Oral History Interview - Milton Dillon

Audio file

1998

2016.46

Audio recording of an oral history recording with Milton Dillon. Milton was born in Jamaica c.1958, and moved to Hackney c.1970. He discusses 1.Caribbean background. 2.Caribbean music in London. 3.Rastafarianism. 4.Anti-racism in 1970s UK music.

Dillon, Milton (Subject of)

No

[TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH MILTON DILLON]

Q. It’s Monday the 7th of September, and I’m talking to Milton Dillon of Kingday Music Academy about his Caribbean music influences and basically what he is interested in to do with Caribbean music. When I came here last time you were telling me about basically how you got into music when you were younger. Can you start by telling me a little bit about that?

MD. I came from Jamaica, West Indies, when I was 12 years old, and I went to a local school, it used to be called Upton House School and now is called Homerton House.

Obviously like most Afro-Caribbean children, our music life started in churches. You learn to sing mainly in churches, and then if you’re rich enough you can probably have an instrument, probably a piano or a guitar. Most children from the country in Jamaica actually made their own instruments, and I made my instrument out of bamboo, I think we call it a saxophone – I would probably call it a ? – but we just call it a saxophone because we lived in the hills and we didn’t know any better.

When I came to England and I got exposed to a lot more instruments, mainly classical instruments, I got into music obviously because of the school I went to, which had quite a large music department. So I got into music that way. When other kids went to play football at dinner time, I stayed indoors and actually practiced piano and guitar.

My school is actually responsible for quite a lot of famous sons: Eddy Grant went to my school, and most of the Black actors that you see on TV like Chris Tummings - he’s quite famous, he used to be in Eastenders and stuff - Sylvester Williams I think, I don’t think he went to Upton House but we had to do with him, from a rival school.


Q. So this is Homerton House now?

MD. Yes, Homerton House. As I said, it used to be called Upton House at the time.

The music at that time in the school was quite alien to me because coming from Jamaica when I came here, I came across classical music and I had never heard classical music before in my life because obviously if you live in the hills in Jamaica, in the remote parts, you only hear local music or church music which we actually used to sing ourselves. So classical music was quite new to me, and when I tried to play reggae music people just laughed.

Apart from learning to play instruments in school, which was basically piano and guitar, they used to have something that was called UHIB which was Upton House Internal Broadcast, and every lunch time we used to play records. As an Afro-Caribbean child, it was my turn on a Friday, and they used to laugh at all the records I used to bring from Jamaica, mainly because all of Jamaican pressings were in mono and they have no middle, so when you’re trying to get the record on the turn table it actually required a certain skill. If you have to queue up a record for broadcast, you probably mess it up because you have to get your fingers to get the record to be in the centre of the turn table.
So they used to laugh. It was quite a tough time, because of those two things: no middle in the record, and also because the record was in mono and in lighter broadcasting.

Also as well the mix, Jamaican pressings at the time tended to be a lot of bass and a lot of mid, no middle. You put a record on the turn table and it used to jump off, and all the White kids were laughing. I really had a tough time. It took a long time to actually break through. Eventually we got there and now everyone is actually playing reggae music.

Even BBC Radio One used to refuse to play Jamaican pressings or reggae music because of the same thing to do with the mix. They didn’t understand it. When a record was made in Jamaica, they would do a cut for the sound system and a cut for the radio station. The mix or the cut that you do for the radio station was a bit different. One had to be a lot lighter, so you would mix the bass down, so it sounds a lot lighter for radio. And then the sound system people – because sound system deals are mainly bass and drums, they have a special mix for that. That’s one of the other reasons why you find that reggae music didn’t chart a lot, because the BBC just wouldn’t play it.

Also you have to realise that maybe in London, where people have got a lot more money and they can afford to buy ghetto blasters or a really sophisticated hi-fi system, it’s okay to have these kind of records being played on Radio One. But because Radio One is actually a national station, people in the remote areas of probably Scotland and Wales, who have got a little mono radio, when they play Jamaican pressings it sounds horrible, because BBC does not gear for it. And that’s the reason why they actually turned their back on a lot of Jamaican music which could have been big hits.

I remember one time John Holt had a massive hit, it went to number one, and he had to come to England to actually re-record it with a British orchestra just to get the air play. That’s one of the reasons why Bob Marley actually broke up with the original Wailers: it was Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer and Bob Marley, those three guys were the original Wailers. But when Chris Blackwell said to Marley, “Look, you need to make your music to suit the White man”, so to speak, then Bunny Wailer got upset over it, he said, “No, no, no we can’t do this”. And Marley, for commercial reasons, said, “Well, we gotta do it this way”. And even Marley made some pressings for Jamaica and some pressings for the international market, which basically means that he had to tone the bass down.

If you listen to UB40 now, they’re playing reggae music but the bass is not as deep as the Jamaican bass. It’s still Reggae, but it’s an English kind of Reggae.

Reverting back to my school days, I was actually responsible for forming one of the biggest soul bands of the 1970s, a band called Light of the World, myself and a guy called Paul Williams.
That band was actually formed in the Homerton House School.

In those days, in the 1970s, you weren’t allowed to have electrical instruments in the school. So, what used to happen was, after school we used to smuggle in – we went to Woolrest (?) on Mare Street, bought a guitar for £19.99 and 8p – and we used to wait for the cleaners to come to the school and we would sneak around the back. It was Room 15, I can never forget it, it was the Orchestra Room and it was at the back of the school, and the entrance to there faced the street, it wasn’t at the front of the school. So we used to wait for the school keepers, the cleaners coming in the evening time and we used to crawl through the doors and go upstairs. And while they were cleaning the school – they started from the seventh floor and come all the way down to the bottom - we used to practice and when they’d got all the way down to the ground floor, then we used to go home because you weren’t allowed to have electrical instruments in the school, because kids used to get electrocuted from playing guitars and touching microphone stands, so they banned it. Maybe three or four people got electrocuted so it was forbidden.

Everything in the school was acoustic instruments, classical instruments, violins, cellos and violas which obviously the Jamaican kids, we’re not used to that.

The band went on to become a multimillion pound act. I wasn’t in it at the time when they got really big, because I had problems with the bass player. But I went on to have another band, another reggae band called Unity Stars, and we’ve done all the gigs in Hackney and all over the country.


Q. Was that after you left school by that stage?

MD. I was still in the band while I was in school, because I was in school until I was 18.

