While Don Letts isn't the most familiar name in British punk's origin story, that story would be different without him. Best known for his Big Audio Dynamite tenure and his music-centered films, including the Grammy-winning The Clash: Westway to the World (2000), Letts finally takes center stage in the entertaining and essential There and Black Again: The Autobiography of Don Letts.
Born in London in 1956, Letts was raised in multiracial Brixton by his Jamaican-born parents. He grew up listening to rock while soaking up "the 'new' music coming out of my parents' old country." After Letts saw the Who in 1971, he vowed to "become part of this world"--no small ambition for someone who couldn't sing well or play an instrument. In 1976 he was asked to DJ at a London club, where he introduced punks to reggae and wielded a Super-8mm camera ("my punk 'instrument' "); these efforts influenced and immortalized the music. In the mid-'80s, Letts joined Big Audio Dynamite, former Clash man Mick Jones's new endeavor, contributing sound effects and movie-dialogue snippets--proto-sampling that became the band's much-emulated signature.
Letts may have been a rebel, but he was no loner, and There and Black Again contains his priceless before-they-were-famous takes on fellow scene fixtures like Chrissie Hynde and Joe Strummer. Originally published in 2021, the book finds Letts conscious of his elder statesman status--"I'm at a stage in my life when I'm apparently a living, historical document"; There and Black Again is the print version. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer