Linton Kwesi Johnson at Galatos

By GRAHAM REID



Club owners probably don't like Linton Kwesi Johnson if Friday's performance was typical. The slight, bespectacled, 51-year-old unofficial poet laureate of black Britain silenced the Galatos with readings at a lectern and from the moment he came few made their way to the bar.

Jamaican-born LKJ - in an immaculate cream suit, tie and topped by a panama hat - was so gripping you couldn't walk away.

His poetry galvanised the black British communities of south London in the late 70s when they were confronted with police harassment (the notorious "Sus" law which allowed arrest on suspicion) so inevitably in this reading - a performance only in that he poured meaning into every syllable, alliteration or rhyme - he reached back to those revolutionary works.

Opening with Five Nights of Bleeding which segued into Dread Beat an' Blood and All Wi Doin' is Defendin with Dennis Bovell providing minimal reggae bass, LKJ immediately engaged serious matters and never let his audience go in the hour of solo readings which followed.

Acknowledging the struggles of his parents' generation as different from his own, prefacing moving poems with anecdotes or pertinent information, gently mocking his reputation as a "dub poet" for its reggae leanings, and reading with subtle changes of pace and emphasis, he delivered a night of poetry and politics like no other.

From his Penguin Classics edition published two years ago he pulled out what might be called "greatest hits": his moving Sonny's Lettah (a young man in prison for accidentally killing a policeman writing respectfully and apologetically to his mother in Jamaica), his beautiful eulogy for his late father, and It Noh Funny.

He also offered more recent poems which had the same frisson of emotional depth and intensity of purpose.

It wasn't all serious, however, and Mi Revalueshanary Fren (a dialogue between a sceptic and a Marxist-Leninist after the fall of communism) and If I was a Top-Flight Poet were highly amusing.

LKJ is rightly considered one of Britain's most important living poets. He reads again at the Kings Arms on Thursday. You'd be very unwise to miss him.