’ stop and search] and such. We were all rebelling against the system.” As Hinds puts it: “We became part of the punk family.”
After they signed to Bob Marley and the Wailers’ label, Island, Ku Klux Klan became Steel Pulse’s first single for the label. At school Hinds had achieved a poor grade in English, but discovering the poetry of William Blake and Alfred Tennyson inspired him to write lyrics. He penned the words to his band’s most controversial song in response to reading that Klan grand wizard David Duke was about to visit the UK to advise the National Front, but also drawing on his own experiences of being chased by older white men. “I used to kick a stone all the way to school in Handsworth,” he says. “So I wrote: ‘Walking around kicking stones, just minding my own business / I go face to face with my foe, disguised in violence from head to toe.’”
Released in April 1978, the single coincided with a huge march from Trafalgar Square to Victoria Park, where Steel Pulse, the Clash and others performed for Rock Against Racism. “The organisers expected 20,000 people, but over 80,000 turned up,” remembers Brown. “It was overwhelming.” The Labour politician Peter Hain – an RAR organiser then – has since said that the scale of that show was “decisive in running the NF out of town and helping to create a climate in which being racist was not acceptable”.
Ku Klux Klan was denied airplay and reached No 41, but the band’s momentum was unstoppable. The Handsworth Revolution album landed in the Top 10 and Marley asked them to support the Wailers in the UK and in Europe. “That was the first time I saw a crowd hold lighters in the air,” remembers Gabbidon. “Bob’s audience was so eclectic. Black, white, brown. I’m sure I saw some Martians there as well.”
Hinds, who fondly remembers playing football with Marley, still bitterly regrets turning down an offer to visit the singer in hospital in New York in 1981, when he had cancer. “I knew he’d lost his hair with the chemotherapy so I didn’t want to see this great man like that,” he sighs. “We spoke on the phone instead but there was no suggestion in his voice that he was ill. He talked about having us on his label and had all these plans. I didn’t know he’d been told he had a month to live. I said, ‘You know what? All I want you to do is get well soon so we can chant down Babylon together.’ That was the last time we spoke.”
It hasn’t been plain sailing for Steel Pulse. Hinds talks of being dropped by labels, business rip-offs and at one point having to record in “what was virtually a shack”. Today, only the singer and Brown remain from the Handsworth Revolution era, but they’ve navigated the ship through decades of personal, musical and political upheaval and still record and tour around the world.
“I think that’s been a combination of trying to stay current, creating an affinity with our fans and also a bit of luck and timing as well,” considers Brown. At times they’ve also had to hold their nerve, just as they did on that first trip to America. “When we told Island we wanted to call the first album Handsworth Revolution, [label boss] Chris Blackwell said ‘Nobody knows where Handsworth is. Can’t you call it Birmingham Revolution or something?’” remembers Gabbidon. “But we stuck to our guns. I like to think we put Handsworth on the map.”
