By the early 1970s, reggae had finally penetrated the mainstream and rattled around the world. In 1972, Jimmy Cliff starred in the movie "The Thick Path" and wrote a soundtrack for him, Bob Marley became a world superstar, and even Paul Simon did not miss this fashionable music, hiring Cliff's companionship to record his distinctly reggae-centric composition "Mother and Child Reunion".
At the same time, a movement inspired by a deeper, more powerful, less commercial sound, the dub reggae (aka dub), was gaining strength in the British underground. The main structural element of this movement was the sound systems. A kind of battles of sound systems - soundclashes - became an attribute of many parties. DJs from competing sound systems competed with each other in sound extraction techniques and in the exclusivity of the records used, many of which were printed on vinyl in a single trial copy (the so-called dub plates) just hours before the party. In the interest of the strictest secrecy, the DJs even brought the music with their backs to the audience - so that no one would peek at which particular track the speakers were playing.
The influence of reggae during this period stretched beyond the immigrant community: to the sounds of Jamaican origin beat the hearts of young Britons - including, incidentally, skinheads - and at the same time, this sound had an impact on the music, based on seemingly very different rhythms. We associate punk rock with hard guitar sounds, straightforward drums and screaming vocals, but it was reggae that was the soundtrack for the punks themselves.
The key figure here was DJ Don Letts, son of Jamaican parents. He worked at Acme Attractions, a London clothing store, and all day long, he started up a shaking dub diaphragm - from Londoners Sex Pistols to touring stars like Blondie. Soon Letts was invited to DJ at Roxy, a nightclub considered one of the punk scene centers. And since punk records were still tight at the time, Roxy's sound systems were mostly reggae. And the consequences didn't take long: The Clash recorded a cover of the "Police and Thieves" reggae standard
for his debut album, and John Lydon, after the collapse of Sex Pistols, made dub one of the foundations of the Public Image Ltd. Their album "Metal Box", the cornerstone of British post-punk, was largely the result of dub's integration into punk rock.
In the same years, numerous events were held under the slogan "Rock against racism": a vivid testimony to the coexistence of various sounds and cultures in British music.
The history of the British reggae was marked by many prominent participants, but perhaps the greatest contribution was made by Dennis Bowell, who for a long time had been the link between the different parts of the movement. A native of Barbados, who moved to London in 1953, he participated in soundclasses with his sound system Jah Sufferer, played an important role in the design of the Lavers-rock genre (a form of reggae with a strong emphasis on vocals and romantic lyrics), produced several guitar bands inspired by the Jamaican sound of The Pop Group or The Slits, recorded the 1980 Babylon soundtrack and was
a member of the Matumbi reggae band that existed until 1982.
By the 1980s, the reggae style had penetrated so many different aspects of British musical culture - both specifically immigrant and homegrown - that its echoes will be heard in a great many later musical genres and currents - from the second wave of skies to modern drama.
The sound of British rock boom bands of the 1960s was usually based on American rhythm and blues, in which local artists breathed youthful fervour and some purely English features. Although this movement is mainly associated with white musicians, by the second half of the decade other influences had begun to penetrate it. Indian motifs, at times noticeable in The Beatles' music, were a symptom of a general curiosity about other musical cultures, largely provoked by London's own environment: by this point, the city's musical life had become a bubbling pot of soul, reggae, ska, funk, rock, jazz and Afrobit. The influx of talented musicians from other regions in the previous two decades had changed the temperature and sound of the city - and even large, successful rock bands were not indifferent to this.
Niimoy "Speedy" Aquaye, a drummer from Ghana, was a popular musician on the British club scene. With recordings of jazzmen like Ronnie Scott and work with rhythm and blues artists like Georgie Fame and his band The Blue Flames, he proved it, that his African style of playing the instrument is well suited to any genre - so in the 1960s Aquaye was used by The Animals, Small Faces, Rod Stewart, Graham Bond, The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney and Ginger Baker's Air Force, among others. A similar image