Sound System – DJ’s at Notting Hill Carnival – 1979
Notting Hill Carnival 1979. © Adrian Boot
“I didn’t start life as a photographer,” Adrian Boot says with a laugh. “I stayed at university as long as I could – as everyone else did in those days – and then I went to Jamaica to teach physics for about three years. I took up photography as a hobby, and ran into people like Bob Marley and Burning Spear.”
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Boot got his first paying gig when the Rolling Stones were in town to record Goats Head Soup at Dynamic Sounds Studios, through his friend Michael Thomas. When Boot returned to the UK, he collaborated with Thomas once again on the 1977 book Jamaica: Babylon on a Thin Wire, now in its fourth printing.
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The book was a powerful document of Jamaica in the early ’70s, showing the emergence of reggae music within the larger landscape of politics, violence, and poverty. Suddenly the media took notice, and editors from NME, The Melody Maker, Sounds, Rolling Stone, and the Village Voice were on the phone, giving Boot assignments to shoot the emerging reggae scene in the UK.
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“I decided to delay going back into teaching and have a sabbatical just taking photographs — and I am still having that sabbatical,” Boot says. “Now I am 72. I have been doing it for a lifetime, and I always expected it to fade out but it didn’t. Then I started to work for Island Records, and then Bob Marley came along and started to have success. The rest is history.”
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Specials Live in Montreux 1980. © Adrian Boot
Coxsone International Sound System – Clement Dodd with the microphone. © Jean-Bernard Sohiez