Don exudes an atmosphere of sharp intelligence: an alert flexible thinker, seemingly very relaxed and at peace with himself. He knows where he has been, what he has achieved, and he is comfortable with himself, that much is clear. He maintains a busy work load, currently reworking and remixing rare dubs with Dan Donovan from the vaults of Kingston's dub plate masters, Bunny Lee and King Tubby (the latter was brutally murdered in a senseless killing, the gunman as yet not brought to justice), working on interviews and a film about the NY and Detroit garage punk scene of the mid to late 70's, ["I don't think that story has been told properly yet: Richard Hell, Television, I want to get their story down on film, record them and their memories and contribution fully, as they deserve"] plus running his own sound system, The Dub Cartel Sound System. Don breaks off from talking for awhile to pay attention to his daughter, who looks about a year old. She sits and surveys the situation, wide eyed and with some bemused concentration, not uttering a sound. Barely able to contain his energy levels, Don jumps from topic to topic enthusiastically.

DL: Notting Hill , this whole area, you know, its like my office. I walk around here, and always meet someone I know with a new project, work out some good deal for a place to hold a sound system dance or some other business.

Don Letts can get away with it, and he does. And he has a history and credentials to prove it, to back it up, which began in earnest around 1974/5… He tells me that in the mid 70's, he was just a young black man from Brixton, heavily in to funk, the JB's, Sly and The Family Stone. Ideologically, the Black Panthers, Huey Newton ("Revolutionary Suicide"), Assata Shakur, Eldridge Cleaver ("Soul on Ice"), George Jackson ("Blood in My Eye" and "Soledad Brother"), Bobby Seale ("Seize the Time") were moulding influences for him, but somehow, the African American Black Panthers perspective and solutions were not enough for the young Don Letts…
 

DL: My parents' generation had come over on the Windrush, and they had made their lives acceptable through so much struggle, toeing the line, knuckling under, but for us, that just wasn't going to work. It was too obvious we were getting the short end of the stick: you had to see it as it really was, and I identified pretty quickly, that the way we blacks were being treated within the school system was fundamentally wrong. I couldn't accept what I was being told: As a black man, they would say to me "Go join the GPO, or work on the London Underground ". Obviously, I wanted more…

So, how did you progress from being an earnest Black Panther sympathiser and funk fanatic, to rubbing shoulders with anarchists and Situationists, (The Sex Pistols, Vivienne Westwood, Mclaren and all the others)?

DL: I was a Brixton boy, born and bred. As a young Black man at that time, I loved funk, I had an Afro, Italian L'Uomo Vogue fashions… What you have to realise is, that the blueprint for Black people in Britain pre-Rasta, was funk and soul… Ok, the music was good, and the political stances of a small number of the artists were commendable, but I have to tell you, so many aspects of that scene as grafted onto an emerging black culture in England were real BULLSHIT! It was bullshit because it involved emulation of another culture, emulation of another host nation, whilst we as young black men should have been revelling in our differences, our qualities which were distinctly ours! So that's what Rasta and punk did for us, it freed us up! We didn't have to fall for the same "cultural emulation" roles which our parents had succumbed to, which appeared to us as a form of cultural repression and castration.

So, besides the weighted school system, how did he perceive the source of the confusion, and how did he deal with it?

DL: I got totally into the Black Panthers, Huey Newton with his work "Revolutionary Suicide", and then there was George Jackson, with that book of real power, "Soledad Brother", and "Blood in my Eye". Those were powerful books for a guy like me, because we were truly seeking. I can't emphasise that strongly enough

And you didn't find what you were looking for in the Panther ideology?

DL: No. Look, it all seems so easy now, the very word just rolls off your tongue, "Black British", but for awhile back there, it wasn't so simple you know? Fundamentally the Black British and the Black American experience was different, right from source. Black Americans were dragged, screaming and kicking, from the shores of Africa to an utterly hostile America, whilst my parents, they bought a ticket on the "The Windrush" bound for London! So, right off, you have it there, a major fundamental difference. So even though I attended the Black Panther meetings, proudly wearing my Angela Davis badge, read "Soul on Ice", there was still so much more that we needed to do. It's true that we became aware, became conscious in many respects and that was partly due to those Panther ideologies, but the total relevance of that movement just didn't translate into the Black British experience.

So how did you reconcile yourself to growing up in a very European culture? Did you experience any strong conflicts?

DL: Well, I've already outlined some of the conflicts we experienced as Black British youth. One thing is for sure, I wasn't going to join the GPO, you understand? Also, there were new cultural exchanges going on among the black and white youth in London! I was hearing really freaky music like Captain Beefheart and Beatles tunes, and you know what, I loved that stuff, it wasn't like "Oh that's white man's shit!" I was being turned on by an alien culture, and essentially, this ongoing cultural exchange is what has inspired and informed me ever since. So out of this bad situation, good things were growing and it was a melting pot of influences going on! At the same time, all the hippest white guys were into checking out the latest funk clubs!