Because of the culture shock of coming here, not being used to the city, because I actually come from 50 miles above sea level, and as I was saying to you the last time we met, my system wasn’t used to anything. Even the first time I went on a motor car, to get my papers I had to travel from the country to Kingston and when I got on the bus I vomited because of the smell of the petrol. I literally vomited. Leaving straight from the hills and coming straight to London, I had to get used to the people, the claustrophobia, and all the different races: Irish, Scottish, Greeks, Turks, Indians, even Africans.

We didn’t mix with Africans like from Nigeria and Sierra Leone. You hear about this people but we didn’t mix with them. You’re all confused because you think, England is only White people speaking one kind of language. But when you come to London, especially Hackney, which is so cosmopolitan, and you go to school and you hear someone speaking English, if it’s an Irish person it sounds different, Scottish sounds different and everyone sounds different. And you’re trying to suss out the right way to speak. Like when people say wa’er and you’re thinking, ‘wa’er, what’s that?’ You’re from Jamaica and you think water. If somebody says wa’er or woss this?, you’re thinking… That’s cockney right? And you’re trying to do an English exam, it’s impossible, because back home in Jamaica all the educational system is actually based on the old imperial business, and they teach you the proper way. You speak in a Jamaican dialect but when it comes to writing the Queen’s English, you write it the proper way.

I had problems like that, plus identifying with the food and the people and everything. Stuff like that… I remember one meal they gave us sausages, they tasted nasty and you just stay hungry because you’re not used to that.


Q. Tell me about the food that you’re used to then?

MD. The food that we’re used to, in the hills… I mean, Jamaican food is quite basic: we have fish, fresh fish or saltfish. Saltfish is basically dry cod and they cure it in Norway and they ship it out to Jamaica, and the reason why that fish is so popular with Jamaicans and West Indians, even Africans, it’s because it’s something that they use to feed to the slaves. They’d cure it, they’d bring it over and they’d feed that to the slaves. So therefore it became a big part of our diet, and in actual fact salted cod and the Jamaican food called Ackee is actually Jamaica’s national dish, it’s known as Ackee and saltfish, that is our national dish.

When it comes to meat, we have beef, we have pork and then we have goat. In Jamaica we don’t call it goat meat, we call it mutton. In England, if you go to the butcher shop and you ask for mutton, they give you old sheep, and you don’t want old sheep. You want goat meat. That’s what we know back home. All food is quite basic, we haven’t got pasta. I mean, nowadays we’ve got pasta because of Italian migration, but I’m talking about 20-25 years ago or whenever, 30 years ago, our diet was quite basic. So the meat stuff as I said before, fish, saltfish, fresh fish, you have beef, you have mutton or goat meat, and pork.

In terms of food, we have a lot of root crops which is a selection of yams. So you’ve got white yam, yellow yam and soft yam, which is kind of a purple-y yam. Then you’ve obviously got banana, a lot of people know banana only as ripe banana, but us coming from the country we have bananas in two forms, we have them green, which we peel of the skin and we cooked that and we eat it like a potato, or we have ripe bananas. Then we have cocoa, not the cocoa that you drink – I think actually the botanical name is cocoa yam, and it’s actually a tuber that grows in the ground – we have that. And we’ve got dasheen, also a tuber that grows in the ground, near to water. And obviously rice. We only have one type of rice in Jamaica, mainly brown rice. You don’t find us having basmati rice or easy cook or this and that. I think a lot of our rice actually comes from America, it gets shipped from America. And also our flour, in Jamaica we don’t really have self raising flour, we have one type of flour and you want the flour to raise you have to put baking powder or some sort of raising agent in the flour. In terms of vegetables, we’ve got something called kalalou, which is like a spinach and I think it originally comes from Europe somewhere again brought by slave masters to Jamaica.
It’s a big part of our diet in terms of… If you were to ask to Jamaican people what’s their favourite veg they would tell you kalalou which is our version of your spinach.

Then obviously we’ve got stuff like pumpkins, we’ve got sweet peppers, cucumber, lettuce.
But on a day to day basis you’ll find that most Jamaican kids who live in the country will have a lot of starch food to eat, the yams, the bananas and you balance that out with fresh fruit because you get to step outside your door or maybe stick your hand out of the window and you get fresh oranges, apples, mangos, fresh coconut.

People in the Eastern atmosphere or in the Western atmosphere probably know about coconut or processed coconut, but we have two types of coconut: we have the dry one, which we take to make coconut oil, and we also grate it and we can put it in our tea if we don’t have milk, to sweeten our tea or coffee; and also we have the jelly coconut which is basically a coconut which is undeveloped, you chop off the head, you drink the water, the milk inside – we don’t call it milk, we just call it coconut water – you drink that, then you split it open and it’s got a jelly inside which is basically like a young coconut. You scoop that out, and basically you wait for the coconut to develop, and you take it to make coconut oil or whatever, baking and stuff like that.


Q. So you described what the food was like over there. How old were you when you came over here?

MD. I was 12 years old when I came here.


Q. And what did you make of the food when you got here?


MD. My first taste of English food actually, I mean, it took me a very long time to actually get used to the London version of Caribbean food and also English food. Back home, when we have yams, the stuff is organic, no fertilisers, you get a yam seed, you plant it and you use a mulch, basically dried leaves for the mulching, and the land is quite fertile, the humidity is good, so you have a good crop. The problem is when they grow the yams or any kind of root crop for transporting, they process it so they’ve got fertilisers and they spray it with it for keeping it. Even being on an aircraft or in the ship, they gas it for killing insects. All that process changes the taste of it.

So when I first came and my mum gave me yams, it tasted weird. And the most important thing as well about cooking is that when we cook in the West Indies, we always drink the water from the cooking, the liquor. In pie and mash they make liquor, well our liquor from our meals, when you cook all the food, we drink that and we get all the iron. Because if cook bananas, you’ve got a lot iron from bananas. And yams have got whatever they’ve got in it, all the good properties. You drink that water and it’s good (?) you get all the kinds of nutrients.

So when I first came here, and my mum cooked the bananas and the yams, I drank the thing and it made me sick, because the water is different, it’s not a natural water, it’s Thames water that’s been recycled five times. It was hard.

And then I tried the English food. When you go to school, that’s your first introduction to English food so I can remember mash potatoes, sausage, Yorkshire pudding and some yellow stuff they call custard. You don’t give that to Jamaican kids, man!

