In January 2026 Marcus Garvey words come to pass.
Here I introduce the first of a series of posts about the performance, The Sound, at South Street Arts Centre, Reading – which played between 21- 24 January. The Sound is a show that I’ve had the privilege of co-producing alongside South Street’s AD, John Luther, as part of our Work in Progress project.
The Sound is a ‘sitelines’ production. sitelines is South Street’s programme of largely off-side work, encompassing everything that doesn’t fit a traditional theatre space. Homegrown sitelines shows by South Street’s resident artists, Benedict Sandiford, Cassie Friend and Sabina Netherclift, focus on telling Reading Stories that pick up on an element of Reading’s history, in a resonant space, speaking to a local audience. sitelines shows now have a strong fanbase with performances often selling out in a matter of hours/days.
Directed and dramaturged by Sandiford, The Sound is a show based on a series of detailed interviews with those from Reading’s community who were central to the scene in the late 20th century. The show explores the stories and sounds of this great heyday with immersion into soundsystem, through narrative and theatre, and through the presence of elders on stage and in the beats. In the summer of 2025, we held memory cafe-style reminiscences with elders involved in the culture which were then recorded and transcribed.
Based on the testimony, John and I commissioned a group of students to co-write The Sound. This enabled us to support new talent through the project as well as develop a team appropriate to the show. These students are: Kia Afflick, Taiwo Akerele, Saffron Green and Will Jordon. The cast is Charadaè Philips, Hilson Agbangbe – with Will Jordan and Ron Lamothe.
The Sound also features Reading’s own Rueben Irie Sound and Jah Lion Movement by Skully Roots. One of the most important aspects of the show is the presence of Irie and Jah Lion Movement and their sounds. Many of the stories on stage are their own reminiscences. Ron Lamothe’s participation in the performance has the same effect of both re-performing the past, and also showing the importance of the passage of this culture: with Lamothe handing down the knowledge of box building to the fictional – but nonetheless very real – Yvonne and Mal. In The Sound, we see these two central characters, Mal and Yvonne, as they grow up in the shadow of Uncle Ron, the pioneer.
Mal and Yvonne go on a journey of discovery and spiritual becoming as they grow into their own sound, and become established selector (Mal) and operator (Yvonne). The climax of the performance is a soundsystem battle between themselves: Central Sound (supported by Jah Lion Movement) and Oxford International (Rueben Irie Sound) – in which a coming of age culminates. On the way towards this battle, we see Mal and Yvonne navigating an understanding of Rastafarian style, culture and revolutionary politics, optics and reception – as they come to know the meaning of history, legacy, ancestry and the roots – and – most importantly – its relationship to Reading. In one important scene (written by Akelere), a teenage Mal encounters Marley’s Natty Dread on vinyl, gifted by his Dad. At first shook by Marley’s ecstatic wailing at the top of Lively Up Yourself, Mal re-positions the needle to No Woman No Cry. When he gets to Natty Dread, however, his life has changed.
The final song Rueben plays, as the actors are applauded, is the mesmeric Dennis Brown’s At The Foot of the Mountain (who was likely 16 years old when it was first recorded). After the applause is finished, Jah Lion Movement thanks the audience, and reveals the true identities of both his own sound and Irie’s. Jah Lion Movement notes that, in reality, Irie could never be beaten in battle. We can see and feel this even without experiential knowledge of this truth. As an audience, we see that we’ve received a fictional and compassionate passing on of the message, but even the show needs to be corrected on whose sound comes out top – even to this day.
About 10 years ago, I co-produced with South Street another show directed by Sandiford: Being Gordon Greenidge. With the facilitation of Reading’s Bajan community (namely Barbados and Friends Association), Sandiford and Luther interviewed elders about the significance of cricket in Reading, including the life and legacy of Gordon Greenidge, a renowned West Indies batsman who immigrated to Reading, age 12. During the preparation for the show based on the oral testimonies, Luther was shown some archive soundsystem footage. Since then the idea has been in process for a soundsystem collaborative show of this kind. It took another decade to come to fruition following multiple ACE applications, funding from the University, and the gathering of community and creatives. British soundsystem has notably been explored in other cultural forms during this period, namely audiovisual and documentary forms including Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock (2020). It is beyond the scope of this blog post and my cultural position to be able to rehearse a history of British soundsystem here, but as I continue it might be worth saying this: soundsystem seems to me an unbeatable combination of fresh/recorded sound based on a uniqueness and unheardness with the embodied (felt) presence achieved through the clarity of the box speakers, the volume and also the operator’s and selector’s virtuosity in the battle. That is to say that in the soundsystem, the box of records cease to be straightforwardly reproduced and recorded objects. In the soundsystem, rather, an aura is created in which The Sound is everything.
What it is to create a performance of a soundsystem, then, that is itself a reenactment of previous soundsystems as well as an extension of the culture? Is it a reproduction or the real thing?
