ONE afternoon in the late ’70s, Eddy Grant was making the regular pilgrimage from his home in North London to the Black Theatre of Brixton when he noticed the name of the market street next to Brixton tube station: Electric Avenue, so called because it was the first shopping street to be lit by electric light. ‘That’ll make a great title for a song one day,’ he thought, filing it away for future reference. The name resurfaced a few years later, when Grant was in desperate need of new songs. His stash of lyrics and tapes had gone missing when he moved from London to Barbados and now his record company were getting impatient. Working with engineer Frank Aggarat at his new Blue Wave Studio, Grant turned the street name into a song that contained subtle allusions to the 1981 Brixton uprising. It went to No 2 in the UK and US.
From the moment Grant arrived in London from Guyana at the age of 12, he knew that one day he’d go back to the Caribbean. That return was delayed by his success in The Equals, the pioneering mixed-race rock band for whom he wrote the No 1 “Baby, Come Back” as well as some of the first songs about the Black British experience – “Police On My Back” and “Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys”. In the 1970s, he learnt to dance and act, built a studio at his home in Stamford Hill and ran his own label, Ice Records. But Grant also continued to record, making music that was more evidently influenced by his West
