After a thunderous set on the decks from Nabihah Iqbal, who played the club mix of The Contortions’ Contort Yourself to much delight from the crowd, Linton Kwesi Johnson opens the night with a staggering retrospective set of his poetry. The Brixton-via-Jamaican poet stands sentinel at the front of the stage, reading politically charged poems masterfully. On completing the first, he says: “that poem could have been about events today. I wrote it in 1973.” Johnson disperses his poems, all dense with strong statements and vivid imagery, with tales of the horror of growing up as a young black man in the 1970s and 80s. He tells allegories of the New Cross Massacre and Brixton Riots of 1981, and ends with a number about the 90s conflicts in East Africa and Eastern Europe. Johnson is magnetic throughout, a packed out 100 Club crowd shushes every individual instance of talking, and the poet walks off to a rapturous applause.
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