Concrete Jungle

Sukhbender Singh is the author of Concrete Jungle, a radio play performed on the BBC Asian Network which shares its backdrop with Bob Eaton’s Three Minute Heroes and my novel, Ghost Town.

"As the storm of racial tension in Coventry rises, two young Asians, Harri and Rudy, each have to make a choice about what's most important to them - music, girls, or standing up to be counted."

Here he talks to me about growing up in Coventry in the 1980s, and the trials and tribulations of getting Concrete Jungle produced.

Sukhbender, what are your memories of Coventry from the early 80s? Did you take part in the protest marches that followed the murder of the young student, Satnam Singh Gill? 

I was born in India and came to Coventry when I was two. In 1981, I was fourteen - too young to be directly involved. My mum would never have let us!  What I do remember is that going into Coventry City Centre could be a bit of a tortuous trail. We used make sure we went shopping early because the skinheads didn’t come out until later.

Most of those involved in the protests were around five years older. Nineteen, twenty. It was one of the first times that young Asians took a stand against racism.  For the older generation, it was all about keeping your head down, not being noticed. But now there was a new generation who felt British. I know some of the older ones got involved in vigilante patrols, protecting their communities.

How did you come to write Concrete Jungle?

Concrete Jungle was one of the first things I wrote. A classic example of ‘write what you know’. It started off as film script. I first tried peddling it around in 1993, and then again around 2000.  The first time they all wanted it to be more like My Beautiful Launderette.  The second time round it was, “can’t you make it more like Bend It Like Beckham?” The only thing Concrete Jungle has in common with either of those is that it’s about Asians! After a while, I decided there was no point. I had to move on.

I started working on Silver Street, which was a radio soap opera for the BBC Asian Network.  When that was canned, the BBC decided to put some one-off dramas on the Asian Network, so I pitched Concrete Jungle to them. I cut the film script down to 50 minutes, hoping that they might do a longer piece, or maybe a two-parter.  But in the end I had to squeeze it all down to 25 minutes, which didn’t give much scope.

2011 was an interesting time for Concrete Jungle to come out.  Not only was it the 30^th anniversary, but we were in a recession again, there was another Royal Wedding ... I was working with the producer, James Pereis, who was brilliant and fully understood the script and the times. But the BBC controllers didn’t know the history. They were concerned about the riot scene and they didn’t like my using the word Paki.  How can you tell the story of that time without using that word?  They wanted to sanitise it.

The play used comedy to highlight the tensions of growing up Asian, which wasn’t all about racism. It was about not having a job, unrequited love, all that stuff. It wasn’t overtly political, but there were political undertones.

The playlist for Concrete Jungle includes tracks from Two Tone Bands like The Specials, The Selecter and The Beat. Yet Horace Panter has said that not that many young Asians would go to The Specials’ concerts.  How do you think Coventry’s Asian youth viewed Two Tone and Ska? Did it speak to them, or did they feel excluded? Were you a fan yourself?

A few Asian kids were into things like The Jam and The Clash. But most of them were listening to Bhangra or Filmi (Bollywood music). My brother loved Two Tone, though and so I got into it. No one else captured the zeitgeist quite like they did.

When The Specials announced their Concert for Racial Harmony, we were very excited.  But we couldn’t afford the tickets. And we were all scared things would kick off again.  Everybody thought the National Front would use it as an excuse to make more trouble, though in the event, that didn’t happen. 

This is potentially a huge question – but how do you think things have changed for young British Asians in the past thirty years? Is Coventry in particular a better place to be growing up than it was thirty years ago – or a worse?

It’s hard for me to say.  As an adult, your cognitive map of the city changes.  But the vibe is not the same as it was during the 80s recession.  There aren’t the same tensions. 

It feels like a calmer place.  I understand it’s now one of the safest cities in England. There was a small demonstration by the English Defence League a while back, but hardly anyone turned up.

Thank you, Sukhbender.  

Coming soon:  Jatinder Verma, Artistic Director of Tara Arts, the first Asian Theatre Group in Britain (founded in 1977).

Three Minute Heroes

Bob Eaton was Artistic Director of the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry from 1996 to 2003.  During that time, he wrote and produced Three Minute Heroes, a “jukebox musical” about a young Ska band in Coventry, set against a background of the same events that inspired Ghost Town.

Here he talks to me about why it was so important to him to put on a play about the Two Tone era, how he approached writing it and what Coventry is like today.

First can you tell us a bit about your background.  Are you Coventry born and bred?

No. In fact, I was Manchester and Liverpool during the Two-Tone era. So, really, my experience of Two Tone was much the same as the rest of the country - seeing the Specials and The Selecter on Top Of The Pops.

