After Lovers Rock premiered at the New York Film Festival in September, early reactions to the film, directed and co-written by Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave; Widows), fixated on its “vibes”—some heady combination of joyfulness, sensuality, and just a hint of danger. Set mainly at a bustling Notting Hill house party in 1980, the roughly hour-long drama, starring Micheal Ward and Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn (in her screen debut), takes its name from a subgenre of reggae popular in the 1970s, using the thrummy 1979 ballad “Silly Games” by Janet Kay as its pseudo-theme song.
“That was the anthem on the set,” St. Aubyn tells me, calling from her home in Southeast London. “Sometimes the girls would be in the dressing room, and you’d hear one of the boys trying to reach the high parts…It was the tune of the two weeks [of shooting].”
Appearing on Amazon Prime this Friday, Lovers Rock belongs to McQueen’s new anthology series, Small Axe, about London’s West Indian community between the 1960s and 1980s. If it’s not as tightly plotted as the other sections—which are variously about the racism of the Metropolitan Police (Mangrove; Red, White and Blue); how the British schooling system fails Black children (Education); and the novelist and former DJ Alex Wheatle (Alex Wheatle), all based on real events—it made for an evocative first glance at the project, foregrounding both the close communal ties of England’s Jamaican, Trinidadian, and Grenadan immigrants, and the prejudice they faced from white Britons. (In one scene from Lovers Rock, St. Aubyn’s character Martha is menaced by a gang of white no-goodniks outside the party.) Sometimes known as the “Windrush generation”—the HMT Empire Windrush ferried hundreds of Caribbean émigrés to the U.K. in 1948—nearly half a million people relocated to England from the West Indies in the 1950s and ’60s, attracted by labor shortages in the wake of World War II.
More than anything, Small Axe celebrates the strength of the collective, lifting its title from an African proverb popularized by Bob Marley: “If you are the big tree, we are the small axe.” With Lovers Rock in particular, McQueen looks at the inner workings of that collective when left to its own devices. “I love it because that is what Small Axe is about,” he says. “It is about doing it yourself. Don’t worry if people won’t let you in. You make your own.”
Small Axe comes from a personal place: The son of Grenadian and Trinidadian parents, McQueen learned the stories of the series from his family, and describes developing the scripts with Courttia Newland and Alastair Siddons partly as an exercise in nostalgia. “Images, smells, textures, and old customs came flooding back,” he says. Strictly speaking, Lovers Rock is a work of fiction, yet it draws on a long and very real history of “blues parties” in the U.K.—raucous West Indian discos with a fee charged at the door. “Courttia’s mother used to have parties at his house, so he remembered a lot of that stuff as a child. I came to it through my aunt,” says McQueen. “[She] wasn’t allowed to go to these parties, but my uncle would leave the back door open for her so she could go to the Blues.” In Lovers Rock, Martha resorts to similar methods, slipping from her house under cover of night to finally return just in time for church.
The post “Lovers Rock” Star Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn on Janet Kay, Harry Potter, and Working with Steve McQueen appeared first on Honk Magazine.
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