When Locksley Gichie arrived in England in 1962 from Jamaica, age 13, he landed with a bump. “It was a shock,” he recalls. “It was cold and misty. There was no sun or blue skies. Everything was grey, dark and dull.”
However his arrival would bring a riot of colour to British music when, years later, he formed the UK’s first reggae band, the Cimarons, who went on to back Jimmy Cliff, collaborate with Paul McCartney, and thrill the UK punk movement. The first ever UK shows by Bob Marley and the Wailers did not in fact feature the Wailers – it was the Cimarons. “They were the spark that started the fire,” says General Levy in Harder Than the Rock, a new documentary about this hugely important yet frightfully overlooked band, which had its premiere last weekend at Sheffield Doc/Fest.
