Ska Man
By Rab MacWilliam
So you enjoy weekends in Stoke Newington bars but feel that you’re overdosing on DJs playing contemporary hip hop, dance, indie or whatever? Give your ears a rest and visit the Coach and Horses on Sunday nights, when one Harvey Sylvester Roberts – aka DJ Harvey – spins his amazing collection of ska, rocksteady and reggae.
An amiable, laid-back 60-year-old man – and a committed Rastafarian (‘it’s born in you and manifested in later years’) – Harvey was born in Kingston, Jamaica – ‘I was a country boy. I was properly brought up’. He arrived in England with one of his four sisters in 1961 and made his home in Cazenove Road with his parents. We hear a lot about racism in that period. Did he experience this? ‘When you’re young, you don’t see it. Perhaps there was racism but I didn’t really notice.’ Aside from a brief dalliance with Burton-on-Trent (‘man, you could smell the beer in the air’), Harvey has spent all his adult life in Stoke Newington, including Kyverton Road, Downs Park Road and, most recently in his flat in Rectory Road, where I visited him.
Sitting in his kitchen in his Bob Marley T-shirt, and with his locks tucked under his leather hat, he described his musical upbringing and influences. Although the first record he bought was ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, and he loved any pop and soul music with a beat and rhythm, he then re-discovered the attractions of ska and reggae. His mum was a ska enthusiast and used to play it all the time. Says Harvey, ‘it’s in my blood. Ska was everywhere in the 1960s and was the music of the times’. He began collecting Jamaican music in his early 20s, beginning with the Techniques ‘I’m in Love’ on the Bluebeat label, and he now has at least 2000 7’’ singles (‘I’ve never got round to counting them’), as well as shelves packed with 12” singles and albums, all concentrating on the period between the early 1960s and the late 1970s. His collection stops when ‘the computer came in and music was no longer natural’. There seems hardly space for his sound system, of which he is justifiably proud.
No surprises to discover that his hero is Bob Marley – ‘a prophet and a true Rastafarian; reggae died with Marley’. Indeed, the two pictures on his sitting room wall are of Marley and Haile Selassie, late Ethiopian emperor and Rasta’s spiritual father. He appears to have little time for contemporary Jamaican music, with its cynical, and often misogynistic and homophobic lyrics and rasping deliveries, preferring instead the mellow innocence and dub beats of bands from that early- to mid-1960s period. As Harvey says, and I can only concur, ‘everything was better in the 1960s’. He remembers seeing Stevie Wonder and the Skatalites, among many others, in clubs on Dalston Lane, and naturally he was there for the famous Marley concerts at the old Rainbow in Finsbury Park in 1977.
Harvey is by profession a delivery driver, and has been for 25 years, but his job allows him the time to DJ across the area. ‘I’ve played everywhere: Stoke Newington, Stamford Hill, Tottenham and far beyond’. He started his current gig at the Coach and Horses just before Christmas last year, and it is fast becoming one of Stokey’s most popular evenings. He is slightly bemused by this, saying that ‘young kids come along and they stay to listen to my music’. That’s because it’s distinctive, melodic and friendly, unlike so much of the junk that passes today for contemporary music culture.
Visit The Coach and Horses on Sunday evenings and find out for yourself.
Coach and Horses, 178 Stoke Newington High Street, N16. Tel: 0207 254 6697 |
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