Pop Mythology: The 2-Tone past and multi-coloured future of the Gulliebon

It’s approaching eight o’clock on an overcast Wednesday morning. Half a mile from the bombed-out husk of Coventry Cathedral, a ragtag band of trailers and stalls - refugees from the recently demolished Hapney Market - have set up shop on the bulldozed concrete foundations of the Taylor Brothers soap factory. Already an air of premature defeat hangs over this down-at-heel facsimile of the high street, as a parade of potential customers, all apparently on their way to somewhere else, shuffle in dribs and drabs past wire baskets full to the brim with packs of budget Calvin Klein underwear, wooden boxes of fruit, and trays of red meat laid out on bright green Astroturf.

In this atmosphere of threadbare commerce it’s heartening to see at least one of the traders is doing brisk business. At the far end of the makeshift avenue, a pair of long of trestle tables bow slightly under the weight of several blue plastic crates filled with 12 inch vinyl. Closer inspection reveals the stock to be composed mainly of vintage dub and reggae although, somewhat incongruously, a heavyweight re-pressing of Stars by Simply Red also slumps forward under a slanted stack of records. A serious looking young man systematically flicks through the massed ranks of plastic-wrapped cardboard sleeves, laying potential purchases in a small pile on top of the contents of an adjacent, previously inspected crate.

While the records take up most of the room on the stall, the main focus for a cosmopolitan mix of old men, teenagers in school uniform and a young mum over-burdened with shopping bags from a nearby Lidl supermarket, wheeling a toddler in a pushchair, are the plastic jars of boiled sweets, bearing a wonky black and white chessboard livery.

“Gulliebon, when it’s gone it’s gone,” says Derek Wright as he uses a metal trowel with raised sides to fill a small brown paper bag with the contents of one of the jars. Holding the bag taut by both corners, he deftly flips the bottom horizontally over the top before handing it to one of a trio of schoolgirls. We both watch as they dash across the vast expanse of bare concrete, passing in and out of a large patch of sunlight, in the direction of the idling bus that has just pulled in at a stop.

Over the last four decades, Wright has eked out an existence as a purveyor of rare Jamaican vinyl, a serial bootlegger, an engineer on the railways, a DJ both on the live circuit and on local radio, and as the curator of a bizarre tribute album that saw some of the leading lights of 1980s reggae paying homage to Wolverhampton glam rockers Slade. However his most enduring claim to fame is as the inventor of the Gulliebon – the black and white checkerboard sweet manufactured from Gullie weed, that has become synonymous with the 2-Tone movement.

As he tells me later over a pint of Guinness: “Even the Rude Boys and Girls need something sweet to take the edge off.”

Sam Redlark: “Do you remember the first time you tried Gullie weed?”

Derek Wright: “I never even heard of it when I lived in Jamaica. When I was 12 I emigrated to Coventry with my mother and my two sisters. I was enrolled at Bray’s Lane Comprehensive School and immediately started running around with some bad boys. At the time the school had a massive playing field. If you wanted to smoke you went right down to the bottom where the teachers couldn’t be bothered to follow you  – they’ve built houses on it now. Me and my mates would do a bunk over the railings and go out robbing and stealing. Afterwards we’d head back to class like nothing happened. Being seen at school was our alibi.

“At home things were getting bad between me and my mother. My sisters were scared cause we were fighting all the time, often physically. One time, our next door neighbour called the police and I spent the night down the local nick. After that the social services started sniffing around. For a while it looked as if I was going into foster care or maybe to a home. At the last minute my Aunt Agnes agreed to take me in and I went to live with her and my uncle Clive in their council flat in Bell Green. Every Sunday after church she cooked up her Lionel Town Tincture, which she made by boiling Gullie weed with sugar and water. If you left it out for a few days and let the air get to it, the sugar would crystallise and it would go almost solid like pappy gum. My uncle Clive had a job on the railways as an engineer. He would chew on it all the way through his shift to keep himself alert.”

Sam Redlark: “Was Gullie weed widely used in the Jamaican expat community?”

Derek Wright: “It was very hard to get hold of. In the wild Gullie grows in shallow tropical waters. The seagulls snatch it out of the current and mash it into paste on the rocks with their feet. That’s where the song Gullie Stomp gets its name. They use it as a stimulant the same as humans do.

“When I first came to the UK there were a few corner shops where you could buy dried Gullie. You could get it in flakes to put in stews. My Aunt used to grow it herself in a tank of salt water on the balcony of her flat. There was a dirty orange electrical extension lead running through the small top window of the living room which powered the pump and an aquarium heater.”

Sam Redlark: “What gave you the idea of putting it in sweets?”

Derek Wright: “In 1979 I was seeing a girl called Jo. She worked in a sweet shop kitchen in Foleshill that was actually a basement flat where they made seaside rock for places like Blackpool. We were both into 2-Tone and The Specials in particular. One day she made some mint humbugs with a lopsided black and white chessboard pattern like the 2-Tone records logo. We handed them out at a Specials gig and people seemed to dig them. By this time I was chewing Gullie pap all the time. It gives you mad energy for about the first hour, like you’ve had too much coffee. After that your concentration levels go up and you get tunnel vision. My way of thinking was that Gullie and 2-Tone were on the same wavelength – really energetic but underneath very disciplined and focused. I suggested that she put some of the Gullie pap in the middle of her sweets to give them a soft chewy centre. I called them Gulliebon because they’re bonbons. Also ‘bon’ is French for ‘good.’”

