British Link Up

The UK dancehall collective behind the biggest link-up dances of the 1990s and 2000s: London-based promoters, patrons and scene figures whose events — staged in Britain and in Jamaica — put diaspora money, high-spectacle fashion and Kingston's current dances in one room. British Link Up made the UK a full participant in dancehall's social calendar rather than an export market, and its dances are fixtures of the video-light archive of the era.

Donna Hope's 2004 study gives it an origin and a calendar. Owen "Roy Fowl" Clarke — Father Fowl, Sir Roy — started it with early-1980s "shub-een" parties in north-west London basements, working between Waltham Park in Kingston and north-west London, and by 2004 the annual Jamaican events had been running for over a decade around Easter and the pre-Christmas weeks, with the London event timed to Jamaican independence at the start of August.

Her argument about what the crew was doing is the reason it belongs in this archive rather than in a fashion history. She calls it consumption masquerading as masculinity: where schooling, a career and social background are out of reach as markers of male status, the public display of money becomes the route to standing instead. Brand-name clothes, jewellery, cars and grooming, performed where they will be seen and filmed. That is the same logic the archive records in the video light and, later, in the money pull-up — the dance as a place where status can be bought outright.