Eliot Goes Dub

 Ignoring the harsh realities of this long, frosty January - my bank account is more than empty, an entitled Etonian perjurer is misrunning the country and we are about to crash disastrously out of Europe like soon-to-be-mangled test-dummies through a windscreen - it's bracing to hear that a distinctive new non-white voice has won the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry. 
     Roger Robinson, whose victorious book A Portable Paradise is published by the small independent BAME press Peepal Tree, is not only a dub poet in the tradition of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Anthony Joseph but also (as I found out from this Guardian article) the singer with no less a band than King Midas Sound, one of several bass-heavy projects produced by Kevin Martin I used to follow. Their 2019 album Solitude is worth a listen but here's a track from Waiting for You, their 2009 debut: