Fleapit revisited:Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised).

"When I try to find a job to earn a little cash. All you got to offer is your mean, old, white backlash. But the world is big. Big and bright and round, and it's full of other folks like me who are black, yellow, beige, and brown" - Backlash Blues - Nina Simone (words:Langston Hughes)

"You are young, gifted and black. We must begin to tell our young there's a world waiting for you, yours is the quest that's just begun'" - Young, Gifted, and Black - Nina Simone (words:Weldon Irvine)

Nina Simone's set at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival in Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park) in Harlem, New York seemed to encapsulate all that was good about that event. In Backlash Blues, she sang movingly and with no little anger about how black people in America, and elsewhere, have been given a raw deal. In Young, Gifted, and Black, a song she encouraged a willing crowd to join her in, she sang about the transformative power of the collective and how music and comradeship could improve the lives of millions.

Of course, life's not that straightforward. Racism continued, and continues, to exist - in America and elsewhere too. But for a series of six weekends over the summer of 1969 between 120th & 124th Street the Harlem Cultural Festival gave an oppressed, marginalised, and often demonised, people not just some great music and some incredible memories but hope for the future.

It changed their world and in doing so, in a small way, it changed all our worlds. Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson's Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) uses long ignored (not lost, ignored) footage of that event to tell a story of the black experience in America before, after, and, most specifically, during that era - and it's one every soul fan, every music fan, and every cinema fan should make a point of seeing.

The Harlem Cultural Festival wasn't just about soul. There were jazz performers (Roy Ayers, Mongo Santamaria, Ray Barretto), gospel acts (Mahalia Jackson, The Staple Singers, The Edwin Hawkins Singers), and even acts considered pop like St Louis's The 5th Dimension. There were comedians, ventriloquists (!), and impassioned speeches by a young Jesse Jackson whose brown suede waistcoast, green cravat, and stripey t-shirt combo alone is worth the price of admission.

Jackson's on hand, in more formal attire, to look back at the event too. As are Al Sharpton, Gladys Knight, Marilyn McCoo of The 5th Dimension, Stevie Wonder, and a host of regular punters who attended the festival over its six week run. Gladys Knight remembers being young and up'n'coming, and with The Pips knocks out an uplifting and life affirming take of I Heard It Through The Grapevine, Marilyn McCoo and her bandmates recall surprising an audience that had assumed them to be white, and audience members recount their amazement that Sly and the Family Stone had a white drummer - and one, Greg Errico, bold enough to take the stage in a leopard print outfit.

Against a backdrop of assassinations (JFK, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X), angry white protests at black students being allowed to study alongside white ones, an epidemic of heroin addiction in the ghettos, and burning cities - and with Richard Nixon taking the presidency that year - the Harlem Cultural Festival was both an outlet of energy and a source of pure unadulterated joy as much as it was a political statement and most of the artists who appeared firmly understood that and expressed it as creatively and as powerfully as you could ever hope for.

BB King's Why I Sing The Blues outlined years of oppression and being treated like a second class citizen and set it to a turbocharged electric blues riff, David Ruffin (recently departed from The Temptations) wowed the crowd with some extraordinary high notes in My Girl, The Edwin Hawkins Singers roused the spirits with Oh Happy Day, and Hugh Masekela made it clear that the American black experience had echoes of the African one with a triumphant rendition of Grazing in the Grass.

Mavis Staples spoke of how sharing a microphone with Mahalia Jackson was one of the proudest moments in her life, Mongo Santamaria hits his bongos so hard his hands start to look like shovels, and Stevie Wonder (before his imperial phase of the 1970s and at a stage when his audience, wrongly, assumed he'd play it safe and keep churning out pop hits) moves so far down his keyboard looking for low, funky notes to play that a well meaning bystander nudges him - assuming his blindness to be the reason for this change of direction.

Even in a line up as stellar as this, some stars shine brighter than others. Sly and the Family Stone (who actually turn up, not always guaranteed) cause a surge towards the stage and soon their psychedelic soul and acid fried funk is driving the crowd crazy. Sly Stone himself, a proto Prince in purple, leading the crowd through a cathartic and celebratory singalong of I Wanna Take You Higher. One attendee, interviewed fifty years later, talks of turning up at the festival as a jacket and tie guy and leaving it, having seen Sly, knowing that the jacket and tie days were over.

Perhaps the only artist that can eclipse Sly and the Family Stone is, of course, Nina Simone. Taking to the stage in a beautiful yellow dress, looking like an "African princess", you can see the young girls in the audience transfixed by her beauty, her confidence, and her authority - their lives transformed forever. Her voice is, of course, perfect and when she sings Backlash Blues and Young, Gifted and Black it's nigh on impossible to stop tears of joy forming in your eye.

While the rest of America were celebrating Neil Amstrong becoming the first man to walk on the moon (not an event that sat well with those who lived in chronically underfunded inner cities), black America, or at least black New York, were out freaky dancing, some in their Sunday best - some dressed almost in full Funkadelic garb, and having a moment that changed their lives - and changed music.

The fact this footage sat in a basement for over five decades is little short of a travesty. It does, however,  give us a chance to revisit it completely fresh and to see it, in our own small way, as those at the time must have done. For that, a lot of the thanks must go to director Questlove (a man whose name, these days, has become a byword for quality). 

Thankyou for the music too to Stevie Wonder, BB King, Mongo Santamaria, The Staples Singers, Mahalia Jackson, Ray Barretto, The 5th Dimension, David Ruffin, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and Nina Simone. I watched this film in Brixton a place that, to me, is the beating heart of black London - and I'm glad I did. It felt right to do so. It had been my first visit to the cinema for 647 days (there's been something going on, you might have heard) and it's hard to imagine a more joyous spectacle to return to. It's good to be back.