Linett Kamala Turns Maypole Into Sound System
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- Linett Kamala, who was one of the first female DJs at Notting Hill Carnival in 1985 at age 15, unveiled the 'Basstone Maypole' at the Light Up Kilburn festival in February, with attendees including 'kids, parents, elders' and ageing ravers.
- The Basstone Maypole replaces traditional ribbons with programmed LED light strings, places school Tannoy speakers on the crown, and bolts a bass bin to the bottom — a 'light and sound system' that pairs maypole dance with dancehall, jungle and drum'n'bass.
- The project was sparked in early 2020 when Kamala encountered a maypole in a school classroom in Success, Jamaica — a hamlet on a former sugar plantation co-owned by George Philips, an early Guardian financier — where children still dance around it daily to mento music.
- Beverley Bogle, a Jamaican quadrille dancer who moved to the UK in the 1960s at age 16, explained that enslaved Africans took the colonizers' quadrille dance and secretly performed it at night as a survival strategy, communication tool and act of resistance.
- Kamala's Kilburn workshops have drawn attendees like Louise, a Canary Wharf corporate worker and jungle fan, who called the maypole-sound-system pairing 'my dream come true' and said the session 're-lit the fire.'
- Kamala frames the work as a reclamation of English identity, telling the Guardian: 'There's a new version of being English: this is my heritage too,' positioning sound system culture and Jamaican heritage as integral to a reimagined Englishness.
Why it matters: Kamala reclaims a tradition the British imposed on enslaved Jamaicans after 1655 and makes a deliberate claim on Englishness itself, declaring 'this is my heritage too' — a pointed intervention as 21st-century Britain debates who owns folk culture. The Kilburn debut drew immediate multigenerational demand ('inundated' with kids, parents, elders and ageing ravers), showing appetite for cross-cultural reinvention of symbols that have become politically charged.
