Immigrant Songs

The basement that gave us Led Zeppelin and Lovers Rock

Gerrard Street • Photograph: Jackie Hopfinger

All of these stories are about change — about how a small neighbourhood in central London has evolved as different people and communities have passed through it, leaving their mark. For some, the neighbourhood offered islands of liberty and liberation: spaces where they could become who they wanted to be, create what mattered to them, and give shape to their identity. Some of those islands lasted a century. Others barely an afternoon. Yet all of them helped drive the forces of transformation.

When we place these spaces within the wider context — the shifting city, the changing street — we begin to see how they not only reflected the world around them but fed off it, generating cultural statements that still echo today.

We’ll focus on one such place: 19 Gerrard Street, one of London’s oldest surviving buildings. Dating back to around 1677, the building still retains some of its original interior features. It was modernised in the 19th century and is now a Grade II listed site. But our interest lies specifically in its basement — a hidden space where two brief but seismic cultural events unfolded. Each lasted just a few hours, yet each helped alter the course of popular music in Britain — and beyond.

Though they emerged from vastly different musical and cultural spaces, the stories of Led Zeppelin and Lovers Rock share striking parallels. Both speak to a spirit of post-war reinvention: of openness, genre-blurring creativity, and the forging of bold new identities. And both were born in the same unlikely place — beneath the floorboards of 19 Gerrard Street.

Good Times Bad Times

Music is of its time, and 1968 was a year of contradictions: hope for liberation vs. fear of chaos, multiculturalism vs. xenophobia, and idealism vs. cynicism. Soviet tanks rolled across central Europe. President De Gaulle fled France in fear of revolution. Enoch Powell gave his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. The civil rights and anti-war movements surged forward. Police brutality in Derry sparked the early flames of the Troubles. The year ended with two events that seemed to encapsulate the paradox: the election of Richard Nixon and the Earthrise photo taken by Apollo 8 astronauts, capturing for the first time our fragile, shared home rising above the grey lunar surface.

1968 marked the transition between the swinging sixties and the polarised seventies, and Gerrard Street itself was undergoing its own transformation. In time, it would become the heart of London’s official Chinatown, but in 1968, that identity was still in flux. The street retained some traces of its earlier French and Italian influences, remnants of when this part of Soho was known as Little Italy. Some gangster-run strip clubs and brothels still lingered, but new waves of immigrants were gradually reshaping the area.

Some Chinese individuals had lived in London during the 1700s — diplomats, sailors, servants, artists — but not as a settled community. Large-scale migration began in the 19th century with the growth of British colonialism and the opium trade, creating a well-established Chinese community, primarily in the East End. After the Second World War, this presence began to shift. Chinese businesses, mostly from Hong Kong, started to establish themselves in Soho from the 1950s, but 1968 marked a turning point: more restaurants, grocery stores, and community associations began clustering around Gerrard Street. The red lanterns and gateways that now symbolise Chinatown would arrive in the 1980s. In 1968, the area remained organic and unpolished — more a practical hub for Chinese workers drawn by affordable rents and an increasing appetite for Chinese food than a cultural emblem.

Squeezed between gang-run sex clubs, Italian restaurants and the first stirrings of Chinatown was the music. Down at 39 Gerrard Street was Ronnie Scott’s Old Place, and just around the corner on Wardour Street stood the Flamingo and Whisky A Go Go clubs. In the late 1950s and early 60s, Number 19 had been home to Zodiac Records — an import-focused record store and occasional label that likely thrived off custom from clubgoers at the Flamingo. In its basement was a modest recording studio.

Zodiac shut down in the mid-1960s, and the recording studio was rebranded as Gerrard Sound Studios. By the spring of 1967 it became Studio 19, described in Beat International as “one of the newer and cheaper studios in London.” The hourly rate for recording was £3 10s, dropping to £1 5s for daytime rehearsals.

Train Kept a-Rollin’

It was a Monday morning in August 1968, and Jimmy Page was the first to arrive at Studio 19. His manager, Peter Grant, had booked a two-hour rehearsal slot. Page was there to test an idea. He needed to quickly form a band to honour contractual obligations after The Yardbirds had split. Still going by the placeholder name The New Yardbirds, three other musicians joined Page in the basement — and soon, they would rename themselves Led Zeppelin.

At just twenty-four, Page was already a prodigious guitarist and one of London’s top session musicians. He had worked with fellow session player, arranger and multi-instrumentalist John Paul Jones on recordings like Petula Clark’s Downtown. Robert Plant, though largely unknown outside the Black Country pubs and clubs, possessed a voice Page described as a “primeval wail.” Plant brought with him drummer John Bonham, notorious locally for playing too loud. This was their first opportunity to play together.

“There was just wall-to-wall amplifiers, and a space for the door — and that was it,” Jones recalled. “Literally, it was everyone looking at each other — ‘what shall we play?’” Page suggested the rockabilly standard Train Kept a-Rollin’ and counted them in.

“All I can remember is it was hot and it sounded good,” Plant later said. “Very exciting and very challenging really, because I could feel that something was happening — to myself and to everyone else in the room. It felt like we’d found something we had to be very careful with because we might lose it. But it was remarkable: the power.”

That two-hour session in a Gerrard Street basement ignited a collaboration that would reshape rock music. Like many of their peers, Led Zeppelin’s early sound was rooted in the blues — but they supercharged it, amplifying its energy with distorted guitar riffs, driving rhythms and Eastern-influenced arrangements. Their musicianship was unparalleled, and Page’s production approach was strikingly innovative. Their blend of technical skill, eclecticism and ambition helped define hard rock and heavy metal — and then pushed beyond those boundaries.

In 1968, the group’s sound mirrored the year’s cultural upheaval and boundary-pushing energy, with music that was louder, heavier, and overtly primal. Mikal Gilmore summed it up in Rolling Stone: “Led Zeppelin — talented, complex, grasping, beautiful and dangerous — made one of the most enduring bodies of composition and performance in twentieth-century music, despite everything they had to overpower, including themselves.”

As with others we've discussed in this series, including David Bowie and The Beatles, Zeppelin’s uniqueness owes much to the influence of Soho.

Jimmy Page was a regular presence in Soho’s music venues in the 1960s. He frequented the Round House Blues Club on Wardour Street, where Davy Graham showcased the DADGAD guitar tunings he picked up during his travels across North Africa. Those tunings would later echo in Kashmir and other Zeppelin tracks. Page also visited Les Cousins folk club, where Sandy Denny — later the only guest vocalist to appear on a Led Zeppelin album — performed regularly. Bert Jansch was another key figure at Les Cousins.

“At one point I was completely obsessed with Bert Jansch,” Page said. “When I heard that first LP, I couldn’t believe it — it was so far ahead of what anyone else was doing.” This admiration occasionally blurred the lines between influence and appropriation. Black Mountain Side, from Led Zeppelin’s debut album, closely mirrors Jansch’s arrangement of Black Waterside.

As Patrick Humphries writes: “Bert had learned the song from a version his girlfriend Anne Briggs used to sing, which she had learned from A. L. Lloyd… then enter Al Stewart, who recalled noodling a version of Black Mountain Side to Jimmy Page during a 1966 recording session. All in all, the folkies were maddened by Page’s inclusion of the song on what turned out to be one of the best-selling debut albums ever.”

Jansch, however, was more generous: “I don’t think there’s anything schizophrenic about Led Zeppelin playing acoustic music or using traditional tunes. In those days, everybody was trying to put different sounds together. Davy Graham probably started those fusions. He was very into Eastern music and when he started, crossed it with the blues; Jimmy Page was doing a similar thing.”

Soho’s culture of musical cross-pollination — where musicians and audiences could share, experiment and collaborate across genres — found perfect expression in Led Zeppelin. And six years after Page and his bandmates sparked one musical revolution in the basement of 19 Gerrard Street, another young artist would spark a very different one in the same space.

All My Loving

Six years later, in a transformed London, another voice would echo through the same basement walls — not a band of virtuosos bending rock to their will, but a teenage girl about to pioneer a sound that would speak for an entire generation of Black British youth.

It is now 1974, and for young Black Londoners, life was a mix of vibrancy and struggle. House parties and clubs playing reggae were sanctuaries away from police harassment and racist abuse and violence. Despite racism, neighbourhoods like Brixton and Hackney buzzed with Caribbean-owned shops, record stores, and grassroots activism. The Three-Day Week earlier in the year hit working-class Black families hard, but also bred resilience—sound systems and DIY fashion flourished in the margins. 1974 was raw, creative, and defiant—a time when Black Londoners built their own identity against the odds.

Louisa Mark was just fourteen when she descended the stairs into what was now called Gooseberry Sound Studios. There, she would record the first track in a new genre that transformed Black British music — and gave a voice to women in particular.

Gooseberry was an eight-track studio that had become popular with reggae musicians and later with punk bands for its central location, affordability, and what PiL’s Jah Wobble later called a “killer bass sound.” It was also where The Sex Pistols recorded demos in 1977. But in autumn 1974, it became the birthplace of Lovers Rock.

Born in 1960 to Grenadian parents, Louisa grew up in Shepherd’s Bush and was a keen, gifted singer. As a young teen, she would have heard roots reggae — with its militancy and Rasta references — through artists like Bob Marley. But as Lloyd Bradley notes in his brilliant history of Black British music, Bass Culture: “Even if reggae at the time enjoyed its highest-ever status, many sons and daughters of the Caribbean simply couldn’t relate to those records.”

This generation had grown up watching The Beatles, Dusty Springfield, The Supremes and Jackson 5 on Top of the Pops. Soul, Motown and pop — from Black and white artists — shaped their aspirations. Despite the racism they faced, many shared with their parents a culture of determination and optimism. “It’s hardly surprising,” writes Bradley, “that London’s take on reggae was far less confrontational and had a lusher, more pop-and-soul vibe than what was being made in Jamaica.”

After winning a series of talent competitions run by sound system operator Lloyd Coxsone at the Four Aces Club in Dalston, Louisa was invited to record a single. Coxsone brought along Dennis Bovell and his band Matumbi, both key figures in London’s reggae scene.

Coxsone was one of the first to bring reggae to central London. Starting at the Flamingo — just yards from Gooseberry Studios — he moved on to Colombo’s on Carnaby Street, where Bob Marley was known to drop in. Dennis Bovell, still only twenty, ran the Jah Sufferer sound system and had recently opened for The Wailers.

For the session, they selected a little-known Southern soul song from 1967: Caught You in a Lie. Slowing the tempo and layering in a Moog synthesiser, Louisa sang over Matumbi’s backing. That night, Coxsone cut the track onto a dubplate and took it to his club in Dalston.

“From the first time I played it, the whole place went haywire,” he recalled. “It’s with that record that Lovers’ Rock truly started.”

The track sold 10,000 copies in its first fortnight. It was followed by Louisa’s cover of Lennon and McCartney’s All My Loving. She opened the door for a wave of Black British artists — notably Janet Kay, who became the first Black British woman to score a number one hit.

Lovers Rock marked a cultural shift in reggae. Interviewed by The New York Times, Bovell described it as an act of defiance: “We were struggling against all the doubters that said, ‘You can’t beat reggae outside of Jamaica.’ You bet we can.”

David Katz explains how the political and religious language of Jamaican reggae often alienated second-generation Black Britons. Lovers Rock offered something else: a uniquely British expression of Black identity.

Don Letts reflects on its gender politics: “It was led by young women across the board. Reggae was a very male-dominated genre, but at that moment, it was all about the women who totally took over… It gave them a kind of political equity in a weird way.”

Lovers Rock remained underground for a time but influenced the pop mainstream through artists like Sade, Culture Club and The Police. Carroll Thompson, whose debut album sold over a million copies, argues it was overlooked because of who was producing it: “Independent Black labels didn’t chart. That’s why we were working in parallel to the mainstream… and that’s why we’ve never been recognised alongside soul, jazz, funk.”

She continues: “There’s a lineage in UK sound — and the mother of that is Lovers Rock. Without it, there’s no Soul II Soul, no Estelle, no Corinne Bailey Rae. There’s a distinctive UK musical family tree.”

And right at the roots of that tree was a schoolgirl making her first recording in a Soho basement. Louisa Mark briefly returned to school after the record’s success, later signing with Trojan Records and winning Artist of the Year at the 1978 Reggae Awards. She eventually left music, moved to The Gambia, and worked in charity. In 2009, the first Queen of Lovers Rock passed away, aged just 49. The Guardian wrote: “Her hit singles are rightly regarded as classics of the genre and have never gone out of fashion.”

Staircase to Heaven

Number 19 Gerrard Street today is just part of an anonymous backdrop to the flow of tourists, restaurants, and red lanterns that define modern Chinatown. Few passers-by would guess that its basement once hosted two musical revolutions — that within those walls, the defining sound of rock and the voice of Black British soul were both born.

And yet, the stories live on — in riffs and rhythms, in sampled drum beats and acoustic echoes, in sound systems and sold-out shows. That basement was one of our islands of liberty and liberation: a space carved out in a changing city, offering new possibilities for art and identity.

Led Zeppelin and Lovers Rock. Two genres, two generations, and two worlds — linked by a staircase, a spirit, and the city that shaped them.

Finally…

Here’s our selection of the very best of Lovers Rock.

Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock film - part of the Small Axe series - tells a fictional story of young love at a blues party in 1980. The film is an ode to the romantic reggae genre called lovers rock, and to the black youth who found freedom and love in its sound at London house parties, at a time when they were unwelcome in white nightclubs. It is wonderful.

Buy us a coffee

We love sharing our writing and research freely — and we want to keep it that way. Our hope is that these posts spark your interest and give you a good read.

If you’ve enjoyed what we do and would like to support the time, thought, and research that goes into it, we’ve added a Buy Me a Coffee button. We really appreciate your support.