Don Letts in Plymouth

Don Letts introduced punk to reggae and was a member of Big Audio Dynamite with ex-Clash rocker Mick Jones. He was in Plymouth last night, where the Arts Centre showed two of his films, and participated in an all-too-brief question and answer session as part of the Flipside film festival.

My main interest centred on his Grammy award winning documentary on The Clash, Westway to the World, but also showing was Dance Hall Queen. The patois on this Jamaican film was so difficult for my west country ears that sub-titles would have been useful but by the end of the film I could pick up the gist of it. It's a kind of West Indian Calendar Girls but instead of stripping off the central female character empowers herself through dancing - provocatively.

Don revealed how he wasn't at the Rock Against Racing gig thirty years ago. Methinks we could do with another of those. He said Joe Strummer had just stolen his girlfriend so he was sulking. He read extracts from his autobiography and showed that he hasn't lost any of his energy, passion and vision.

I wanted to ask, "So Don - the Eurovision Song Contest - what went wrong?" It might have raised a cheap laugh but the sequence of questions asked and Don's responses covered the current lack of integrity in modern music and Don's views on what has been lost. I got the answer to my unasked question anyway.