Mikey Dread on Sixty Years of Notting Hill Carnival and the Sound System Tradition

Sixty years after Rhaune Laslett and the London Free School staged a street party in Notting Hill, the August Bank Holiday event remains London’s most visible Caribbean cultural marker. Its early years were local and pointed: a celebration of Black community in Ladbroke Grove, tied to streets left behind. The arrival of London sound systems in the 1970s changed Carnival’s texture, moving it closer to the version that now fills west London.

Mikey Dread of Channel One Soundsystem has played every Carnival since 1982. He locates the sound system lineage in 1950s Jamaica, carried through Studio One and into England in the 1970s. Channel One’s discipline—single turntable, no mixing, MCs shaping the gaps—turns sets into narrative. Dread describes starting evenings with older records before moving into newer material; Colour Red’s “Natty Dreadlocks” remains a recurring selection from Carnival’s 80s and 90s peak.

The relationship between Channel One and Carnival, he says, is now generational: parents bring children who later return as adults. For Dread, that longevity depends on inclusivity. “It’s a cross between all cultures, not just black or white, but everyone,” he says. That view, not the Red Bull Culture Clash win in 2010, defines how he frames the sound’s place. The trophy was a statement for roots reggae in an unlikely arena, but the ongoing corner at Carnival is the deeper proof.