A dispatch from one of the most singular club nights in Britain, right next to Heathrow Airport.
For the last three years, the revival of a very British musical subculture has been gaining momentum among the suburbs around Heathrow Airport. On a Friday evening once a month, a cohort of skanking revellers gather at a clubhouse sandwiched between two parks beside the trickling waters of Yeading Brook in Hayes, and listen and move to the layered sounds of dub reggae. ‘Come. Respect the music, respect the message, respect the people. Uplift yourself,’ grins overseer DJ Kullar of Roots Youths Records, a veteran of the UK reggae scene who grew up off nearby Southall Broadway. ‘And in the morning, you’re gonna wake up feeling motivated, with a spring in your step. You’re going to change your day. You might even change your life. Sometimes this music is that motivating, I’m telling you.’
In the daytime, before the dance begins, Kullar arrives with other operators to set up. The main room is cleared, the pool table is covered and the dartboard hanging from the wall is accompanied by posters of Emperor Haile Selassie I, the Rastafarian flag depicting the crowned lion of Judah against stripes of green, yellow and red, and the community platform label of West London Dub Club. Mixing boards, turntables, subwoofers and speaker boxes made from birch plywood are carried indoors and piled to the ceiling. Staff stock the bar while vendors heat up plates of homemade Ital and Punjabi food. The window shutters are closed, creating darkness within. Then, from 6pm until late, as BMWs and Mercedes fill the car park outside, where smokers rest on the picnic tables and soothe their eardrums in the breeze beneath the trees, bass lines reign supreme, shaking the squat building like a shack in a storm.
I attended my first dance at Brook House FC on 2 June 2023. Just weeks before, the legendary producer and sound system controller Jah Shaka, widely regarded as the father of UK dub, had passed away at the age of 75. He played hundreds of times across the decades in Southall, amassing a loyal following among the town’s patchwork population. In a tribute to his legacy, a pair of locals called Taranvir and Rana of Vedic Roots, another sound system formed in Southall, played a seven-hour set as the floor before them filled up with people coming to pay their respects.
The music’s ribcage-shattering bass, cyclical drum patterns and ricocheting vocals about justice and freedom created a hypnotic, transcendent atmosphere. I belonged to a crowd of more than 100 people – young, old, black, white, Asian, dreadlocked, turbaned, men and women – swaying in unison, raising gun fingers, slapping the walls, dog-whistling and stomping feet in heady communion.
‘For as long as I’ve known Kullar, he’s been on the hunt for a venue. Brook House has brought back that sense of a dub community. It’s a blessing,’ explains Rana. ‘There is no judgment, no animosity,’ adds Taranvir. ‘You can come, listen to positive, educational music, feel the uplifting vibes, and some pressure – warm, natural pressure.’
Punjab, the land of five tributaries that flow down from glaciers in the Himalayas to join the mighty Indus River, was brutally partitioned in August 1947. Ten months later, the HMT Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury in Essex, having sailed across the Atlantic from the West Indies. For the next few decades, in synchronicity, thousands of south Asians and black Caribbeans laid down roots in Britain, labouring in foundries, meeting patients in the newly founded NHS, and keeping the cogs of public transport turning.
As mass migration filtered into Southall, the area gained a global reputation as the nucleus of western Punjabi life, while also becoming home to a community of Jamaicans fanning out from more storied inner-city areas like Brixton and Notting Hill. Bound by life on the margins of society and the capital, black and brown locals organised in pubs, taught themselves self-defence and formed advocacy groups like the Southall Youth Movement and Southall Black Sisters in response to racist discrimination.
Meanwhile, the civil rights movement progressed in the US and reggae music exploded from Jamaica, catching fire across the world. In the UK, dub – a subgenre that strips reggae back to its drums and bass, cuts up vocals and adds sound effects like echoes and reverbs – soon became the soundtrack to the marches of political resistance in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. Sound systems commanded a safe space for the black community to connect and let loose, but they were also a way to bring working-class people of all backgrounds together, spreading messages of hope, resilience and unity.
