Steve McQueen: 'It's rebel music that moves me'
Reggae music is the beating heart of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series, which traces Black British experience from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. In the 1970s, when the characteristically defiant Bob Marley song that gives the series its title was released, McQueen’s aunt, Molly, used to regularly sneak out of her family house in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, on weekend nights to go to “blues parties” – all-nighters usually held in someone’s house.
Back then, the blues party was a staple of West Indian immigrant life in England, a makeshift club-cum-shebeen, usually held in someone’s front room or basement, where, as the night progressed, the sweet smell of ganja merged with the lingering aromas of West Indian home cooking. As an escape from her strict, religious upbringing, Molly would dance until dawn to roots reggae, sweet-sounding “lovers rock” and floor-shaking dub instrumentals.
“My uncle used to leave the backdoor open for her to get back in,” says McQueen, “so there was this dynamic of the day-to-day life lived under a quite confining Christian doctrine and the release of immersing herself for a few hours in this other world of music and rebellion that was thrilling because it was raw and illicit.”
McQueen himself recalls being taken as a child to a relative’s house and witnessing the carpet being rolled up and put in the bedroom, the furniture being rearranged to create more space and, as he tried to sleep, the muffled thud of a bassline echoing through the house. When he woke up hours later, he remembers, he was covered in coats that had been thrown on the bed by revellers.
