Home again to Huddersfield. Mum and dad wait for me outside the station. We're fair clemmed and need to slake our thirst, so it's off to the pub for us. As I'm tucking into my Yorkshire pizza (blue cheese and crumbled black pudding topping) and drinking some IPA I hear pumping heavy bass from outside. Then cheering, laughter, singing.
Good timing, Huddersfield Carnival is rolling past my window. Images flash through my mind from summer days of my youth, of the old Afro-Caribbean festivals in Greenhead Park - Bob Marley tributes and DJs spinning cuts from Trojan Records. I dive outside, camera in hand, and get swept up off my feet - down under the railway bridge, into delirious chaos. Mum and dad follow, grinning. I lose them in the surge. Keep your head, raise the camera, start shooting...
Shot with the X-E2 and 18mm f/2 and 35mm f/1.4 lenses.
There's just something strangely right about the blending of Jamaica and Yorkshire, which is odd considering the seemingly perpetual rain that besoddens my Northern birthplace. Folk from the West Indies came over to the old market mill town in the fifties and sixties and brought with them reggae music and the sounds of such artists as Jimmy Cliff, Desmond Dekker and Toots and the Maytals. To service the appetite for this music there arose among the West Indies youth the curious culture of custom made sound-systems. As commercial sound-systems were too expensive, the kids built their own; giant, boxy, mildly dangerous cabinet affairs with gaping echo chambers - the bigger the better. These brilliant, towering monstrosities were wheeled from garage to club to pub to park for gigs and local festivals, and a thriving reggae music scene soon built up around them. Although that scene sadly somewhat faded into the nineties, it found in this festival parade a resonant echo - as if born from the chambers of one of those old, leviathan, custom sound boxes.
Good to be back, Huddersfield. Flags of yellow, red and green flutter between the dour 19th century sandstone buildings. Today it's dancing in the cobbled streets, and to hell with the weather forecast. Funny, I hit town tired from a long journey and now I find I can't stop myself from weaving and shooting...
