31^st August 2009

Notting Hill Carnival is widely acclaimed as the biggest multi-cultural street festival in Europe and the second largest in the world, after the Trinidad & Tobago Carnival held in the Caribbean itself. Words & Pics: Will Jobbins

Flourishing in the forty-five years since the first Carnival back in 1964, Notting Hill has expanded and is held on a massive scale over two days - the Bank Holiday weekend towards the end of August. The vibe is mainly Caribbean and Latin American, as you'd expect, and the event is now synonymous with Rio-style fancy dress, floats, loud music and dancing in the streets.

It has had its fair share of civil unrest, most notably in the 1970s when a largely disenfranchised black youth population reacted violently to what was indeed a very lopsided campaign of harassment against them by the police force, and rioted heavily. Since then, things have calmed down and whilst violence does occasionally flare, it is usually gang-related and so for most of us, the Notting Hill Carnival is a wicked day out.

The floats are, of course, central to the whole carnival experience and enormous, gaudily-decorated trucks roll past, pumping out Latin house music or Samba and trailing teams of dancers - wearing absolutely spectacular costumes - in their wakes. One particular truck, with two girls on the front wearing nothing more than bodypaint, peacock feathers and big smiles, was (unsurprisingly, perhaps) preceded by a phalanx of doe-eyed young lads with camera phones held high, while behind them was an enormous bloke wearing far too much eye shadow and dressed in the costume of a South American god.

Dotted around the enormous site - during Carnival, the entire district of Notting Hill becomes a pedestrianised party central - were numerous rigs and soundsystems. As you'd expect from a predominantly Caribbean festival, dub and reggae was the tuneage of choice in most places with the odd system playing dubstep or drum n' bass.

But, on a tip-off from a friend, we made our way to the Pineapple Tribe rig on the junction of Ledbury Road and Lonsdale Road, where an absolutely awesome selection of breakbeat and fidget house was being pumped into an ecstatic crowd at full - and I mean full - volume by a wall of speakers, while some bloke broke pineapples open on his head and handed big juicy chunks out to the crowd who were overheating in the blazing sun.


Dear reader, I must confess that at that point all efforts at investigative journalism were finally thrown to the winds, and so I packed my camera away in the rucksack, cracked open a Red Stripe and joined the melee, only surfacing when the rigs were shut down sometime after 7pm and the atmosphere darkened slightly. Suddenly the police were carrying riot helmets and the word on the street was of a stabbing just down the road. Time to leave...



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