I can remember that had been before me, queueing next to me, sitting around my table, they ate my sausage, they used to basically take it. Then after about six, seven, eight months you kind of get accustomed to it and you want your sausage but by then it’s too late because people will bully you, fight for your sausage. I can remember hitting someone with my spoon because they were trying to nick my sausage. And the custard they gave you, that took me a long time to get used to all of that.
It tasted different. Now I can understand the reason why they tasted different, because as I said to you before, when you live in a completely clean atmosphere and everything is organic, no fertilisers, you grow the stuff today, you dig it at the same time and you cook it in the same place, there’s no chance of anything escaping. And you have to wait for maybe weeks for it to reach this country, and then it just tastes funny. And as I said the water, we cook everything in natural rain water, it’s got minerals in it. If we don’t have rain water then we have water from a spring, from our river.
You can tell the reason why we don’t like it, we couldn’t get used to the food. Even the way they cooked dumplings. Our dumplings, you get the flour and you knead it until it’s kind of elasticated and you roll it in your hand and you get a West Indian dumpling, which is quite hard in texture, and you boil that. When they said to me in school that you’re gonna get dumplings, I was like, ‘Yeah, dumplings!’, and they come with some soft, spongy things. All different.

Fish and chips that kids used to go mad over, no way! Didn’t like that either. It took a very long time, maybe five or six years, to get used to fish and chips and even now I don’t like fish and chips, it tastes like paper, all of it tastes like paper and the fish is very watery, there seems to be a lot of water in the cod that you get.

And they found the reason, now that the truth has come out, they give the fish rubbish. If you’re used to getting natural things it’s quite frustrating when people will give you all this rubbish to eat. Then it messes your brain up because people are thinking that you’re not adapting to their culture, but you don’t know how to explain yourself because there’s so much going on for you, the culture shock, getting used to the food, getting used to the people. You just get completely confused.
It took me a very long time to get used to the English system.

I was actually at school until I was 18 years old, and I ended up teaching at the school before I even left it. I used to run an evening class, when my teacher was away on maternity leave and she didn’t want to lose her job – I built a relationship with certain teachers and they helped me with my studies, and a way of repaying them, because I knew so much about the department, actually operating very dangerous machinery, they allowed me to run the evening class, unofficially, open the doors, lock the doors, clean the classroom, tell the pupils what they had to do, giving all the work. I didn’t mind at all.


Q. You’re talking about it being difficult to explain to people why you didn’t accept their food.
From what I can understand about you, you’re someone for whom, all your life, Caribbean culture has been important to you. You’ve slowly adapted to British culture, got used to it but you retained that separate identity. What would you say it’s the most important aspect of Caribbean culture in Britain for you today?

MD. The most important aspect of Caribbean culture in Britain is for all of us to be high achievers and still maintain our cultural identity. It’s important for us to maintain our cultural identity in terms of the food that we eat, attitude towards life, the way we actually bring up our children in a very disciplined way, learning to respect people. Because when I came here, there was no respect for authority, for example I was completely confused when I saw… You’re in a classroom and somebody wants to ask a teacher a question and they don’t put their hand up. In Jamaica you just don’t do that. You have to put your hand up and say, ‘Excuse me Miss?’, and wait until you’re told to speak. When I came to this country that completely shocked me, as well as vandalism: when I saw kids kicking in doors or even smash up the toilets, or breaking pencils or any of the school equipment, that was a complete shock to me, because we don’t do that.

When I went to school in Jamaica – I’m 40 years old now – there were no books, all we had was a slate, like a root slate, and you used to write your classwork on one side and your homework on the other side, and you had to carry it in such a way that it didn’t rub off. If it rubbed off and you went to school the next day, you’d get a beating because you’re supposed to be careful.

Even the way that you dressed, you had one school uniform, khaki trousers, a khaki shirt, no shoes – couldn’t afford shoes – and that is it, you have to wear that all the week. It had to be clean all the time, and going through the bushes and all of that, it’s quite visible. You have to make sure it’s clean. And when I came in here and saw kids in dirty shirts, what do you call it, unkempt, that completely shocked me. And being rude.

Then when the Afro-Caribbean parents try to instil in their youngsters they’re like, ‘Look, you don’t do that. You respect teachers’, they always tell you in Jamaica you respect teachers, police, nurses and doctors and such. And when you come to this country and you don’t see that, that’s a shock. After a few months, when you copy other pupils who do that, your peer group, the indigenous population, and you copy their ways you find out that the authority comes down on you ten times worse than they do with the indigenous population.

I can remember a teacher at the school, he was known as Mr (?), his speciality was caning you on your bum until it split and blood came out. I can remember that, you do one thing wrong, you go to a lesson and you’re supposed to line up, and you’re out of line, any excuse for caning you. On reflection now, the guy must have been a pervert. You had to bend over, and you’d get six at the best and he scarred your bum.


Q. Did it do it to everyone?

MD. Most of the Afro-Caribbean kids he did that to, you know. And this is after you’ve come to this country and you moulded yourself with the negative attitude of the indigenous population, and because you’re Afro-Caribbean they think, ‘No, you shouldn’t come here and be doing that’, and you’re thinking, ‘But other kids are doing it’. And you get in ten times more troubles.

In Jamaica, you’d never dare tell a teacher to ‘eff off’, you couldn’t do that. What would happen, I’ll tell you something… My mother for example has got 10 children and my auntie has got 15, all alive, so this is what my mum used to say, if you go to school and you do something wrong and word get back to my mum that you’ve done something that’s wrong, my mum would take you to school in the morning and tell the teacher to give you a beating in front of the class, and that’s what would happen. And in the evening time when your mum comes back, she’d take off all of your clothes in front of the school and she’d give you a beating and then make you walk home naked. And that’s no joke.

If you go to school and you haven’t got your hair combed, because you know a lot of Caribbean kids have got knotty hair - or we have a nickname for that, we call it ‘black pepper grain’ – now when you go to your class, some teachers were so strict that they’d get a pencil and put it through your hair like this, and if it sticks they just put you to one side and you get a beating for that. You understand? You got to sit down. You go to school equipped, you’ve got your pencils, your pens.

