The legendary Linton Kwesi Johnson, recognized as the voice of Britain’s post-Windrush generation and who single-handedly defined the term “dub poetry”, has straddled creative disciplines for decades. Kwesi Johnson came to Brixton, South London from Jamaica in 1963 and joined the Black Panthers while still a schoolboy. At first, his lyrics of anger, struggle and defiance spoken in his Jamaican London patois were often sung to the beat of a reggae beat, resulting in a series of groundbreaking albums in the late 70s and the early 1980s, including Dread Beat an’ Blood (1978); forces of victory (1979); bass culture (1980) and make history (1983).
The 70-year-old’s influence also spans several generations of the British art world. When Yinka Shonibare co-ordinated the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition, he invited Kwesi Johnson to read Di Great Insohreckshan, his poem about the 1981 Brixton riots, as part of the academy’s sound programme. Steve McQueen also used Johnson’s poetry in his acclaimed BBC drama series small ax (2020); and commissioned a new poem, Towards Closure, for his three-part documentary series Uprising (2021). But Kwesi Johnson had already made inroads into contemporary art: in the early 1980s he organized an open exhibition of black British art with the aim of bringing art into line with the fight for racial justice which included Keith Piper, Eddie Chambers and Sonia Boyce.
Peter Doig and Linton Kwesi Johnson
Photo: Louisa Buck
It was also around this time that a young Peter Doig went to see Kwesi Johnson perform at The Ritzy in Brixton. “One of the musicians whose music brought me to London was Linton,” Doig tells me. “I first saw him in 1980, the year after I arrived from Toronto.” Doig still vividly remembers the Brixton gig as “a powerful performance as much as a gig: LKJ had that kind of styleless elegance…he didn’t sound like a musician – whether it was reggae or the pop world – his lyrics were spoken, which really matched his appearance, kind of like a cool professor, his music still sounds as fresh and surprising now as it did then.
Another long-time LKJ fan is Sir Peter Blake, the tall, nonagenarian old man of British pop art, who remembers seeing Kwesi Johnson supporting Ian Dury and the Blockheads at Hammersmith Palais in 1979 and being so enthusiastic that he returned. seven nights in a row.
Blake’s 2020 watercolor portrait head of Kwesi Johnson, along with a new painting by Peter Doig commemorating that concert long ago in Brixton, are currently on display at The wise man, at the Paul Stolper Gallery, an exhibition that pays a timely tribute to Kwesi Johnson’s central and enduring cultural role in the UK and beyond. There are also prints by Kwesi Johnson’s near-contemporary Denzil Forrester, a knitted yarn portrait of musician Rod Melvin (who also performed with Ian Dury) and a bronze bust and two paintings of Errol Lloyd, the London-based, Jamaican-born artist. who was a key member of the Caribbean artists movement and remains a longtime friend of Kwesi Johnson.
Peter Doig’s New Painting Commemorating Kwesi Johnson’s Ritzy Concert
Other works include Kwesi Johnson’s collage of portraits of Petra Börner that was used for the cover of her 2006 anthology published by Penguin Books, and a trio of distinctive bearded portraits by Derrick Alexis Coard that the late artist has described as “a symbolic expression of possible change for the African American male community”.
Doig, Blake and Errol Lloyd were all in attendance for the show’s crowded opening, which was also memorably marked by the ever-dazzling presence of the Big Man in his trademark suit and cap. With characteristic modesty, Kwesi Johnson said the show was “a golden opportunity” to showcase the work of her friend Errol Lloyd, saying, “That’s why I’m here”. He then hypnotized the room with three poetic elegies to his father, his nephew Bernard and the Afro-German poet May Ayim, as well as a recent poem written in Brixton, in the midst of the pandemic, against a grim background of “di unrelentin”. ‘wailin’ sound’ of the sirens’.
Subsequently, in a conversation with Roger Robinson, writer, performer, and TS Eliot Poetry Prize winner (who said he “wouldn’t have written anything without LKJ”), Kwesi Johnson reiterated that, despite playing with everyone from Pete Tosh to Gil Scott-Heron and Siouxsie and the Banshees, and after being offered – and turned down – a multi-album deal from Island Records, nonetheless “the music n was just a way to reach more people”. At LKJ, it is always the words that prevail, as he says, “writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon”. And right now, we all need his words more than ever.
• The wise man, Paul Stolper Gallery, London, until April 21
