Soul singer Reuben Richards credits Roberts for hearing “dat ting” in his voice and recording his debut album in 1987. Roberts was an instrumental figure to West Indian musicians in London throughout his decade-spanning, pioneering career. He’d clench his fists, and you could see the ecstasy written on his face Reuben Richards He licensed Montserratian artist Arrow’s 1984 calypso hit Hot Hot Hot, before producing his highest-charting single in 1986 with St Vincent artist Judy Boucher’s soft reggae single Can’t Be With You Tonight – which was beaten to No 1 by Madonna’s La Isla Bonita. Manning the shop from Monday to Saturday, Roberts recorded music in rented studio spaces on Sundays, producing Nigerian band the Nkengas’ Destruction album in 1971 – one of the earliest examples of Afrobeat music in the UK. In 1970, Roberts resuscitated his passion for music and opened Orbitone, a record shop in Harlesden that stocked reggae, ska, calypso, Afrobeat, merengue and jazz. The booming Island Records took over the former Planetone space, and by the late 60s, Gopthal and Blackwell teamed up to establish Trojan Records, spawning an era of chart-topping reggae, ska and rocksteady hits including Ken Boothe’s UK No 1 single Everything I Own, Dandy Livingstone’s A Message to You, Rudy, and Desmond Dekker’s You Can Get It If You Really Want. With an infant child and another baby on the way, Roberts closed the studio in 1965 to focus on the more lucrative carpentry gigs. “I never had to say: Sonny, would you please shut up!” he laughs. Attesting to the skill of Roberts’ carpentry knowhow, Betteridge does not recall hearing the muffled sounds of the brass and bongos played below. He remembers Roberts would pass by his office to get to his studio, which he recalls as a “pretty basic, four-track recording space with egg boxes on the ceiling to baffle the sound”. “It was quite intimate!” says David Betteridge, who was Island Records’ managing director at the time. Roberts pictured with the singer Arrow in 1984 West Indian music was the lifeblood of the building, rhythmically pulsating through each floor of the bustling three-storey house. Island Records moved on to the site, and Gopthal founded a music distribution company Beat & Commercial. In 1963, Roberts told his friend Chris Blackwell, who he met through a furniture commission, about a ground-floor office available at 108 Cambridge Road that could suit Blackwell’s fledgling Island Records operation. Roberts rented the basement from Indian-Jamaican landlord Lee Gopthal, who lived in the upstairs. “Sonny had that entrepreneurial spirit that the Windrush generation arrived with: we’re going to do it, in spite of the challenges.” They’re having to create that scene and build that community,” says Mykaell Riley, director of the Black Music Research Unit at the University of Westminster. Named after his favourite wood polish, he’d bring Lavender to parties, seeing the opportunity in West Indians’ ever-growing demand for ska, reggae, mento and calypso sounds from home. The sound systems were Roberts’ inroads into the music business: a skilled furniture maker and joiner, he crafted loudspeakers, eventually building his own sound system, Lavender. The studio was established in the backdrop of the Notting Hill race riots, and located less than a mile away from the racially aggravated 1959 murder of Antiguan man Kelso Cochrane.įorced to navigate a hostile and segregated London, West Indians found solace in hand-built sound systems: mobile discos built from a vinyl player souped up to large speaker boxes. Planetone stood out as a safe space for Black musicians during a time of intense racial discrimination towards the newly arrived Windrush generation, who had predominantly settled in London’s north west. Even if they weren’t recording, they’d come sit and listen. She says her husband and his studio were deeply valued by the community: “Sonny never turned anyone away. They were married for 52 years, moving back to Jamaica in 1997, where they lived together until Sonny died in 2021. Monica and Sonny struck up a romance over ska and R&B grooves in the Planetone basement. Some of them didn’t have a job, y’know? Wages were small,” Monica recalls. “Sonny would cook up lamb soup, or stewed pork, and give them a little something. Sonny Roberts always made sure guests were warm and well fed. “When the musicians heard about 108 Cambridge Road, there was an influx,” says his wife Monica Roberts, who met Sonny in the studio while chaperoning her adolescent pianist niece, Ornell Welsh, for recording sessions.
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