And when the Afro-Caribbean parents start to instil that discipline into their children here, teachers told children if your mum hits you or something you can report it to the police. You call 999 and get them arrested. And a lot of Afro-Caribbean parents get themselves into serious troubles for that. Then a lot of people give up. And what’s happened now, you tell me that so many Afro-Caribbean males are in the prisons, I think there’s 65 million in prison in Great Britain or in England, and probably about 5 million of them are Caribbean. The prison population of Afro-Caribbean people is a lot larger than it is for White males. And it’s down to reason, because we come over here and we get all confused, we get ourselves in trouble because people don’t understand our culture, then they confuse our parents and we find ourselves on the wrong side of the law.

So, those kind of things I would like to see people get back to. Now it’s only two years ago I heard the government of the day saying that they actually snapped their child, when their children stepped out of line they’ll snap them.

I’m not talking about people who actually brutalised their children. I’m talking about parents who are responsible and may say to a child, ‘Look, one, two, three, four, five times you have done wrong. I’ve spoken to you, I’ve shown you this way, I’ve shown you that way. You’re not listening…’ The only alternative is corporal punishment. I’m talking about that kind of responsible parent. I’m not talking about the kind of people that would basically abuse their children, I’ve got no time for that kind of people. I’m talking about responsible people. If an Afro-Caribbean parent did that to a child, a long time ago, maybe even now, they’d get into serious troubles. And then the government of the day can turn around now and they can see the importance of people trying to bring their children into line by doing so. And then you’ve got a whole generation of Afro-Caribbean children who ended up into special schools, ended up in prison and they’ve got no kind of future. They’re selling drugs or they’re (?) nicking people’s watches. They’re up to no good, all because the system has really messed them up. So, going back to your question, some of those things are important to me, for us to actually go back to.


Q. You have been explaining why things have gone wrong. Am I right in assuming that you think it’s important for Afro-Caribbean people to maintain their own culture?

MD. Not in a selfish way. I mean, the English culture is very important and is very rich for us, and it’s up to us to take from it and learn from it. I’ve learned a lot about the English culture and I’ve got a lot of respect for the English culture. But also English culture has done us wrong.

And it’s all about ignorance. So, yes I do believe that Afro-Caribbean people should try to maintain their culture, but not in a selfish way, or not in an ignorant way. In other words, you know the indigenous population and you respect them for who they are. And if you conduct yourself in a certain way, they should respect you for who you are as well. But not for people to actually get our culture confused, and then we end up with so many of us in prison.

You were talking before about the kind of objects that Afro-Caribbean people have in their homes or the kind of things that you want to go out and buy, so let’s look at the domestic things: in the home obviously we’ve got food, so I would say a Dutch pot made of cast iron is a part of the kitchen utensils for nearly every West Indian home. You won’t find a West Indian home without one. You might be from Jamaica, St Kitts, St Vincent, St Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, wherever it might be, if you are Afro-Caribbean or West Indian you will have a Dutch pot in the kitchen.
Some alternative doctors say that when you cook in the pot, because West Indian or Afro-Caribbean cooking is very spicy and you’ve got all the spices, especially curry, you’ve got coriander, ginger, pepper, all of these hot spices, some of the metal or the iron from the pot actually get in the cooking and it’s good kind of iron for the body, some say that. But others say that too much of it it’s not good. That’s why a lot of West Indian people suffer from heart attacks or strokes. Some people are claiming that, even if you store food in those pots is not good. But the Dutch pot, ‘dutchy’ is the nick name.

There was even a number one song called ‘The Dutchy’. Well, musical youth turn the word around to actually suit the population, because the original song was by the Mighty Diamonds, which is a group of Rastafarians. As a part of Rastafarian worship, whatever you may call it, they put marijuana or ganja, whatever you feel like, in a pipe, in some kind of a vessel with a tube on it. They pack it with marijuana and put water inside, and they draw, they smoke this thing and call it a ‘dutchy’. What they do, they sit in a group of 15-20, whatever it might be, and someone takes a pull and they pass it around. They say ‘pass the dutchy’ and they’ve got a certain kind of religion way of passing it, on the left, so they say ‘pass the dutchy on the left hand side’.

Obviously, musical youth, being young kids, they started saying ‘pass the dutchy’, and everyone’s saying, ‘What do they mean by dutchy? It’s encouraging people to smoke’. So they took out the dutchy and say… No, sorry, the Rastafarians call it the ‘cutchy’, a ‘cutchy pipe’, and the musical youth call it ‘the dutchy’, they’re trying to make it as a Dutch pot, but it’s got nothing to do with the Dutch pot. ‘Pass the dutchy’, but it’s not that. People who knows about marijuana smokers will know what they’re talking about. So, that’s something that’s important.

What else is in our kitchen? You’ll find in an Afro-Caribbean kitchen a lot of aluminium pots.
I’ve recently discovered that these aluminium pots are really not good for cooking in, because if you’ve got an aluminium pot and you wash it as clean as you can and after you get a white tissue and you rub it, you’ll find that black residue comes away on the tissue. I’m personally into stainless steel. But in Jamaica we don’t know anything else because that’s what you’re given. We haven’t got like a plant for moulding these things, they get shipped over and we’re used to them from the days of slavery, so we just use that.

People in the country or the old timers like my grandmother, who died when she was 88, she used clay pots, which is a lot nicer. But you’ll find that most Afro-Caribbean homes, when it comes to cooking utensils you won’t find a lot of stainless steel, you’ll find a lot of aluminium stuff, you’ll find aluminium plates, the Dutch pot that as I said is made of cast iron, and everything else is the same as English people would have.

Now, let’s go back to the 1950s when Afro-Caribbean people first came on the Empire Windrush or whatever it might have been, coming to London obviously we didn’t have… Essentially heating wasn’t around, I think heating became popular in the 1970s, I could be wrong. But I know, I can remember when we were first sent a heating system, which was probably in 1986-87 that we got central heating. Because most Afro-Caribbean people were still poor, they made £5 a week and the jobs they used to do didn’t allow the luxury of a central heating system, so what we used to have was paraffin heaters. People like my mum, she’s going for 80 years old now, she doesn’t call it paraffin, she calls it sparaffin. She’d say, ‘Go buy me a litre of sparaffin oil’.

We used a lot of paraffin and paraffin heaters, and we used it for… If you’re really poor, sometimes you use it to boil the kettle. That’s what we used as a source of heating. A lot of Afro-Caribbean people have actually lost their lives because of paraffin heaters. Coming from a hot country like Jamaica, we don’t need heaters, you come to this country and you have to learn how to use a paraffin heater, and people make mistakes, people get knocked over, people left them on… A lot of fatalities have actually taken place because of them.


