Rudeboy: The Story of Trojan Records (2018)
Trojan Records was never just a record label. Founded in 1968 and named after the Duke Reid sound system truck that had rattled through the streets of Kingston, it became the primary channel through which ska, rocksteady and reggae flowed from Jamaica into the living rooms, youth clubs and dance halls of Britain. For a generation of West Indian immigrants and their children, and for the white working-class kids who adopted the music with equal fervour, those orange-and-white labels on seven-inch singles were something close to a cultural lifeline. By the time the label folded into receivership in 1975, it had released well over a thousand singles and left a mark on British popular music that stretched far beyond its modest commercial lifespan, feeding directly into punk, two-tone and beyond. Nicolas Jack Davies's documentary, released in 2018, arrives fifty years after the label's founding, at a moment when questions about immigration, identity and belonging in Britain were once again very much in the air. Whatever else you think of the film, the timing was not accidental.
Davies, working with London-based production house Pulse Films, approaches the material with the affection of someone who clearly grew up with this music rather than discovered it academically. The film runs a trim eighty-five minutes and leans heavily on archive footage and photography, much of it rare and visually striking in the way that late-sixties British street photography tends to be: all pork-pie hats, tonic suits and crowded record shop counters. The production is polished but unremarkable in technical terms, which is perhaps as it should be for a film whose subject matter is earthy and communal rather than glamorous. There is no grand cinematic ambition on display in the direction, and the film is all the more honest for that. If you want a useful point of comparison for the cultural territory being covered, Macca's reviews of The Harder They Come (1972) and Rockers (1978) give a good sense of how Jamaican music translated, or didn't, into film around the same period.
The cast of talking heads is where the film earns most of its goodwill. Lee "Scratch" Perry, the mercurial Kingston producer whose contributions to reggae production bordered on the visionary, appears in typically unpredictable form. Toots Hibbert of Toots and the Maytals, one of the genre's most recognisable voices and a man who could fairly claim to have coined the word "reggae" itself, brings warmth and authority in equal measure. Pauline Black, lead singer of the Coventry two-tone group The Selecter, speaks to the music's second-life in Britain with the perspective of someone who lived it from both sides of the cultural fence. Don Letts, the filmmaker and DJ whose career sits squarely at the intersection of reggae and punk, offers the kind of lucid, wide-angle commentary that comes from decades of thinking carefully about what this music meant. And Dandy Livingstone, whose "Rudy, A Message to You" gave the documentary its title and later became a two-tone standard, is a reminder of how many genuinely significant artists passed through Trojan's orbit without always receiving their due credit.
There’s a very specific, undeniable magic to the moment the needle drops on a classic Trojan Records compilation, and Nicolas Jack Davies’s 2018 documentary Rudeboy: The Story of Trojan Records captures that exact frequency. I’ll hold my hands up and admit I’m a massive fan of reggae and early ska, so this picture was practically tailor-made for me. But trying to look at it through a slightly more objective lens, it’s clear that Davies has crafted a film that is unapologetically, almost exclusively, for the converted.
When you’re dealing with a label that practically soundtracked the lives of so many working-class kids across Britain, you need the right voices to tell the story, and fair play to Davies for securing an absolute cracking lineup of interviewees. Hearing legends like the late, great Lee "Scratch" Perry and the iconic Toots Hibbert recount the glory days of the sound system era is an absolute treat. The documentary is highly informative and incredibly well-presented, tracing the label's journey from Jamaican pressing plants to the front rooms of London with a genuine sense of reverence and historical accuracy.
However, that deep, unyielding devotion to the subject matter is exactly why it probably won’t be for everyone. If you don’t already have a passing interest in the minutiae of 1960s and 70s music business logistics, or the specific cultural collision of Jamaican immigrants and British youth, the pacing can feel a bit like a very long, very pleasant liner note.
It’s a thoroughly "good" documentary, but it rarely steps outside its comfort zone to offer a truly critical or explosive narrative hook that might capture the uninitiated. It’s a loving tribute, but it doesn't necessarily need to convince anyone who isn't already tapping their foot.
Rudeboy is a highly enjoyable, deeply affectionate look at a record label that changed the cultural landscape of the UK. Nicolas Jack Davies has put together a cracking, well-researched history lesson that does exactly what it sets out to do, even if it plays it a bit too safe to be a groundbreaking piece of cinema. It’s a brilliant watch if you’re already part of the club, but a bit of a chore if you’re just passing by.
What Rudeboy does well, it does with real warmth, and that counts for something. As a piece of cultural record-keeping it sits comfortably alongside the better end of music documentary making, even if it never quite pushes into the territory of, say, a film that uses its subject to say something genuinely surprising about Britain or about memory. Fans of the era and the genre will find it essential viewing, and for anyone who has spent time with Macca's take on One Love (2003), there is a clear thread connecting these films as documents of Jamaican music's complicated, rewarding relationship with British culture. The film is a good night in rather than a great night out. Sometimes that is exactly what you need, and sometimes it isn't quite enough.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2018 | Watched: 2026-07-13
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