The Dutch route: reggae without a Jamaican migration

Amsterdam roots reggae and dub sound system founded in 1991 by Bredda Neil, a Bradford man in the city since 1988, and the sound that turned a small squat-and-Surinamese underground into a stop on the European dub circuit. It runs a six-way stereo rig, unusual in a culture that mostly builds mono, with trapezoid bass boxes designed by Steve Stavrinides of Noise Control Audio, and its own King Shiloh Majestic Music label; the first album was released on 23 July 1997, Haile Selassie I's birthday. The crew held the Dub Club Y2K residency at Paradiso from 1999 to 2003, ran bunker parties in the NDSM docklands, has staged the Amsterdam Soundsystem Weekender since 2012, and made its London debut at University of Dub in Brixton on 1 March 2002. Its non-profit arm built a system for Ethiopia and staged the Great Ethiopian Soundsystem Festival at Lake Langano in February 2018.

The Amsterdam borough built in the 1960s as a modernist high-rise experiment and settled from the 1970s by Surinamese families arriving around independence, later joined by Antillean, Ghanaian and other communities. It is the closest thing the Netherlands has to a Caribbean quarter: the Kwaku festival has run in its park since 1975, the Reggae Lake Festival is staged at its Gaasperpark, and the Dutch Caribbean music economy of shops, halls and promoters that reggae and dancehall travel through is largely based here.

Built in 1880 as a hall for the Vrije Gemeente and converted into a youth music venue in 1968, Paradiso was Amsterdam's largest concert club until the 1990s and, with the Melkweg, one of the two rooms that carried roots reggae in the Netherlands from the late 1970s. Its main hall holds about 1,500. King Shiloh's Dub Club Y2K held a residency here from 1999 to 2003, which is where Amsterdam's sound system audience and its club audience first properly met.

A former dairy on the Lijnbaansgracht near Leidseplein, run as a music venue and cultural centre by a non-profit founded in 1970, with four halls, a cinema and an exhibition space. With Paradiso it was one of the two Amsterdam rooms where roots reggae played live through the late 1970s and 1980s, and it remains a regular host of the city's dub events; the Rootsriders played their first major show here on 11 May 2006, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Bob Marley's death.

A former squat on the Amstelveenseweg in Amsterdam Oud-Zuid, legalised and run as a volunteer DIY venue, and one of the rooms where the city's early sound system culture found space. The Amsterdam squat movement is the other half of the story the Surinamese community started: it supplied the halls, the equipment tolerance and the audience for dub sessions that no commercial venue would book.

Rotterdam roots and dub collective, selecting since 2009 and running its own handbuilt rig since 2015, taking its bearings from Jamaican and British sound system practice. It hosts sessions across the Rotterdam region and has shared its stack with King Shiloh, Jah Shaka, Dubkasm and Imperial Sound Army; its own Mixcloud carries recordings of those nights, including a 2018 session with Ras Lorenzo at Cafe Belgique in Amsterdam.

Roots and culture sound from 's-Hertogenbosch that ran the other way round from most: it began as a weekly vinyl-only radio show on Radio Banzai in Den Bosch, kept that going for five years with guest selectors from around the country, then stopped broadcasting in order to build a rig. The crew's own account puts equal weight on the sound, the room and the way the room is dressed, on the reasoning that a session only lifts when all three are in balance.

Born and raised in Bradford, West Yorkshire, and in Amsterdam from 1988, Bredda Neil founded King Shiloh there in 1991 and turned a small squat-and-Surinamese underground into the Netherlands' best known sound system. For ten years he co-presented a Saturday night roots reggae show on the Amsterdam pirate station Radio 100 with Mad Jack Meynell, which is how a generation of Dutch listeners found the music at all. He also runs the sound's non-profit arm, whose stated purpose is to bring the music to Ethiopia: it built a system for local operation there, staged the Great Ethiopian Soundsystem Festival on the shores of Lake Langano in February 2018 and a second edition in Addis Ababa in March 2019, and launched the Addis Dub Club alongside it.

Amsterdam radio selector who co-presented the Saturday night roots reggae show on the pirate station Radio 100 with King Shiloh's Bredda Neil for ten years, one of the few sustained reggae broadcasts the Dutch scene had before internet radio.

Kenneth Bron, born in Paramaribo on 1 November 1961, is a Surinamese Dutch reggae and dancehall singer who has lived in the Netherlands since 1991. He served in Suriname's national army in the 1980s and took part in peace talks between the warring parties in the interior war between 1989 and 1991. He sang first in Sranantongo and English, reaching number one in Suriname with "A sama de", and then switched to Dutch-language reggae: "Parijs", released through Top Notch in 2015, went to number one in both Dutch charts as the 750th chart-topper in the history of the Dutch Top 40, passed twenty million streams and sold more than fifty thousand copies. It made him the oldest artist ever to debut at number one on the Mega Top 50 and its predecessors.

The multi-instrumentalist behind Twilight Circus Dub Sound System, formerly bassist and drummer with the Legendary Pink Dots, who has run his own studio in the Netherlands since the 1990s and made it one of the few European rooms Jamaican foundation artists record dub in. Moore began the project with instrumental dub albums and then opened it to voices, cutting sides with Big Youth, Michael Rose of Black Uhuru, Ranking Joe, Sugar Minott, Gregory Isaacs, Jah Stitch, Fred Locks and Luciano among others, and working with players including Sly and Robbie, Dean Fraser, Earl "Chinna" Smith, Vin Gordon, Bobby Ellis and Style Scott. In the reggae tradition rather than the rock one, he keeps issuing limited ten inch singles.

Dutch group whose mix of reggae and hip hop carried them across European stages from 1998 to 2003 and made them, with the 1998 debut Documents, one of the founding acts of the Dutch hip hop scene. The core is the rapper, producer, composer and bassist Remon Stotijn, who works as The Anonymous Mis, with the singer and rapper Michael Parkinson as Shyrock and the drummer and DJ Gus Bear as G-Boah, filled out by live musicians on stage and in the studio. They won a Zilveren Harp and the Popprijs, the Dutch music industry's principal award.

Dutch reggae and dancehall media outlet founded in August 2010 and based in Woerden, publishing news, releases, interviews and its own concert footage, and one of the few continental European platforms covering Jamaican music as a daily beat rather than a festival season. Its YouTube channel holds live recordings from Dutch venues, including Postmen at Paradiso in May 2013.

The Dutch public urban station, on air since 3 August 2002, aimed at listeners between fifteen and thirty-four and built around the music the country's multicultural cities actually play: R&B and hip hop alongside reggae, dancehall, Latin and a long list of crossover styles. It runs city editions for Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht through a partnership of their local broadcasters, SALTO Amsterdam among them, with a national edition since 6 September 2005 and themed internet streams including a dedicated reggae channel. For most Dutch listeners under forty it is where dancehall arrives.

Online station and music platform that broadcast daily from a former window brothel in Amsterdam's Red Light District between 2010 and 2020, giving local and international artists a room and an archive. King Shiloh held a numbered residency across its run, and those broadcasts are one of the better records of what an Amsterdam roots selection sounded like in the 2010s.

Dutch reggae webzine and non-profit founded at the end of 1996, publishing reviews, charts and articles on Jamaican popular music and later staging its own "live & direct" reggae and dancehall events.

The largest reggae festival in the Netherlands, held annually in August at Gaasperpark, Amsterdam, across six stages; recent editions have booked Jamaican and diaspora headliners including Damian Marley, Wayne Wonder and Jesse Royal, with 2020-21 editions cancelled and the festival resuming afterward.

Amsterdam dub producer and engineer working out of DC Studio NL, mixing on an analogue desk with outboard set up for dub technique and offering recording, dubplate cutting, mixing and mastering to the Dutch scene. His own releases reach back to sessions from the mid-1990s, and the studio's regular players include Phillip I-Ness on guitar, Max Covale on trumpet and trombone and Tommy Tornado on saxophone. He has played the Amsterdam Dub Event alongside Scientist and Manasseh.

Amsterdam pirate station on which King Shiloh's Bredda Neil and Mad Jack Meynell ran a Saturday night roots reggae show for ten years, prime time for anyone in the city who wanted the music. Free radio was to the Dutch scene what pirate radio was to the British one: for years it was the only broadcast route Jamaican records had.

