Quote:
Originally Posted by William_the_Bloody
Wow! I would have loved to see Dennis Bovell with LKJ, personally LKJ is bar none one of my favorite artists of all time.
You are one lucky man, I know he is 60, but I hope he gives touring one last go.
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I hoping that Linton does one last tour with the Dub Band. I was the house deejay at the Channel club in Boston at LKJ and the Dub Band's 1984 concert. It was the single best concert I ever attended. By all appearances, Linton at age 60 looks like he's in great health but he hates touring.
I got to meet both Linton and Dennis. Linton was a bit aloof but Dennis was a big gregarious fellow who was very friendly.
I was told that Linton was into a black consciousness thing and trusted very few white people. Linton had no use for the Rastafarian concept of one love and racial harmony & was a committed Pan-African socialist. His dub poetry was influenced by U-Roy and I-Roy but Linton was never a member of the brotherhood of the Rastafarian believers.
In 2012, Linton Kwesi Johnson joined such distinguished authors as Harold Pinter, JG Ballard and Doris Lessing as winner of the Golden PEN award, for a lifetime's distinguished service to literature. It's the highest literary award in the UK. In 2005, LKJ received an appointment as visiting professor of literature at Middlesex University in London.
My biggest thrill at the 1984 LKJ concert was when Linton's opening act, Gil Scott-Heron came up to my deejay booth and startled me with the greeting, "
Hi I'm Gil". I told Gil, he didn't need to introduce himself to me...I'd worshiped his music for years. Gil joined me as impromptu deejay for my first set of songs.
Gil was the most charming performer I ever met. Part of Gil's charisma was his towering presence on stage... He stood around 6' 7" tall (200.66 cm in UK measures), which automatically commanded the attention of everybody, whenever he entered a room or walked onto a stage.
It crushed me when he died in 2011 in New York. Gil was bedeviled by both drugs and alcohol when he was alive, but he was sober when I met him at the Channel gig in 1984. He ordered ginger ale when I bought him a drink and he refused to indulge when a somebody offered him a toke off a spliff. Gil chronicled his own struggle with chronic addiction in both his poems and his music.