As resident DJ at the Roxy in 1977, Don Letts was at the centre of London’s burgeoning punk scene. Playing mostly roots reggae, he was following a family tradition: his father ran the Duke Letts sound system in London. Inspired by the DIY ethos of punk, he soon reinvented himself as a filmmaker and shot his first film, ‘The Punk Rock Movie’, documenting many of the original punk bands at their peak. He later reinvented himself once again, forming Big Audio Dynamite with Mick Jones of The Clash. His latest film, ‘Punk:Attitude’, returns him to the Roxy and argues that the punk movement was about more than music. Fused spoke to the ‘rebel dread’ about the new film, his career and the state of the music industry today.
Fused: In ‘Punk:Attitude’ you trace the genesis of punk music from rock’n’roll acts like Jerry Lee Lewis through bands like The Stooges and later the New York Dolls. When did you first become interested in that music?
Don Letts: I first became acquainted with the punk movement as people now know it in the mid-seventies. The popular music was a million miles from the feeling on the street, it was stadium rock and ten minute guitar solos. Luckily for me I had a soundtrack for my situation which was reggae, but my white friends never had that so they set about creating their own and that became known as punk rock.
At the time were you listening to bands like The Stooges?
I’m first generation British black so I’d been listening to white music parallel with the reggae that I would have been hearing at home. So in tandem with listening to Jamaican music I’d grown up on the Beatles and the Stones and then evolved from that into more obscure seventies acts. I guess I started to seek things like the Stooges and the Dolls and the MC5 out when punk exploded and I got the gig as DJ at the Roxy. I tried to find stuff that I thought the punks could relate to. I started listening to ‘Raw Power’ or ‘Kick Out The Jams’ or whatever and I actually was turned on by it I have to say. I loved the energy of it.
So how did you end up working at the Roxy?
I was working at Acme Attractions on the Kings Road Chelsea back in the day when shops were the happening places not clubs. I used to play dub reggae in my shop constantly, and that would draw people in as much as the clothes did, if not more – that was the thing that got them through the door in the first place. The guy that started the Roxy was the shop’s accountant [Andy Czezowski] and he asked me to become DJ at the Roxy because of the reaction I got to the music in the shop.
And you got involved in filmmaking at the same time.
Well slightly after. What happens is punk rock kicks off and it’s all about this DIY thing. Everybody’s picking up guitars and I want to pick up something but the stage gets kind of full up really quickly. So, inspired by seeing films like ‘The Harder They Come’, and with the whole punk DIY ethos, I picked up a Super 8 camera and reinvented myself as a filmmaker. That’s something beautiful about that whole movement: it wasn’t just about music. It turned people on that would become writers, photographers, journalists, graphic designers. It was a complete subculture.
In the film there are a lot of great clips, are a lot of those from your own archives?
Obviously I haven’t got anything of the early New York scene or the LA scene that I shot because I wasn’t there. The stuff that’s of mine is most of the UK stuff. A lot of The Clash, The Slits, Banshees, all stuff that I shot back in ’76, ’77.
Was it hard to decide which clips to use and which to leave out?
Generally I tried to find archive that people hadn’t seen over and over. That was the first thing. Another thing that is a major factor in making programmes like this is cost, I mean the cost of archive now is phenomenal, bits of film that are thirty seconds long cost ten thousand pounds! That’s a factor as well but for the most part I tried to find stuff that people weren’t that familiar with.
Is that part of the reason why you looked into the No Wave scene, interviewing Glenn Branca and James Chance? Did you want to give exposure to those bands?
I wanted to widen the brief. We all know the holy trinity of Ramones, Pistols, Clash but the point of my film wasn’t supposed to be a nostalgic look back, it was a way to move forward. Punk rock is not this weird thing that happened back in the late seventies. It’s part of an ongoing culture.
Joe Strummer, as well as three of the Ramones have died recently and this month CBGBs has been handed a final eviction order. Did you think this was a prescient time to look back at that period?
It’s nothing to do with people dying or CBGBs closing. It was to do with the cultural climate as I see it today. It’s in a pretty sad state. We’re in a climate of the cult of celebrity, Pop Idol and all that stuff. People have forgotten about individuality and empowerment so that’s why I made the film: to show people there are other ways forward.
Moving on from the punk period, you went on to form Big Audio Dynamite. How did that come about?
Well, as everyone knows, Mick got the sack from The Clash and he moped around for a little bit. I remember going round to his house and saying to him, you know, “What you gonna do? You’re not gonna fucking go and drive a bus: get on with it, get another band together.” I introduced him, well he already knew, a friend of mine called Leo [Williams, AKA E-Zee Kill], who actually used to work at the Roxy. Leo was a bass player and Mick, slowly but surely, started to put Big Audio Dynamite together. Then one day I went to a club with him and Leo, and he looks to the left and there’s Leo, and he looks to the right and there’s me, and he thought, “Oh, this looks like a band.” But I said, “Well Mick, I can’t play anything.” He said, “Don’t worry about that, we’ll work something out.” He used the fact that I was a non-musician to bring new ideas to the band. Because I wasn’t fully trained in music I had no rules. I’d sample minute sections from films like The Good the Bad and the Ugly because it hadn’t been done before and I didn’t see why it couldn’t be done. So I was responsible for a lot of the sampling and the dialogue/sound-bite stuff. I also co-wrote most of the songs with Mick, making the fact that I wasn’t a musician an asset rather than a problem.
It sounds like you approached music making in the same way you approach filmmaking.
Yeah, I just threw myself in there and came up with the ideas rather than the know how. When I played live with Big Audio Dynamite I had coloured stickers on my keyboard telling me what to do. I would lift the keyboard up to show the audience, to basically say: “If you’re brave enough, you can do this thing too.” That’s another great thing about punk, it broke down that wall between the audience and the band, you know. Punk rock was all-inclusive: it wasn’t a spectator sport.
Are you still involved with music making?
Well, all the projects I’ve done lately have been music based. I’ve just finished a documentary on Sun Ra, a year and a half ago I did one on Gil Scott-Heron. All the projects I do are music affiliated. I DJ out every now and then as the Dub Cartel, do the odd remix now and then: I’ve got a foot in the door.
Would you like to talk about your Sun Ra film?
It was really interesting because the whole thing with ‘Punk:Attitude’ was to show people that this ideology existed way before 1977. You have to understand that this attitude isn’t just about music; it can manifest itself in all kinds of things. If you look at the art of Marcel Duchamp, the Surrealist art movement or the films of Buñuel or even something like Lenny Bruce: it has a punk attitude. So I’m doing Sun Ra and lo and behold here’s a guy who was born in 1914 who has got this attitude but he’s working in free form jazz. He had his own record label in 1956 and he’s pressing up his own records, they’re hand drawing the sleeves, they’re selling them at gigs. This was all stuff that the punks thought they invented and here’s a guy who’s doing it thirty years before. That was a kind of beautiful symmetry to show my idea of the attitude predating ’77, a great example of this attitude predating punk.
Do you feel that a movement like punk is needed today?
Well not punk, I ain’t talking about safety pins and Mohawks. But the attitude, the fight against complacency is definitely needed. People have forgotten about individuality and empowerment, everybody’s got that herd mentality. Somebody says in my film that when we got into music it was an anti-establishment thing but now people get into music to become part of the establishment. That’s the crux of the problem right there. If you want what the man’s offering, you’re screwed: you’ve got to have new values.
‘Punk:Attitude’ is out now.
Mark Ward