Q. Could you describe the type of paraffin heaters, because there’s very different types that you can buy, aren’t there?

MD. To give you a verbal description is a bit hard. I know the one that we’ve got, I don’t know if you can call it an oval shape, almost like an oval shape and it’s got a couple of wheels on it and it’s got a tank at the back, there’s a section at the back and there’s a tank for the paraffin you put inside and obviously it’s got a (?) at the front. I don’t know how to describe the shape, it’s like a dome, is that a dome you call it? A dome-shaped paraffin heater. And then when you get a bit more money, people used to buy a double-fronted paraffin heater, which is like a more squared box, with two burners and a bigger tank. You don’t find a lot of Afro-Caribbean people using natural coal fires, it’s mainly paraffin until they actually came over to using central heating.


Q. What other sorts of objects would you have, say… Say when a family got to the stage when they can afford to buy a house or at least a flat with a few rooms, what would they have in those rooms?

MD. Oh man, you don’t want to go into that! If you go into a traditional, proper West Indian home, you can’t walk. Let me not speak about other people’s family, let me speak about my family okay? You walk into my mother’s living room and you’ve got the three-piece settee, right? And then she’s got a lot stuff covering it. She’s got the settee that she covers with something, then she puts all of these embroidered backings on it, so that if people sit on the settee they’ve got something to rest their back on. I forgot the name of it, what they call it, but…


Q. Doilies? Are they like doilies?

MD. Could be, I don’t know the proper name.


Q. Embroidered material…

MD. That’s right. One for each person to sit down, so you’ve got all of that covering the settee.
Then you’ve got the living amount of ornaments, little animals, then you must have a picture of the Queen and Jesus Christ, you’ve got that in every Afro-Caribbean home. I’m talking about Jamaicans in particular. And you will see a picture of Jesus Christ, a picture of the Queen because I think the Queen is still responsible for Jamaica, so people of my mum’s age, 60, 70, 80 years old have got a relationship with the royal family we don’t have, and they’ve got a respect for the royal family we don’t have. So you’ll find that you go to my house now and you walk inside, you’ll see Charles and Diana, the Queen, Jesus Christ, some image of Jesus in the living room.

And then you’ve got the animals. You’ll even find a cabinet, a traditional West Indian cabinet and that cabinet is set aside for a rainy day. I’ve been in this country since 1970. 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and it’s now 1998, so you’re looking at, call it thirty years to round it up.

My mum has got a cabinet, a glass cabinet and inside she’s got plates, glasses, goblets, knives and cutlery inside, and none of the children can touch it. The only time when that stuff gets used is if you get a visit on a Sunday and our friends come down, then they come out and then get washed and go back in. My mum has been brought up to save up for a rainy day, and when guests come on a Sunday they get treated specially. No one touches these things. And you look. If you visit a hundred West Indian homes, provided that the people are 50, 60, 70, 80 years old, you’ll find a cabinet.
If you go to Jamaica you’ll find the same thing. You must have a cabinet.

You’ll always say, ‘Why don’t you take the stuff and use them?’. ‘No!’ Because remember, as a people we’re not used to all the mod cons. We’re very much into the old tradition, so when I came to this country first, every Sunday, as a rule, or on a Saturday we visited family and friends.
So we used to go to Wood Green to my cousin James. We’d go, my mum used to give me condensed milk, flour, ovaltine and sugar and you’d bring… You can’t go to a person’s house empty-handed, you must bring something. This tradition comes from Jamaica because we’ve got so much on the land, if you to someone’s house down the road or if you’re coming from the bush or the farm, let’s call it a farm so you can understand but we don’t call it that, we say ‘coming from the bush’ and you get to dig yams or whatever you might pick, and you walk in someone’s gate, you don’t walk past without giving a bit of sugar cane, giving a (?), giving whatever you have. Because if one person cultivates tomatoes, another person cultivates nutmeg and you don’t have that, you swap. That tradition came to this country. So going to my cousin James in Wood Green, my mum would give us all this kind of food stuff to bring. You get there, you deliver the stuff and you sit down and you have a chat. The old tradition, you talk about back home and how are you finding England bla bla bla. And the next Sunday they’ll come to you, and that’s the way that West Indian people used to live.

Because we couldn’t afford TVs, even in the 1970s we never had TV sets. So all way of communication and entertainment is about visiting people. So in West Indian homes you will find as well the radiogram like the Telefunken, the Bluespot or maybe Ferguson or whatever, but there must be a radiogram and records. The old people again, or the senior citizens if you like, of 50, 60, 70 they must have Billy Graham or Jim Reeves or someone like that, that’s what they’re used to.

And funny enough, in the 1980s when I was in Jamaica for my grandmother’s funeral, you’re expecting to hear reggae music blasting out everywhere but on the radio you’d listen to Rod Stewart, Don Williams, this and that, all the stuff from England you’re running away from, because what they do is they play it to suit the tourists. And obviously this kind of culture came over to England. The young people obviously do things differently but I’m talking about a certain age group, they’ve got it in their brain and that’s what they do.


Q. If our culture has gone over there, has gone over to the Caribbean, certainly some of the Caribbean culture has come over here. You were talking right at the start of the interview about how BBC refused to play reggae records. There was a period in the 1970s when Reggae was really big, wasn’t there? So how did that happen?

MD. That happened for many different reasons. You look at it. Chris Blackwell, I stand correct, I think it was Chris Blackwell who was responsible for a lot of it. I mean, Chris Blackwell was responsible for ‘My boy lollypop’ which was the biggest international hit for Jamaica, what they call modern popular Jamaican music. I think Chris Blackwell’s family is connected with a lot of Blackwell families.

They’ve been involved with Jamaica since slavery days, that’s where they made their money from.
Some Blackwells manufactured sugar, I know they’ve got a place in Croydon, something to do with sugar or molasses or some kind of cane product. No. 56 (?) in Kingston, Jamaica belongs to the Blackwell family.

Now, I don’t know if Chris Blackwell was born in Jamaica and came to England at an early age, but historical facts tell me that there is a strong connection between the (?) Blackwell family, Chris Blackwell and Jamaica.