Sam Redlark: “And you handed them out at gigs?”

Derek Wright: “The first time was at a punk/reggae all-dayer at The Cock in the Haystack, which was a hulking great corner boozer on Woolven Road. I had a Saturday job at a launderette nearby so every hour or so I had to duck out and check on the machines. Jo and her mate Coleen went down there with two wicker baskets full of Gulliebon. They walked around handing them out.”

Sam Redlark: “I assume that most of the audience wouldn’t have tasted Gullie before, or known much about its effects. What was their reaction?”

Derek Wright: “The first band on that day were called The Lions of Trafalgar. They were an all-white skinhead group. They weren’t racist or nothing like that but the audience weren’t really paying them much attention so they started fucking about. One of them said something like ‘We didn’t have to pay to get in here.’ That got everybody’s backs up. The audience started pelting them with the Gulliebon until they went off-stage. It was really disheartening, but then later on in the day people kept coming up to Jo and me and asking us what was in our sweets and where they could get some more. It got popular very quickly. Pretty soon we started making up small bags to sell at shows.”

Sam Redlark: “I remember going to a Selecter gig in London. Everybody there seemed to be sucking on Gulliebon.”

Derek Wright:  “At The Werkz in Brixton? You see, we’ve already crossed paths! It reached a point where we were cooking all the time. At our peak we had ten staff working for us. Our kitchen was raided by the police because they thought we were using Gulliebon as a cover for trafficking harder drugs. They couldn’t believe that you could have this many people in a small business working profitably just to manufacture sweets. They confiscated our entire stock three days before The Specials played their homecoming gig at the Mill Workers Union Hall. A group of us worked solidly for 48 hours to replace what they took. We never got any of the original stock back.”

Club owners such as Steven Paxman, who managed Datsuns in Coventry, remembers the sudden rise in the popularity of Gulliebon:

“Gulliebon quickly became a fixture at 2-Tone and ska gigs. When the venue cleared you would find the crushed black and white remains of sweets that people had dropped and then trodden on glued to the floor like crystallised bird shit. It was so sticky that sometimes you had to chisel it off. We banned it from the venue but people kept bringing it in.”

Around this time bands such as Madness, The Specials and to a lesser extent Bad Manners and The Selecter were enjoying chart success. As these acts grew in popularity, Gulliebon made the transition from a local to a national phenomenon, as George Hey, a former Deputy Editor of Smash Hits, recalls:

“One afternoon I returned to the offices of Smash Hits in a somewhat refreshed state, having enjoyed a leisurely, mostly liquid, lunch in the company of Michael Roe, who at the time was the Managing Director of Earl Records.

“We had hatched a plan to put a chap called Regular Fox, who was known to his mum as Owen Raiman, on the front cover. Mr. Fox was the lead singer in a ska-lite band called The Strangers and my brilliant idea was to have him dressed-up in a purple suit and a beanie hat, leaning suggestively towards the reader, proffering an open palm onto which we glued a plastic bag containing two or three Gulliebon. The strap-line was something like ‘Are you ready to accept sweets from a Stranger?’ When I came up with this I had consumed three different types of rum and was over-awed by my extraordinary genius. Five weeks later, staring at it in the racks of WH Smiths in the cold, sober light of day, it suddenly seemed in rather poor taste. I still cringe when I think about it.”

As the popularity of 2-Tone waned interest, Gulliebon began to die off. Wright opened the first in a series of record shops but by the early 1990s he was working on the railways doing the same job as his uncle Clive.

Sam Redlark: “When did Gulliebon start coming back into vogue?”

Derek Wright: “It’s always ebbed and flowed in popularity. Around 1997 something changed. We were at the tail-end of Brit-pop. There was a kind of cultural vacuum where a lot of local scenes stepped in to fill the void. In Coventry there was a 2-Tone renaissance. In the space of about two months I had five people asking me for interviews for books or magazine articles. I had always cooked a small quantity of Gulliebon for my regulars. All of a sudden I was selling out. People were asking me where they could get more.

“At the moment it’s taking me and two students from Harnell Catering College to keep pace with the demand. In January I secured a global patent. Now I’m planning to expand into marketing. Gulliebon’s always had the black and white chessboard pattern. Now I’m in talks with football teams to produce some in their colours. I’m thinking of doing the same for businesses – manufacturing Gulliebon with their logo on it. Gulliebon’s always been black and white. Now I’m re-launching it in high-definition colour.”

Sam Redlark: “I read an article in the Coventry Saviour where you took some of the credit for the record GSCE results at your former school.”

Derek Wright: “The kids around here are well into Gulliebon. They pick some up on the way to school. It makes them a bit rowdy for an hour; that’s why nobody wants to teach first period. After that it puts them in a state of mind where they are ready to learn. If you compare the exam results for state secondary schools around the county then the grades for the schools nearest to my stall are higher than average. Gulliebon provides a solid mental foundation for learning. It sounds ridiculous but it’s true. The government should send some scientists down here to study it.”