‘I felt his vibration!’ Sonny Roberts, the UK’s first Black music studio owner

A couple of years after he arrived at Tilbury docks on the SS Manistee in 1958, Jamaican carpenter Sonny Roberts took the keys to a dusty, neglected basement at 108 Cambridge Road in Kilburn, London. Roughly 30 metres square and strewn with litter and discarded clothes, Roberts opened his trusty wooden toolbox, which he’d brought from Jamaica, and started to transform the space into Planetone, the UK’s first Black-owned music studio.

From 1961 to 1965, West Indian musicians flocked to the studio – visitors included iconic reggae trombonist Rico Rodriguez MBE, who went on to record with the Specials and Toots and the Maytals, chart-topping soul singer Jackie Edwards, Millie Small of ska-smash My Boy Lollipop fame, and rocksteady group the Marvels. The site is being honoured with a blue plaque today from the Nubian Jak Community Trust, an organisation that memorialises significant Black and minority ethnic people in the UK.

Musicians would play shoulder-to-shoulder in a cramped recording dock, while the tall, charismatic Roberts stood in the production box, towering over his mixer and recording-cutting machine. There was also a space with a kitchenette, some benches, and a single bed that was frequented by friends stopping by to listen and hang out (or as their Caribbean slang would have it, lime).

“When the musicians heard about 108 Cambridge Road, there was an influx,” says his wife Monica Roberts, who met Sonny in the studio while chaperoning her adolescent pianist niece, Ornell Welsh, for recording sessions. Sonny Roberts always made sure guests were warm and well fed. “Sonny would cook up lamb soup, or stewed pork, and give them a little something. Some of them didn’t have a job, y’know? Wages were small,” Monica recalls.

Monica and Sonny struck up a romance over ska and R&B grooves in the Planetone basement. They were married for 52 years, moving back to Jamaica in 1997, where they lived together until Sonny died in 2021. She says her husband and his studio were deeply valued by the community: “Sonny never turned anyone away. Even if they weren’t recording, they’d come sit and listen. It was like a home, a refuge.”

Planetone stood out as a safe space for Black musicians during a time of intense racial discrimination towards the newly arrived Windrush generation, who had predominantly settled in London’s north west. The studio was established in the backdrop of the Notting Hill race riots, and located less than a mile away from the racially aggravated 1959 murder of Antiguan man Kelso Cochrane.

Forced to navigate a hostile and segregated London, West Indians found solace in hand-built sound systems: mobile discos built from a vinyl player souped up to large speaker boxes. The sound systems were Roberts’ inroads into the music business: a skilled furniture maker and joiner, he crafted loudspeakers, eventually building his own sound system, Lavender. Named after his favourite wood polish, he’d bring Lavender to parties, seeing the opportunity in West Indians’ ever-growing demand for ska, reggae, mento and calypso sounds from home.

“There’s no clubs to go to. They’re having to create that scene and build that community,” says Mykaell Riley, director of the Black Music Research Unit at the University of Westminster. “Sonny had that entrepreneurial spirit that the Windrush generation arrived with: we’re going to do it, in spite of the challenges.”

Roberts rented the basement from Indian-Jamaican landlord Lee Gopthal, who lived in the upstairs. In 1963, Roberts told his friend Chris Blackwell, who he met through a furniture commission, about a ground-floor office available at 108 Cambridge Road that could suit Blackwell’s fledgling Island Records operation. Island Records moved on to the site, and Gopthal founded a music distribution company Beat & Commercial. West Indian music was the lifeblood of the building, rhythmically pulsating through each floor of the bustling three-storey house.

“It was quite intimate!” says David Betteridge, who was Island Records’ managing director at the time. He remembers Roberts would pass by his office to get to his studio, which he recalls as a “pretty basic, four-track recording space with egg boxes on the ceiling to baffle the sound”. Attesting to the skill of Roberts’ carpentry knowhow, Betteridge does not recall hearing the muffled sounds of the brass and bongos played below. “I never had to say: Sonny, would you please shut up!” he laughs.

With an infant child and another baby on the way, Roberts closed the studio in 1965 to focus on the more lucrative carpentry gigs. The booming Island Records took over the former Planetone space, and by the late 60s, Gopthal and Blackwell teamed up to establish Trojan Records, spawning an era of chart-topping reggae, ska and rocksteady hits including Ken Boothe’s UK No 1 single Everything I Own, Dandy Livingstone’s A Message to You, Rudy, and Desmond Dekker’s You Can Get It If You Really Want.

In 1970, Roberts resuscitated his passion for music and opened Orbitone, a record shop in Harlesden that stocked reggae, ska, calypso, Afrobeat, merengue and jazz. Manning the shop from Monday to Saturday, Roberts recorded music in rented studio spaces on Sundays, producing Nigerian band the Nkengas’ Destruction album in 1971 – one of the earliest examples of Afrobeat music in the UK. He licensed Montserratian artist Arrow’s 1984 calypso hit Hot Hot Hot, before producing his highest-charting single in 1986 with St Vincent artist Judy Boucher’s soft reggae single Can’t Be With You Tonight – which was beaten to No 1 by Madonna’s La Isla Bonita.

Roberts was an instrumental figure to West Indian musicians in London throughout his decade-spanning, pioneering career. Soul singer Reuben Richards credits Roberts for hearing “dat ting” in his voice and recording his debut album in 1987. “Music moved him and he wasn’t afraid to express the way he was feeling,” he says. “He’d clench his fists, and you could see the ecstasy written on his face. He was a music lover.”

Renowned jazz guitarist Ciyo Brown also recalls Roberts as a “joyous” producer, who relayed his vision viscerally, despite not playing any instruments himself. “I felt the imagery of what he was saying, just his vibration,” he says. “Music is a frequency; it’s tones, colours, it’s emotive, and I felt it from him.”

In the 1980s, Roberts employed a young Paul Scott “General” Levy, now a veteran junglist MC, to flog records at an Orbitone pop-up shop in Notting Hill carnival. Levy recalls Orbitone as a haven for the Harlesden youth. “Some of the best artists come out from north-west London, because when we had that safe space, it helped the community grow.”

Multiple events have taken place throughout Britain this summer to mark the Windrush generation’s 75th anniversary in the UK. However, despite a recent push to recognise their cultural legacy, much of their achievements have been sidelined in British music history and Roberts remains a relatively obscure figure. “He should be held in high regard; I don’t think he was given the accolades he truly deserved,” says Richards. “He was a forward-thinking man, a genius.”

That is why for those who knew him, the blue plaque unveiling is a fitting, overdue, gesture. Monica Roberts has flown in from Jamaica to attend the event: “I’ll never regret the day I went to the studio and met that marvellous man,” she says.