Because Chris Blackwell is a record producer and he had ‘My boy lollypop’ as a massive hit, the biggest in Jamaica, Chris Blackwell had got influence. Obviously because he signed up Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Toots and the Maytals, Gregory Isaacs, anyone who was big in reggae music had something to do with Chris Blackwell.
Chris Blackwell is a White man and he’s got a company in London, Island Records, and obviously he opens doors. A lot of his artists got through it because of Chris Blackwell. And also Richard Branson. Richard Branson made a lot of his early money by promoting reggae music because basically a label called Frontline Label. If you look at the record sleeve, you see some barb wire and two black hands holding above the wire and blood coming down the palm of it. Branson had something to do with that. Either he licenced the Frontline Label, he released stuff on Virgin or something, but reggae music started to get big because of Marley when he did the recording of ‘No woman no cry’, it was number one. Then Eric Clapton or somebody covered one of his songs, ‘I shot the sheriff’, and people started taking interest in reggae music. Chris Blackwell, Branson and all this people had something to do with it. Rod Stewart played harmonica on ‘My boy lollypop’. Rod Stewart was a big artist because he’s got some connection with that. The music world is very small.


[PART 2]


Q. This is Alex Sidney on the 7th of September interviewing Milton Dillon, and this is take 2.

MD. We were speaking, on the other bit of the tape, about the reason for so many reggae music charting in the 1970s and I was explaining to you all the dynamics around that to do with Chris Blackwell and Richard Branson. There are other things as well.

Do you remember there was something called Artists Against Apartheid, not Artists against Apartheid, Anti-Nazi League, Rock Against Racism. Do you remember during that time you had The Jam, The Damned, The Clash, Generation X, X Ray Spex, Andrew and the Blockheads, obviously the Sex Pistols, all these bands actually rebelling against the system and they were actually fighting for somehow… Rock Against Racism came about and all these bands rebelling against the system somehow got involved in Rock Against Racism. Then you find bands like Steel Pulse, Aswad, Black Slate who used to have gigs with these bands, and they used to use music as a way of trying to get a message across, we didn’t want racism in London, we didn’t want it in Britain. London was the biggest place because it had the most bands.

The geographical area that we live in, which is the London Borough of Hackney, research has shown that we’ve got the largest population of artists and bands of all of Europe. A lot of things used to happen on our door step. The punk rock phenomenon was a multibillion pound business and because the reggae musicians were actually playing alongside the punk bands, businessmen like Branson or whoever they might be saw a good way of making money and obviously they made the record chart, because if you want a record to chart you need to have a plugger, you need to be in the right place at the right time. And these people knew how to do it, and that’s the reason why you find so much Reggae in the charts during that time period.

Now it’s kind of died out because you haven’t got Marley around anymore, Branson has actually got big. He still does his bit for for reggae music but they’re not really marketing Reggae in such a big way because you haven’t got the same kind of bands, they’re not around anymore.

Steel Pulse they only do America and Europe or whatever it might be so you don’t get a lot Reggae in the charts. It’s a bit weird, well not weird, it’s a bit ironic that the biggest reggae band in the world at the moment is UB40, I think they are. It’s really weird, they’re big in terms of record sales and the amount of money they have but I don’t think they could play proper Reggae as good as Steel Pulse or Aswad. So there you go.


Q. So, at its height how big was Reggae? You told me a story another time I met you about everyone having to share that they were into Reggae… (?)

MD. Well, it’s Reggae and Rastafarianism that got big in the 1970s-early 1980s because of the advent and the popularity of Bob Marley. Everywhere you go there used to be red, green and gold or as the Rastafarians call it (?) green and gold. All the young people, just like you had the punk rock rebellion and people put bits of metal through their nose and through their bodies, wear kind of garments that were outrageous, golden hairstyles and everything that was going on for the White people, Black people were doing their own thing and it was Rastafarianism and the colours, growing locks and being rebels.

So in a family environment you used to have a lot of troubles because the young people used to rebel against the teaching of their parents.

In Jamaica, I don’t know if you know, but Rastafarianism actually came out of Jamaica probably in the 1940s or the 1950s, I can’t remember which is correct but let’s say it was the 1950s. Now Rastafarianism used to be persecuted in Jamaica, and if you had locks or the image of a Rastafarian you couldn’t walk in Jamaica, you used to get stoned (?) That’s the reason why the hats came because you can wrap your locks. I remember where I come from, a place called St Katherine, 50 miles above sea level, one man in our district, his name was – I can’t remember what his name was, he’s a man anyway – he decided he was going to become a Rastafarian, so he started to grow his locks and to smoke his marijuana, read his Bible and people just stoned him. He nearly lost his life, they used to stone him. They buried him in all his marijuana crop and stoned him, and because he was a Rasta and he had to peaceful he couldn’t fight back, he wasn’t allowed to fight back because a part of the strict Rastafarian doctrine is that you’re humble, you smoke your marijuana, you meditate, you read your Bible, you live off the land and you preach love and peace for everyone.
He used to be persecuted.

Like my mother, you don’t tell her anything about Rastafarianism. If I had friends who were Rastas they couldn’t come to my house, they wouldn’t dare come to my house because the Jamaican people, and I’m speaking about mainly the senior citizens, the 50, 60, 70 years old they see Rastafarianism as being dirty, unworthy, low class, basically they’re rubbish, Rastafarian people. They can’t speak about Rastafarianism, they’re rubbish.

So, when you have Bob Marley now with locks and he’s a millionaire, he’s a pop star and you see him on TV, then the kids modelled themselves around that and you’ve got Burning Spear come out as well. I think Burning Spear was the founder of Island Records which is another Chris Blacwell’s business. Burning Spear was a 1 million pound selling act. So everyone started to copy and preach the doctrine of Rastafarianism. What Rasta gave to people at home in Jamaica and abroad in the United Kingdom is our cultural identity. It’s because of Rastafarianism why so many Black people know about Africa. And it’s because of the reggae music, because Burning Spear, he’s a guy called Winston Rodney, that’s his proper name, and he’s got a band called Burning Spear and the burning spear is an African word that means something, I don’t know what it means but it means something quite significant.

And there was a guy from Jamaica called Marcus Garvey and he had a concept and also a belief. He says, ‘Africa for Africans at home and abroad’ and what he’s basically saying is all Black people should return to Africa. He didn’t just speak about it, he actually went to do something about it. He had a ship called the Black Star Liner and he set up this organisation. I think the ship was called the Black Star Liner, the organisation was called something else. His aim was to have all the Black people travel on the Black Star Liner and go back to Africa.

