In the expansive basement of his house in an exclusive neighbourhood of Chiswick in west London, Darcus Beese, 55, is sipping a cappuccino below a large framed press photograph, which provides an illuminating glimpse of his singular childhood. It shows him, aged 11, alongside his late father, the renowned Trinidadian-born British activist Darcus Howe, and several others, at the Black People’s Day of Action, which took place in London in March 1981. “That’s me in the hat,” he says, pointing to his baby-faced younger self sitting alongside his older brother.
In a related photograph, taken in 1976, when he was just six years old, he is holding hands with his mother, Barbara Beese (now 78), another prominent black activist of the time, who is sporting an Angela Davis-style afro. They are in the frontline of an anti-racist march in support of Brick Lane’s Bengali community. He looks happy and excited. “It’s what I knew as a kid and I just assumed it was normal,” he tells me, laughing.
I ask his mother, who is sitting opposite him, if, back then, she thought her young son might one day follow in her footsteps. “Well, he did tend to get dragged off to various demos and protests as a little boy,” she says. “So in that sense he was imbued with the spirit of the struggle. Unfortunately for him, he had no choice.” They both crack a smile. “Back then, though,” she continues, “he had a lot of energy, so I thought he might do something athletic.”
Instead, as his imminent memoir, Rebel With a Cause, makes clear, the teenage Darcus Beese blagged a job in the music industry and, as the book’s blurb puts it, “worked his way up from being the ‘tea boy’ to becoming the president of one of the UK’s biggest and most successful record labels: Island Records”.
Described by the industry journal Music Week as “one of the great A&R people of his, or any, generation”, Beese’s ascendancy was rapid and groundbreaking: in 2013 he became the first ever black chief executive of a UK record company, and in 2018 moved to New York to become head of Island Records in the US. Around us, the walls are covered with ample evidence of his talent for spotting and developing precocious pop performers, including framed gold discs for Florence + the Machine, Drake, Hozier, Sugababes, Taio Cruz and Amy Winehouse, his most famous – and troubled – artist. “When I first turned up to see her play,” he recalls, “she was doing small songwriter shows in the black community, and it was clear to me that she was drawing on hip-hop and soul as much as jazz. It was clear she was already rooted in these traditions.”
How challenging was it to deal with someone so seemingly self-destructive? He pauses for a long moment. “Well, there were stages, but it was hard. In the beginning, she just smoked weed, but then it accelerated. Amy was so strong-willed, you thought she would somehow come through, and when she didn’t, I think a lot of us felt a lot of guilt. If an artist is on your watch you feel it is your responsibility to a degree, but then again you cannot watch someone 24/7.”
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Beese was just a year old in 1970, when his parents, along with seven others, were arrested and charged with “inciting a riot” at a march to protest against police racism and harassment against the proprietor and customers of the Mangrove restaurant, a hub of the black community on All Saints Road in west London. At the Old Bailey, the trial of the so-called Mangrove Nine made headlines for several weeks, not least when Darcus Howe and another defendant, Altheia Jones-LeCointe, chose to dispense with their lawyers and speak for themselves. Barbara, who like Jones-Lecointe was a member of the British Black Panthers, now sees that decision as pivotal in terms of their subsequent acquittal. Their victory is now regarded as a landmark moment in the long struggle against racism in Britain.
What was it like, though, to be a black feminist in a movement that was predominantly male? “It was very much a macho environment and, if you were a feminist in support of more freedom for women, you’d be called a lesbian. It was, like, you don’t like black men? We’re not good enough for you? The liberation of women, and in particular black women, was not high on their agenda.”
When I ask her why she has never written a memoir, or indeed given that many press interviews, her reply gives some insight in to her fiercely independent nature. “I’ve thought about telling my story and I may still do it, but it would have to be on my own terms,” she says. “My reticence as regards interviews is that you don’t have control. We’ve had our stories retold, and used, and abused many times so I don’t really want another agent involved unless they have a deep understanding of that time and the issues involved.”
Given that, how did she feel about Steve McQueen’s 2020 drama Mangrove, in which she was played by the British actor Rochenda Sandall? (McQueen’s dramatisation of the Mangrove Nine story was part of Small Axe, his acclaimed BBC series about pivotal moments in post-Windrush Britain.) “Well, some of the descendants of the people involved certainly had concerns that the creative process was exclusive rather than inclusive,” she says. “For me, though, it was important that the story was told, and even though there was a certain creative licence at work, I think the spirit of the film was great and the kernel of it was true to the events.”
At Darcus’s request, I am interviewing him alongside his mother, whose surname he bears. (His more famous father died in 2017.) “The book is about who I am, and what I’ve achieved, and my parents are a huge part of that,” he says. “When my dad was alive, he always got the spotlight, as men do, so it’s important that Mum should be given the space to speak about what it was like to be a confident black woman and to bring up a young black man in what were tough times. The book is as much her story as it is mine.”
It was at his mum’s suggestion that the teenage Darcus, having left Henry Compton School for Boys in Fulham “with no qualifications to speak of”, paid a visit to a hairdressing salon she frequented in Kensington in search of employment. He was hired to sweep up, but later graduated to an even more fashionable salon in central London, where he worked as a colourist and made his first tenuous music biz connections. Two employees of Island Records frequented the salon and soon he was being invited to parties and hanging out with music and fashion people – “an early version of what we now call ‘influencers’”, as he puts it in the book.
On a visit to Island’s office to blag some new releases, he bumped into one of his acquaintances from the hairdressing salon who, assuming he was looking for a job, told him of a vacancy that had just come up for a junior in the promotions department. A week later, he was working there. That chance encounter dramatically altered the course of his life. “Back then, like most teenagers, music was just something I was really into,” he says. “I’d buy mix tapes and records, but the idea of actually working in the music industry was so far removed from my day-to-day life as to be impossible.”
