The Rise of Sound Systems & the Advent of ‘Pirate’ Radio

Claude ‘Hopper’ Hendrickson, now a Project Manager working on Racial Justice campaigns such as the ‘Race Card Project’ at Leeds West Indian Centre, has been involved in Leeds’ Sound Systems since the age of fourteen. He speaks to Ellie Montgomery about his experiences of identity, community and music within the city of Leeds and beyond.

It’s undeniable that, since the 1980s, the reception and appreciation of Sound Systems in the UK have been greatly transformed. In Leeds alone, events like Sub Dub and Brotherhood are now immensely popular, selling out every time. Hendrickson remarks upon this changing landscape, noting that “thirty to thirty-five years ago, compared to the way Sub Dub is now, the young black children of those days were criminalised for playing loud music and gathering young people together. We as the black young people of that generation suffered negatively from bad press and extra policing – nobody wanted us to use community centres.

Sometimes, I’m amazed at how far the Sound System has come in thirty years.” Hendrickson acknowledges that, at the early stages of Sound Systems, he and his friends took inspiration from their life at home: “not with the flashing lights and all of that but [we were] leaning towards what people in our community were doing, what our parents used to have. They used to have weekend parties where a guy would come in and DJ. So we were taking our lead from those kinds of people.” The music took inspiration and precedent from “the men who came from the Caribbean with bags of records”, he adds. “Being in that first generation of young black kids growing up in the UK, because my mother came in here in 1958 and I was born in 1960, I suppose music became the first thing of giving me a sense of identity.” This first generation of young black people and their drive towards creating and showcasing their own music is wryly noted by Hendrickson as a result of “going to places like The Mecca on a Monday night for the disco and realising that 90% of the music [we] didn’t like anymore. It was just a small percentage of DJs playing that [we] liked, so we went about developing our own ‘discotheques’ which are now known as Sound Systems.”