This guy Burning Spear read all about Marcus Garvey’s history – he died in London many years ago – and turned his history into music. He did a song called ‘Do you remember the days of slavery?’, ‘Marcus Garvey’s ghost’ and all of that. And all of this came to a head when Black people started to look into this themselves to find out that we did come from Africa, and then they started to read about Marcus Garvey and it’s all because of this guy Burning Spear or Winston Rodney preaching about Rastafarianism and back to Africa.

And all of that caused rebellion amongst the Afro-Caribbean community, people turning to Rasta and the parents saying, ‘No, we don’t want Rastas in our house’, and kicking children out. They have to go sleep in the street, they’re homeless or social services took over. Everywhere you go people are Rastas, even White people used to have white dreads with their scarves, even growing locks. That basically turned our parents’ teaching on its head.


Q. I think we’ve got to move on, just to save time but the final thing I want to ask you is, you know we’re putting together an exhibition to commemorate 50 years of Caribbean presence in Hackney. What are the objects you think should be included in the exhibition that we haven’t really discussed or defined?

MD. You can actually find a lot of this information in printing matter, there’s a couple of books, one is called ‘Reggae International’, another one is called ‘Reggae Bloodline’. In that book, it covers the music of the country, it tells you something about the people and tells you something about the way they dress. In the United Kingdom, it’s got a section on the United Kingdom, the way that we dress… You need to look at the way that we dress, which is quite smart, in suits with trilby hats which I think we got from the Jewish community, a lot of the hats that Jewish people wear. Black people, West Indians used to wear that when they first came here. And also the mohair trousers, drain pipe trousers, ironed with the seams and all of that. All the suits are tailor-made. You need to look at the way that they used to dress and you can probably find the information in the library or somewhere else. So the way that we dressed, quite smart. If you look at the Skinheads used to dress that way, didn’t they, with suits? Or Rude Boys, people that follow ska music, what do they dressed like? The White kids that follow ska music they dress a certain way. Trilby hats.
You know The Specials? The Specials had a certain image, a lot of them were like Gerry Dammer, they used to wear trilby hats and drain pipe trousers, you need to look at that.
Also the church is something that’s important to West Indian people, so when they go to church they’re normally dressed in black and white with a bible. All the females wear a hat, in church. The men wear hats as well but the image is a lot stronger if you see Afro-Caribbean female going to church, you’ll see black and white attire with a handbag and a Bible.
Then when you look at the way people used to dress when they went into dances, it’s not like nowadays that you’ve got trainers and probably tracksuits and all of that, it’s normally shirt and tie, quite smart dressing for the men for going to dances. A lot of headwear, trilby hats and that.
You also need to look at contributions to sports as well.

You need to look at… A lot of our history is actually in Ridley Road Market, the way the people dressed to go to market, you’d always see them with a shopping trolley because a lot of people couldn’t afford to drive. A lot of history is actually down there.


Q. Obviously if I go down to Ridley Road Market what should I be looking for?

MD. In Ridley Road Market you’ll find a guy called Ginger, he’s a White guy, I hope he’s still there. His name is Ginger, he looks ginger and he knows all about the West Indian community because he’s been there for 30 years. As long as I’ve been in England, Ginger has been in the market. Ginger is one White guy, he genuinely knows us. He can speak to you about all the different changes that he’s seen over the years.

Then you can go into Tom’s Bakery, that’s a Jamaican baker in Ridley Road Market as well.
You can speak to any of the fish mongers down there, I think there’s a Jewish fish monger who has been there since I’ve been in London, for 30 years. They can speak about all the different changes that they see. They can tell you about the way that Jamaican people, West Indian people shopped then, what they used to buy then, what they’re buying now and how is changed.

You don’t find so many baskets down the market now, because a lot of people drive now, so they’ve got shopping bags and they go and buy and drive away. But before you had to go with a big shopping bag. I’m talking about myself, I used to go, my mum would be in front with all the yams and the bananas, the dasheen and sweet potatoes and plantains, and I used to be behind in my school uniform. I used to be showing up, put in this basket (?) and it used to be freezing, you didn’t get gloves, not even a coat, in your school uniform. My mum would be chatting to her friends and I have to wait behind them.

Black people used to buy boiling chicken, we couldn’t afford to have a roaster. Because you know if you have meat, you have the boiling chicken and you have the roasting chicken. The roasting chicken is a younger cock chicken, a boiling chicken is normally the hen that lays the eggs. It’s tough but the meat is quite flavoursome. We are used to that kind of taste back home, because we have chickens that are organic, they run around. The meat is a lot tougher but a lot more flavoursome. So when they come here, they still stick to that kind of buying meat, buying chicken. But now all of that had died out. All the West Indian people used to buy the chicken as a whole because they wanted all the giblets. All Black people used to buy that and White people used to laugh. And now you find it’s a delicacy with the Chinese, all that business, and Black people don’t do that anymore, they don’t buy that. And we used to have cow foot, cow intestines we used to buy, pig foot as well and pig tails. Because every Saturday you go to any West Indian home and you used to find red bean soup, and what they used to put in was red beans, the pig’s tail which they cure in some kind of a red… I don’t know what it is, something that makes it go red, they cure it to make the soup. Every Saturday we used to have red bean soup. On Sunday you have the traditional rice and peas with chicken and always carrot juice they used to have, which is made with a grater, not a machine, you literally grate the carrots, cut your fingers at the same time, grate the carrot, add water to it and then you squeeze out the juice from the carrot and condensed milk, mixed spices, nutmeg, all spice and then you sweeten it all, put ice inside and that was your Sunday drink.

What else can I tell you about what you should look for? The barber shop, you need to include the barber shop.

The barber shop is like the House of Commons, it’s like a social club. They talk like politicians, they tell you about everything in Jamaican culture, whether it might be womanising, food, storytelling, music, culture, social commentary. Any kind of topic you can think of it gets discussed in a barber shop because you go there and probably you have to wait two, three, four hours for your special barber. If a barber is really good maybe he’s got five people queueing up to get their hair done, and by the time he’s there chatting and cutting your hair, one and a half hour has gone. A lot of dialogue exchange in between all that time.

