My research critically examines lovers rock, the distinctly Black British Caribbean genre of romantic reggae that emerged in London’s mid-1970s sound system and pirate radio scene. I argue that this music—often dismissed as a sentimental, apolitical counterpoint to the overt protests of roots reggae—was in fact a vital site where the cultural politics of Rastafari, love-politics, blackness, gender, sexuality, and the erotic converged. Against a backdrop of economic decline, far-right ascendency, and urban uprisings from St Pauls to Brixton, lovers rock articulated a politics of Black diasporic revolution dreaming, permitted erotic intimacies and an anti-colonial collective consciousness that demands scholarly attention.

I situate lovers rock within Stuart Hall’s (1978) framing of the ‘colony society,’ where Rastafari was a dominant mode of Black resistance for Caribbean youth. My project unpacks the coloniality of this conjuncture through the gendered social realities of racialisation and class to ask how Black music was being re-assembled within the faltering economy of empire. I employ Claudia Jones’ writings on the Caribbean community in Britain and Black feminist theories on love-politics (Nash 2020) to reveal how lovers rock mediated romance and desire with imaginings of anti-colonial Black freedom politics. Through textual analysis and archival research, I reveal how the genre enabled a formative, yet overlooked, Black British expression through popular music.

My study provides the first dedicated monograph on lovers rock as a foundational component of Black British cultural history. By interrogating its marginalized status in reggae scholarship and pop culture narratives, my work recovers the genre’s profound significance, offering a new framework for understanding the transnational public sphere of Black British youth cultures and their enduring impact and relevance to popular music today. My project helps us rethink how popular music can be mobilised as a tool for political consciousness in times of crisis.