DJ, filmmaker, band manager, fashion icon, musician, social butterfly… Don Letts is a fascinating and complicated man, a highly suitable subject for a documentary. This potted history of a life, which only occasionally veers into hagiography — it is narrated and guided by the man himself through occasional puffs of a joint — recalls an electric time in music, fashion, politics and art.
Letts was born in London in 1956, and the film takes care to place him in that context: as one side of London witnessed the Swinging ’60s, another side was under attack from a racist police force and Enoch Powell’s inflammatory ‘Rivers Of Blood’ speech. Serving as a handy cousin to Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series, the film sells the vibrancy of Brixton’s Railton Road: the boombox culture, the rise of reggae, and in the middle of it all, the gregarious, almost quixotically ambitious Letts.
Rebel Dread truly finds its rhythm when it evokes an incandescent era of British culture.
The man has evidently enjoyed a remarkable life, as often finding himself in the right place at the right time (he worked in the West London shop of a pre-fame Vivienne Westwood) as rushing towards the right place with vigour (he practically forces a friendship with Bob Marley). By far the most remarkable element of his story is the cultural exchange he facilitated in the 1970s — the unlikely cross-pollination of reggae and punk, two scenes that might seem diametrically opposed. Enriched by Letts’ own footage (his entrepreneurial drive led him to documenting his life at a time when home-video cameras were prohibitively expensive), there’s gold-dust footage of Johnny Rotten rubbing shoulders with Rastas at a South London party.
The latter half of the film gets somewhat lost in the weeds, losing focus when Letts moves to New York; it veers into for-fans-only territory with its chronicling of Big Audio Dynamite, his band with The Clash’s Mick Jones. And given Letts’ intimate involvement in the film (he is an executive producer, as well as its biggest voice), the somewhat less virtuous chapters of his personal life are given short shrift. But Rebel Dread truly finds its rhythm when it evokes an incandescent era of British culture; and communicates that a life spent chasing the next great song is a life well lived. Or, as Letts puts it, in one of his many drops of pearly wisdom: “Have a good time, look good, and try your very best not to be a cunt.”