I think of The Sound as a compounding of past, present and future soundsystems and histories, and an ‘auratic performance’ – following Walter Benjamin’s description of ‘auratic object’ (Benjamin 1968:222). In other words, when a group of people involved in soundsystem culture in the late twentieth century come to make an authentic/immersive performance about that culture in the twenty-first something interesting happens with past/present/future/athenticicity/reproducability. In short, I think of what we have here as very real.The Sound seems to me a process making history – the same history – a second time round and, in doing so, re-expresses History within the the now which is itself new. Or, perhaps the show seemed to enact a process of ‘rediscovered essential identity’ (Hall 1990) and, in so doing, addresses questions of identity, place and the possibilities of removing the artifice of theatre and holding space for communities – this time sound communities in Reading – do their thing together. Again and again.
The points I make here have much to do with Duška Radosavljević’s work on Post-Verbatim, Amplified Storytelling and Gig Theatre in the Digital Age, and the ideas of Rebecca Schneider’s writings in general. My thinking, however, remains super new since it has emerged since I’ve been sitting in rehearsals, tech runs and dress rehearsals last week. Here, I propose that The Sound is an auratic performance on the basis of its re-enactment of the past that ceases, because of play, to be the past and comes once again into being in the present. Or, soundsystem back in Reading’s heyday came back – as if it never went away (and it didn’t). They didn’t.
Aura is a quality integral to an artwork that cannot be communicated through mechanical reproduction techniques (photography, now youtubed audiovisuals of former soundsystem etc.). For Benjamin argued that ‘even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its present in time and space, its unique existence at the play where it happens to be’. Speaking of the Caribbean new wave, Stuart Hall (1990) says something not altogether unrelated about both Caribbean identity and cultural form: ‘we all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific. What we say is always ‘in context’, positioned. (222). Furthermore, Hall continues:
our cultural identities reflect the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us, as ‘one people’, with stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of our actual history. This ‘oneness’, underlying all the other, more superficial differences, is the truth, the essence, of ‘Caribbeanness’, of the black experience. It is this identity which a Caribbean or black diaspora must discover, excavate, bring to light and express (223).
In the recent weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of reading Zadie Smith’s Dead and Alive Essays (2025), including Black England (the foreword to the 2022 reissue of Gretchen Gerzina’s wonderful history). In re-reading this essay now, I am struck by what Smith opines about the past in relation to her reception of Gerzina’s history. Smith notes how ‘[r]eading Black England forced me to concede that the past is like the present in certain key ways. The ‘future’ is always unevenly distributed, and every age is frequently in contradiction with itself. This was hard for me to understand as a young person, but one of the intellectual and moral responsibilities of being an adult, as I see it, is to be able to hold more than one reality in your head at the same time’ (131). Here, Smith informs my thinking – at the end of this blogpost – by opening up the question of what the moral/ethical implications are of the relative maturity in holding pasts/presents and their conflations together.
What are the responsibilities/impacts of a show that does this? What is it for us to gather and listen (not for the first time) to Jah Lion Movement and Rueben Irie sounds? I will leave this blog post with an extended quotation from Smith on what is ethically/morally possible in relation to ones temporal and material responsibilities:
The past is not to be played with – but who can resist using it as a tool? We bend history to our will, for purposes as much personal as political. […]. [There is] a sense of the precariousness of ‘progress’. It does not move in one direction. Nor are we, in the present, perfected versions of people of the past. It is very important that we understand the various hypocrises and contradictions of the abolitionists. But the significance of this knowledge is not solely that we get to feel superior to them. As cathartic as it is to prosecute dead people, after the fact – in that popular courtroom called ‘The Right Side of History’ – when we hold up a mirror to the past, we should see most clearly is our own reflection. The judgement goes both ways. Why didn’t every man, woman and child in Georgian England drop everything and dedicate their lives to the abolishment of slavery? Good question. I like to imagine the studies of the future asking similar questions about us. Why did we buy iphones when we knew the cobalt inside them could have been mined by children for subsistence wages? Why did we buy plastic water bottles every day, for decades, when we knew they were environmentally disastrous? Now, as it was then, a minority of people do indeed dedicate their lives – and risk their livelihoods – to confront these things. Whatever the ideological imperfections of such people they are at least doing what the great majority of people don’t do, which is something. (135-6)
At many points during the r&d and rehearsal process, I thought: here are people doing something (to history, to Reading, to me, to…). Philip Auslander reminds us that ‘recorded music is a form of contemporary production that allows its adherents to experience mass-produced objects as automatic through the process of authentication’ (2022: 262). What if the people doing something was the process of authentication? What if this process of authentication involves a helluva journey in which we receive Natty Dread this way – now – and in Reading. A very moving gesture, Sandiford gave the actors a copy of Natty Dread each as a present for the run.
lucy tyler 