It was a real honour to be commissioned by The Royal Mail to create a stamp celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the arrival of HMS Windrush, and especially poignant for me because my father came over on the Windrush. 

 

The theme that I had to represent was daunting.  I felt the weight of my own generation's ambitions and struggles to celebrate its cultural expression through the vehicle of dancehall music in the 1980’s.

 

I created my original artwork on a wood panel, as wood was the main material from which speaker boxes were made by sound system technicians, mostly in garages or in their own homes back in the day.

 

My overriding visual memory of those dances is of colourful, heavy-bassed, electrifying environments where the most cutting edge dub and reggae tunes were played. Presented by the most flamboyant MCs and DJs who used dub-plates and spun vinyl records, hot from Jamaica.  

 

I wanted the painting to capture the essence of what dance is about, and edited down the composition to convey the most important elements that would stand out on a postage stamp.  So the final composition was stripped down to speakers, the DJ and, of course, the most stylish dancers.

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