Music / News
Bristol’s Firmly Rooted sound system featured in new documentary
Fatty Boom Boom production company has produced a short documentary on one of Bristol’s much loved sound system operators – Firmly Rooted Soundsystem.
The production company met with Joe Peng, a Bristol reggae veteran and brains behind the popular reggae band Laid Blak.
Since being brought to England in the 1950s and ’60s by the first wave of immigration from the Caribbean, sound system culture has been prevelant in Bristol. The city has one of the richest and longest-running sound system scenes in the country.
is needed now More than ever
Enterprise Imperial Hi-Fi and Froggy’s Excalibur are the most well-known and biggest sound systems from the 1970s and ’80s. Since then, there have been many influential sound systems founded in Bristol and the culture surrounding them has flourished.
Filmed at the HighRise Hub ‘Carnival Day Party’ earlier this summer, the documentary features behind the scenes footage, interviews and dub tracks.
The documentary came about when Tom and Mike at Fatty Boom Boom productions attended the ‘Stay Rooted’ dance sessions: “We have a shared love of reggae and soundsystem culture, as well as film and storytelling so it seemed a natural fit to work together!
Through attending the dance sessions [which were hosted by Firmly Rooted] we fell in with Jake and Joe Peng and the project was born!”, they tell Bristol24/7.
The project was filmed in one day with the original animations and photography inputted later on. It took three months for the documentary to take shape, with the team wanting to get it right.
“We worked on the edit around our regular lives and, being our first project together, we wanted to take our time to get it right. It was a joy to see it develop over the course of three months, including moments like receiving archive photos from Joe Peng,” Fatty Boom Boom explain.
Was it important for them to highlight Bristol’s history and place within the UK’s sound system industry? “We felt it was. That may just be because we love the city and we live here.
“We love the scene and wanted to contribute to it in some way. Part of why we both moved here is because the sound system culture is so actively supported and promoted.”
Main photo: courtesy of Fatty Boom Boom
Read next:
- Bristol’s first female reggae dub sound system
- BIMM Institute opens new building in the heart of Stokes Croft
- Saffron Records’ Ones to Watch
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