The band that made reggae and ska ordinary in Dutch pop. Founded on 8 May 1978 by the keyboardist and singer Ernst Jansz with bassist Piet Dekker, drummer Carel Copier and guitarist Jan Hendriks, Doe Maar built a nederpop sound out of ska, punk and reggae, and after the 1979 debut every one of their regular studio albums went to number one in the Netherlands. They broke up in 1984 at the height of a teenage following, reunited from 2000 for occasional runs, and stopped for good when the singer and bassist Henny Vrienten died in 2021. Nothing in Dutch-language music has carried a Jamaican rhythm to more people.

Ricardo Blijden, born in Rotterdam in 1981 and from Sint Eustatius, is the Dutch Caribbean singer who took the Netherlands into the international reggae market. He moved to the Netherlands to study in 1999, started making music around 2002, and signed to Rock 'N Vibes in 2004; the 2006 debut So Much Reasons brought best album, best artist and best live act awards and put "Blaze It" at the top of the German reggae chart, and In Transit followed in 2008 with VP and Greensleeves behind it. VP released the self-titled third album in 2011, much of it self-produced. He has played Roskilde, Lowlands, Couleur Cafe and Reggae on the River, and lives in Amsterdam.

The first Dutch open-air reggae festival and the longest running, begun in 1996 in Eindhoven by Peer Senders and Patricia on the grounds of the city's ice rink, and traditionally staged in August around Marcus Garvey's birthday. It opened to 1,750 people, moved at the end of 1999 to the Genneper parks on the southern edge of the city, and grew past 30,000 visitors with a campsite for about 7,000 and more than 400 volunteers a year. The festival effectively stopped after a storm-hit 2014 edition and two smaller ones, and its founders revived it in 2022 at the Karpendonkse Plassen with the Skatalites, Alpha Blondy and Stonebwoy on the bill.

Rotterdam's large indoor arena, and the Dutch room most associated with Bob Marley and the Wailers: they played it on 7 July 1978 with Steel Pulse supporting, and again on 23 June 1980, sold out both times and the last of the band's Dutch dates. It anchors the Rotterdam end of the Dutch Caribbean music map, in a city whose Antillean and Cape Verdean communities give it a Caribbean calendar of its own.

The route that made a Caribbean audience in the Netherlands runs from Paramaribo and the Antilles, not from Kingston. Suriname was a Dutch colony from 1667 to 1975, and the choice between Surinamese and Dutch citizenship in the years around independence produced a mass migration that continued through the military years of the 1980s and the economic 1990s; by 2013 the Surinamese community in the Netherlands numbered around 350,300. Much of it landed in the new high-rise estates of Amsterdam Zuidoost, and Antillean migration from Curacao, Aruba and Bonaire settled heavily in Rotterdam and The Hague. That population, rather than any Jamaican settlement, is why Jamaican records found rooms, shops and festivals in Dutch cities.

The Dutch scene is unusual in the reggae diaspora because it was not built by Jamaican migration. The Netherlands has no Brixton and no Little Jamaica; what it has instead is a large Surinamese and Antillean population, concentrated in Amsterdam Zuidoost, Rotterdam and The Hague, whose Caribbean listening made a ready audience, and a squat and free-radio culture in Amsterdam that gave sound systems rooms and airtime when nobody else would. Bob Marley reached Amsterdam in 1976 and Paradiso and the Melkweg became the country's roots reggae halls; the sound system side stayed small and underground until King Shiloh built a rig in 1991 and made Amsterdam a stop on the European dub circuit. Since the mid-2000s a second generation of English-style roots and steppers sounds has spread the scene beyond the capital to Rotterdam, Utrecht, Eindhoven and Den Bosch.

The Surinamese Dutch community's summer festival, running in Amsterdam Zuidoost since 1975 and now the largest Caribbean gathering in the Netherlands. It began as a football tournament staged by the Kwakoe youth centre foundation during Amsterdam's 700th anniversary, on the pitches of SV Bijlmer, and moved in 1983 to the park now named for Nelson Mandela. The name carries its own history: Kwaku is the Akan day-name for a boy born on a Wednesday, and slavery in Suriname was abolished on Wednesday 1 July 1863. From a festival for Surinamese families in the Bijlmer high-rises who could not afford a holiday it grew into a multicultural event addressing Antillean and African communities too, went bankrupt in 2008, restarted in 2009, missed 2011 for lack of money and took its present name in 2013. Dutch press reporting in 1995 put its attendance that year at half a million across six weekends, sixty thousand of them on the closing day, and dated its beginning twenty years earlier to a football tournament between teams from different blocks in the Bijlmermeer.