So how did you come to write Three Minute Heroes ?

I started work under Peter Cheeseman at the Victoria Theatre in Stoke on Trent.  He pioneered the idea of developing work for the stage that was based on real local events, which made me think a lot about how theatre relates to the community - the ‘soil in which it grows,’ as it were. 

There was also a bit of me that was a bit of a wannabe rock ’n roller who had been persuaded to do my exams and go to university instead... I guess that was why, in the late sixties and early seventies, I started developing the idea of what these days you’d call ‘jukebox musicals,’ using actors who were also musicians, which was a new idea back then.  When I went to the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool in 1981, I put on a show called Lennon, which is still being produced now.  That was a local story, and timely, as he’d been killed the year before.

So when I came to the Belgrade Theatre, I knew from the start that I wanted to do something about Two Tone, even if it took me a few years to get round to it.  It was a local story, it was exciting, and it had a political dimension to it.  I spent a long time talking to people like Pauline Black, Neol Davies and James Mackie from the Selecter, and Horace Panter and Roddy Byers from The Specials, finding out how Two Tone had come about for them.

It was a strange period musically. Punks and latter-day mods were coming together with musicians with a soul/funk/Caribbean background. And then you had people like Pauline, who was mixed race but had grown up in a white (adoptive) family, and (as she herself says) the nearest she had come to Caribbean music was Joan Armatrading.

At the same time, this wave of fascism and racism was building, and musicians were reacting to that.

Three Minute Heroes wasn’t a documentary.  We decided to tell it as the story of a group of young musicians coming up in the wake of bands like The Specials. We had five young actors, some of whom could play a bit.  And then we had a live band, directed by Akintayo Akinbode.

As well as the joys of the Two Tone era, Three Minute Heroes also addresses the rising tensions between skinhead and Asian youths, and the protests that followed the murder of the young student, Satnam Singh Gill. How did you go about portraying those events on stage?

We dealt with it indirectly, I guess.  One of the members of the band – a Rasta – is set upon in the Precinct late at night and badly beaten up.  Their roadie – the unmusical one who feels a bit left out -  becomes a skinhead.  But then, appalled by the violence he sees around him, joins CovWAR* and goes on vigilante patrols.

[*Coventry Workers Against Racism – which in my novel became CovARA – the Coventry Anti-Racist Alliance]

And though the band breaks up, they come together again one last time to play at The Specials’ Concert for Racial Harmony.

Your play had two seasons at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, in 2000 and 2001. How was it received by a Coventry audience?

The audience was always very mixed – but on the nights that were the most packed, there were a lot of men of a certain age and waist size – ex rude-boys, jumping on stage and dancing at the first opportunity.

On one amazing night, after the end of the show, the band on stage was joined by Neol Davies, then Pauline Black, then Horace Panter ...

I’d love to put it on again.  I’ve been talking to the current Artistic Director at the Belgrade.

There was a screening a couple of years ago, at Coventry’s Two Tone Central, wasn’t there?

Screening is a bit grand. It was a video I’d shot on a hand held camera, with the stage half-blocked out by someone’s bald head. I think about seven people came.

Earlier this year, you were involved with Shaun Prendergast’s Re-Creation Quartet, shown as part of Coventry’s Mysteries Festival.  Can you tell us a bit about that?

The Re-Creation Quartet was a cycle of four short plays focused on different periods in Coventry’s history, each one to be staged in a different square in Coventry. The last of the four plays was a Two Tone story.  Shaun didn’t really know the history, so I more or less re-wrote that one.

We worked with kids from Ego Performance, and we had a band, including Harrington Bembridge, the drummer from The Selecter. They performed it in Broadgate, which is now all pedestrianised. We had kids of all races dressed up in 2-Tone gear. Skinheads with shaven heads. Maggie Thatcher and Arthur Scargill on stilts. Dancing riot police.  The audience were all skanking.

Those kids were all far too young to remember the events from first time round.  But they were all so into the whole 2-Tone thing, it makes me think maybe its time has come again.

[Click here and scroll down to see some fabulous pictures of the performance from John Coles ]

You still live in Coventry now.  How would you describe the city today?

I think it’s much more chilled. A nicer place to live. It had a bad reputation at one time for late night violence, but that’s all abated. For my kids, growing up in Coventry, racism isn’t even a question. There are poorer areas of the city of course – Foleshill Road and Stoney Stanton Road. But unlike some cities, it isn’t ghettoised. People from different backgrounds mix.

Thank you, Bob!
Coming soon to this blog: Sukhbender Singh, author of Concrete Jungle, and Jatinder Verma, founder of Tara Arts, the first Asian Theatre Group in the UK.