Draft:Jah Observer

The culture of the Sound System was brought to the UK with the mass immigration of Jamaicans in the 1960s and 1970s. Notable UK Sound Systems include Sir Coxsone Outernational, Jah Shaka, Channel One, Aba Shanti-I, Jah Observer, Quaker City, Irration Steppas, Fatman International and Saxon Studio International. One of the first sound systems in the United States was Downbeat the Ruler, founded in Bronx, New York, in the late 1970s.

Austin "Spiderman" Palmer is the founder and selector for the Mighty Jah Observer Sound System. He started his sound as a youth in the late 1960s, and established Jah Observer in London in 1972. Austin "Spiderman" Palmer and his Jah Observer Sound System has continued through the various trends in reggae, preserving a unique approach to music all the while.

Two characteristics mark out the Mighty Jah Observer Sound System from all the others who play across Europe and the UK: firstly, the rig used is still valve-driven; and secondly, it eschews the "boof boof" dub played by contemporaries in favour of the more soulful cultural vibes of yesteryear.

For over three decades the Mighty Jah Observer Sound System was resident at the Notting Hill Carnival, offering a refreshing relief from the ear-bashing found on corners all around.

The 1978 Jamaican film Rockers featured authentic culture, characters and mannerisms of the 1970s Jamaican reggae scene, featuring Leroy "Horsemouth" Wallace with his wife and children and in his own home, and the Harry J Studios in Kingston.

The film Babylon, released in 1980, so accurately captured the raw smoldering tensions between White and British Afro-Caribbeans centered around Brixton in the 1970s and 1980s, that it would be given an X rating in the UK and blacklisted in the United States, due to its depiction of institutional racism. Believed to be too incendiary for general distribution, it would be buried and forgotten following its premiere at Cannes, and would take another 40 years before it would be re-released by Kino Lorber in 2019 and made available in the United States on The Criterion Channel in 2020.

Menelik Shabazz's 2011 documentary The Story of Lover's Rock tells the story of the intimate dance, soundsystems, and social backdrop of the Afro-Caribbean community of South London in the ’70s and ’80s.

Lovers Rock, part of the 2020 Amazon anthology series Small Axe, is Steve McQueen's paean to the lovers rock genre and its influences across space and between the diaspora communities of the "Black Atlantic" culture of the British West Indian community of 1980s London.