Legacy in the Dalston dust

Legacy in the Dust: The Four Aces Story is a new documentary, shot, directed and produced by Winstan Whitter, about an iconic club in Dalston that was long a focal point of the West Indian musical scene in London.

The film, which was completed in September with a pre-release screening only a stone’s throw from the Four Aces’ former location, is a powerful reminder of the Hackney that is under threat from the wave of ‘regeneration’ sweeping the borough.

Having survived police raids in the 1980s, the historic building that served for over three decades as the club’s home succumbed last year to demolition by the council to make way for a railway station. Hence the film’s title.

But this film is far more than just another critique of gentrification. It is an invaluable chronicle of the rise and fall of one of the most important musical and cultural institutions for black Londoners from the 1960s to the 1980s.

In the 1960s one Newton Dunbar came to London from Jamaica and set up the Four Aces in the disused Dalston Theatre building.

It featured genres such as reggae, soul and soundsystem music that were not accessible through mass media at the time, and it attracted some of the very biggest names, including Desmond Decker, Jimmy Cliff, Count Shelly, Ann Peebles, Percy Sledge, Ben E King, and Billy Ocean.

Even the likes of Bob Marley, Bob Dylan and Chrissie Hynde made appearances at the club, which was at the heart of a largely unknown subculture.

As Whitter says, the film is about types of music that had been ostracised by the media, ‘what I’ve done by making the film is I’ve voiced all those musical genres and explained what it was all about from the perspective of the people making the music, from the inside out’.

The club was always under the close scrutiny of the police, however, and raids became more frequent during the Thatcher years. Finally in the late 80s, the Aces found it difficult to withstand the constant police harassment, and it transformed itself into a venue for acid house music under the name ‘Labyrinth’. Police raids persisted, but so did the club’s fans.

In the late 1990s, threats from public authority began to take a new form. Plans to bring the East London Line to Hackney had Dalston Junction in their sites, and the former Dalston Theatre building became a target for demolition.

Despite its recognised historic significance (it contained one of the oldest surviving circus entrances in Britain and it was located in a conservation area), and despite its important place in local culture, it was torn down in early 2007.

Whitter was part of a group that formed at the time to save the building from demolition, a campaign that for him had immense personal significance. His father had run the restaurant in the club in the 1980s and he effectively grew up there. Later his brother encouraged him to start filming it, and the seeds of the idea behind the film began to germinate.

The campaign gave a new impetus to his efforts to capture what was left of the club’s history, and by 2007 Whitter had collected sufficient material to form the basis for his documentary. His own material was combined with archival footage from a wide variety of sources to create a lively and fascinating history of the club’s 32-year existence.

Given both the quality of the documentary and its cultural importance, this project promises to send Whitter’s career to new heights. But he already has numerous accomplishments under his belt. He got into film in the late 1980s and early 1990s when he and his mates would film each other skate-boarding. He then scrambled up the ladder of the film industry, starting as a grip on film sets, and gradually moving into cinematography.

For six years now he has been working as a director of photography on films, documentaries, commercials and music videos. At the same time, he has worked on numerous personal projects. His first feature-length documentary and the work for which he is best known is the acclaimed ‘Rollin’ Through the Decades’ (2005), on the history of skate-boarding in Britain.

He has also recently completed a companion piece to Legacy in the Dust called Save Our Heritage, about the campaign to prevent the Dalston Theatre Building being torn down.

Yet despite the fact that he has successfully made so many films, Whitter has a jaded view of the opportunities for emerging film-makers in Britain. He has made Legacy in the Dust with no budget whatsoever, and commercial release of the film has to wait till he can get a completion grant to obtain permission to use the various bits of archival footage it contains. This means that the film will miss this year’s round of festivals.

Whitter is also aggrieved that the cultural importance of the Four Aces went unacknowledged for so long. He notes that the club was one of several black-owned cultural institutions to have been closed down in recent years, and he sees the loss of such venues as a cause of disorientation among West Indian young people today:

“It has made West Indian kids very lost and disconnected from their heritage. Back when I was young, you knew there were places you could go to have functions – weddings, receptions. Nowadays the only places you can go are churches. People of the community don’t own places. We don’t seem to have anything, and kids of the West Indian community have become lost.”

He is hopefully that his film will inspire other people to make films and tell stories that haven’t been told, so as to start reconnecting black kids with their heritage.

And if the Four Aces has been irretrievably destroyed, there are signs that the club’s cultural legacy is being belatedly appreciated by the wider community.

Legacy in the Dust was screened at the V&A and the TUC before being shown in October at the Hackney Museum as part of Black History Month. Meanwhile dust continues to swirl around the building site on Dalston Lane where the club once stood.