In Southall, venues like the Tudor Rose, Southall Community Centre and the Dominion Centre, all within a few minutes’ walk of one another, regularly hosted local bands like Misty in Roots and Aswad, as well as famed selectors like south Londoners Mad Professor and Jah Shaka. Preaching the spiritual depth of his musical selections, Shaka in particular nurtured an intergenerational fascination with dub in Southall. This eventually moved between households via cassette mix tapes which blended it with bhangra and disco, then was carried forward by descendant genres like jungle and grime, and reflected in the passion for blaring it loud from the boot-filling sound systems of souped-up classic cars cruising down the Broadway.
Roots reggae tilled ground in the hinterland of an emerging British Punjabi identity. Some Rastafarians and Sikhs found connection through the shared ritual of growing their hair long. Jamaicans and Punjabis both cherished their own drum patterns and folk songs, carried over to Europe from distant colonised lands. A shared set of values and norms – religious observance, raucous family gatherings, richly spiced food, respect for the seasoned wisdom of elders, a fist-clenching willingness to stand up against historical oppression – sparked a hyperlocal cultural cross-pollination on the west London dance floors.
DJ Kullar attended his first Shaka dance in 1986 at Chaggar’s Hall – a venue named after Gurdip Singh Chaggar, a Sikh teenager killed in a racist attack on 4 June, 1976. ‘Shaka gave us a place to go. If you were troubled, you needed advice or some cleansing, he was there,’ he says. ‘If you have a bad day, the music will tell you, “don’t give up, tomorrow is another day, have some faith.”’ A few years later, he talked himself into a job working at the Jet Star Records facility in Harlesden, one of the largest reggae vinyl distributors in the world. He played out at his first dance in 1996, and in the three decades since he has committed his life to collecting and selling vinyls and bringing sound system culture to the world, including via Dub Life, his weekly Tuesday night show on west London’s Life FM radio station and regular trips to play in bars, community centres and festivals across Europe.
If Kullar represents the older generation who came of age in dub’s heyday, Vedic Roots are helping to translate its story for the younger generation. Rana and Taranvir bonded as teenagers over wanting to apply their inherited carpentry skills to the task of constructing a sound system. In the garage at the rear of Taranvir’s home, where I recently spent an evening while his parents cooked us skewers of seekh kebab and chicken tikka over the hot coals of a tandoor, his grandfather’s tools hang on the wall beside the many wooden scoops that the pair have built together in bringing Vedic Roots to life.
Over the last two years, they have played sets for Boiler Room, at Fabric and Glastonbury. ‘But none of those beat a home session at Brook House,’ says Rana, who went to his first Shaka dance as an early teen. He remembers leaving his weekly Friday evening dhol class at Southall Community Centre and seeing a group of Rastafarians unloading speaker boxes from a van into the hall. ‘I rushed home to drop my dhol off, then I got one of my cousins to take me inside because I was too young to go on my own.’ Taranvir had a similar formative experience. ‘After my first dance when I was 15, I didn’t miss a thing that happened at Tudor Rose,’ he says. ‘Shaka sessions were like therapy for us, our outlet and release.’
Following the smoking ban in 2006, the rammed, late-night, wall-shaking dub events of old became increasingly difficult to sustain. Southall’s venues started shutting down, turning into wedding banquet halls or enforcing restrictive rules. It is no secret that London’s nightlife has waned since the 2010s alongside the encroaching forces of gentrification, commercial development and noise complaints in residential hubs. Committed to his cause, and against this backdrop, Kullar kept his faithful eye out for a space to hold a regular dance again.
It seems like he’s found it. Since the first session there in May 2022, Brook House has been facilitating the type of gathering that would have been commonplace 40 years ago but is now hard to come by. It does so with the sustenance of a community feel that Kullar, Vedic Roots and others have worked hard to bring back to life through the steady, diarised reliability of a monthly date, alongside the odd booking at a local desi pub like Prince of Wales in Southall or the Great Western in Hayes.
For me, these dances have become a life-affirming source of escapism; a safe space away from the type of racist hate that we saw tear the country apart during the riots last August, and the wider divisions that now risk taking us back to a time that so many thought was left in the past. UK dub’s protective powers have never felt more relevant or necessary. Brook House is its keeper.