Alongside revealing insider reflections on corporate responsibility and the rapidly changing nature of the music industry, the book deals in some depth with the pressures of his role as one of the few black people working in the upper echelons of the music industry. Those pressures were amplified when he moved to New York in 2018. He arrived during Donald Trump’s tumultuous term in office, when the burgeoning Black Lives Matter protests were being countered by often violent responses from the “alt-right”. In 2020, the year of the Covid pandemic and the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Darcus increasingly began to feel his life was starting to spiral out of control. During lockdown, anxious and smoking weed in an attempt to “slow things down”, he found himself “disappearing down a rabbit hole of online footage of police killings of black people”.
“I’d been travelling back and forth to America for years and thought I knew the place, but I was so naive,” he says now. “When that stuff happens and you’re in the middle of it, it’s horrible and unbelievable.” Having since gone through therapy and being belatedly diagnosed with ADHD, he now understands how much his anxiety was amplified by his condition. “Back then, I just thought it was Darcus energy and that I was wired a bit differently to everyone else. It was a relief in a way to get the diagnosis.” His mum nods in agreement. “I didn’t know any of this until I read the American chapters of the book,” she says quietly. “It made me feel quite tearful.”
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In early 2021, Darcus made the decision to resign from his job and return to the UK, where he now runs his own independent label, Darco Recordings. Writing the book was a journey of self-discovery in other liberating but also painful ways. Beese’s father was a towering figure in black British culture and politics as an activist, broadcaster, author and editor of Race Today magazine. It is evident from the book that he also took up a lot of space in their lives – as he did in anything he was involved in. An early chapter begins: “As difficult as it is to say, Dad had a propensity for violence, and not just in a revolutionary, anti-police manner.” He goes on to reveal how his parents would often have alcohol-fuelled “blazing rows which would turn physical”.
How difficult was it to confront that shadow legacy? “For me, as a kid at the time, everybody just seemed angry, not just my parents,” he says. “And people expressed their anger most forcefully when there was alcohol around. But even when my mother tried to keep a lid on it, there was tension.”
I ask Barbara how she felt when she first read that chapter. She gives the question some considerable thought. “A mixture of things, really,” she says quietly. “I was pleased that he did it, because only he could express how those rows made him feel. Also, it was kind of liberating for me in a way as well, because in the back of my mind I had always wondered if I had been a good parent. As an activist, I was absent for a lot of the time because of my commitment to the struggle, and when we were both present as parents, we didn’t think how the tensions and the explosions between us were impacting on our son. As you go through life, you realise they must have done, but I’ve never been able to have that conversation with him until now.”
How long did it take her to walk away from the relationship? “Longer than it should have, which is nearly always the case.” Did they manage to stay friends? “No. We could be in the same room, but that was about it.”
Darcus lets slip that she did not attend Howe’s funeral. “No,” she says, matter-of-factly, “I didn’t.” I ask her if, with hindsight, her activism took precedence over everything else. “That’s an interesting question. Certainly, the dynamic flips when you think your responsibility is to be out there on the street and be active, and to have that militancy because that is what is important above all. Maybe even more so than family.”
For all that Darcus had a good relationship with his father, there are several moments in Rebel With a Cause when I found myself thinking maybe Rebel Without a Cause might have been a more apposite title given the complex dynamic he has negotiated throughout his life: how to be mega-successful in corporate capitalist music and the son of leftwing black revolutionary activists. Revealingly, when he was offered an OBE in 2014 for outstanding services to the music business, Darcus immediately rang both his parents to sound out their response to the news. “I was thinking that my dad would be the one that would have an issue with it, because of the legacy of British colonialism and all that. My mum was just proud that I’d done so well and, as it turned out, so was he.” As he recalls in the book, his father’s response was characteristically blunt and to-the-point: “Darcus, most people who are awarded OBEs are cunts. You are not a cunt. Go pick up your OBE.”
Did he himself have reservations?
“My thinking was that, as a black person, you walk around for so long feeling you are being tolerated, so at what point do you reconcile this with the fact that you are finally being acknowledged by the establishment? For me, accepting the OBE was saying: ‘I belong here.’ It’s like young black footballers proudly wearing the same flag that black people would have be running from back in the day. It says: ‘We belong.’ Plus things have opened up a lot since my parents’ days, when their generation was probably too close to the struggle to ever be happy accepting an OBE.”
Looking back, was his parents’ legacy a heavy weight to carry? “At times, maybe, but, for all the madness of those times when I was growing up, I don’t know where I would have been without that grounding. Or what direction my life would have taken. In a very real way, what they achieved underpinned my success because I believed my responsibility was to make good what they laid out for me.”
Both together and separately, they have been on quite an epic and tangled journey of self-discovery. What have they learned along the way? Darcus goes first. “Be careful what you wish for here. As a black person, you can come up through the system like I did, and no matter how successful you are, you still feel you somehow got the job because of the optics of the business and that you are being tolerated because of your blackness. I shouldn’t have felt like that because of what I achieved, but it’s only since I laid it all out in the book that I started to realise I needed to own it.”
His mother takes her time to answer, before describing the familiar sense of communal uplift she experienced at a recent Black Lives Matter-related event she attended in London. “For me, just witnessing the sheer range of experiences and issues that the young people there were involved with was energising in itself. So, the struggle doesn’t stop. It continues. That’s a cliche, but it’s true and it will always be the case. And I don’t say that pessimistically. I say it optimistically.”
It strikes me that they have both, in their separate ways, taken the long road to a rare kind of peace – with themselves and their shared legacy.
• Rebel With a Cause: Roots, Records and Revolutions by Darcus Beese is published by Nine Eight (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