A lot of them, well probably going back ten years, they used cut throat razors because Black people used to have their hair parted, and they used to use a cut throat to make the mark. Now they use a machine, but going back 15 years they used a cut throat for doing it and scissors, no shaver, none of that business. A cut throat and a bone handle, that’s what they used to use, and a big pair of scissors, that’s all they used to use. You go there and they discuss so much knowledge, they talk about back home, where they come from, the way they used to dress. If you’re a young child, they used to tell you, ‘When we were young you couldn’t do this, you couldn’t do that…’ And what children get away with now, they couldn’t do it.

There’s a barber in particular, he’s an institution, a guy called Derby. His shop is at 93 Amhurst Road.
You go there and this guy is always drunk, and he always scared the life out of me because he’s got a cut throat doing your hair and stuff, and he’s always drunk. And if you go to his shop, you can’t go without bringing him a drink. He’s favourite drink was Gordon Gin, and he does all this chatting about barbering, he tells you about all different kind of topics when you go in there. You need to include that because that’s very important, the barber culture.

And also a lot of music is played in barber shops and they use it as a way of advertising dances. Everything that’s taking place in the Afro-Caribbean community actually gets advertised in the barber shop, because that’s really important. Also, you need to look at how they used to sell records then and how they’re selling records now.

My knowledge of Afro-Caribbean life in London is a bit biased because it’s music based. You need to speak to other Afro-Caribbean people, community, about different aspects of our culture and also people who are not Jamaican because you may find that the people that speak French or broken French as a second language – we speak broken English – but some islands like St Lucia and probably Dominica, they speak broken French and their way of life is slightly different from Jamaicans.

Jamaicans are quite dominant in London or in England but we are not the entire Caribbean. You need to speak to those people. People from Trinidad and Tobago are a lot more richer, they’re a lot more richer than the West Indians because they’ve got oil and they’ve also got tarmac. Tarmac comes from Trinidad. Other places export other things. Their way of life is slightly different than ours. A lot of people think that the Notting Hill Carnival is a Jamaican party, but Jamaican people don’t know anything about carnival, that’s mainly the Trinidadian carnival culture. So you need to speak to them as well. Also the food they eat. Jamaican food is quite basic, but they’ve got… They eat monkeys, we don’t eat monkeys. Some of them eat lizards, we don’t eat that. Some of them eat crocodile tail, we don’t eat that. Some of them eat snails like the French, we don’t eat that kind of stuff. You don’t find a Jamaican eating a snail, it’s not part of our diet. They do. You get more of a mix. You’ll find that a lot of people don’t know about Afro-Caribbean. In culture, we are very different from Africa, many parts of Africa, in particular Nigeria. There are places in Africa that have very strong connection with Jamaica, people from Ghana. The Ghanaians and Jamaicans have a strong bond. In certain ways, they speak slightly like Jamaicans when they say certain phrases. Their diet is almost like Jamaicans. All hard dough bread, all hard dough bread is bread that’s not allowed to rise.


Q. I don’t want too much into that because I’m trying to concentrate on the Caribbean side of things. I think the only other thing I would really like to ask you is something that has occurred to me as you were talking earlier about the carrot drink that you made. What are the sort of drinks would you (?) with the Caribbean?

MD. Guinness, Guinness we drink. When you’re in Jamaica the drinks that we drink a lot are Red Stripe, Dragon Stout and Jamaican red wine, and the imported lager that we get in Jamaica in a big way is Heineken. When it comes to the soft drinks, like the carbonates, we just have a green soda and we have another kind of carbonate that we call… It’s like a yellow kind of carbonated water, that’s what we have. Now when it comes to this country, nowadays you can get all the drinks that you can buy in London but that’s only a new arrival, it’s probably been for about five years that they brought that over.

But before that time, the drink that we actually adopted in this country would be Guinness, barley wine (?), Tennent’s which has ruined many West Indian lives because that stuff is really strong, and they drink a lot of whisky and now you can get wine, but this is new. Another drink that I very famous with the Afro-Caribbean community is called Nutriment, not Nourishment but Nutriment, I think it’s a Canadian drink. Canadians promote that drink with all the Black athletes, you have a Black athlete on the can and therefore Black people think it’s gonna make them athletes and they drink it. It’s a milk basically and it’s been around for a long time. A rival company made another drink which is called Nourishment which is a lot of rubbish, it’s quite an inferior drink in relation to Nutriment.


Q. Is that the one that comes in a tin?

MD. Nutriment and Nourishment both come in a tin, but Nutriment is a lot more expensive. The average price for Nutriment is £1.10 and Nourishment is probably 70p but there’s a lot of (?) flavours in that. What we do with the Nutriment… Nutriment comes basically in two flavours, banana and strawberry. The strawberry flavour you drink by itself but the banana you can mix with Guinness and make a punch. That’s quite popular amongst the Afro-Caribbean community, they give it to children, especially male children.

Another drink that we’ve got which is quite unique to Jamaica but actually came from Ireland, it’s an Irish drink, it’s what we call Irish moss, but Jamaican people don’t call it Irish moss, they say Irish mush. If you hear Jamaican people saying give me some Irish mush, it sounds like they want some Irish mush potatoes, but they’re talking about that. It’s a drink which is made from sea weed. You go to some parts of the sea there and you collect a special part of sea weed and you dry it and basically you boil it up and you have lean seed. Now lean seed is used for (?) horses. You boil the lean seed, the Irish moss, to get in a pot and after a while actually all Irish moss will dissolve and the lean seed becomes very slimy, and you strain it off, you strain off all the odd bits, you cool it and you can have it two ways, you have it as a jelly or as a drink. In a drink you need to add spice to it and a couple spoonful of white rum and you sweeten it with nestle milk. Nestle milk as well is another think that’s popular with West Indians because it can keep in the sun, it’ll keep forever.


Q. Condensed milk rather than carnation…

MD. Carnation we use a lot in coffee, but condensed milk we use in abundance because condensed milk, as I was saying to you when we first met, it’s for many thing in the West Indies, particularly in Jamaica, because it keeps well. It’s used for baby food, for making sweets, in your porridge and all of that. And they use the condensed milk for making this Irish moss drink I’m telling you about, and it’s meant to be an aphrodisiac, that’s what they say. I got to understand from Irish people it actually came from Ireland originally, and the reason why that is, because in Jamaica the Scottish and the Irish (?) labours used to mix a lot with the slaves. They brought it over and juts left it with us. What else? That’s basically our kind of drinks. Here is different because a lot of us were born here and we adapt to things happening in Europe.


Q. That’s an abundance of information, thank you very much, that’s great.