Songfacts®:

• "Handsworth Revolution" is the title track and opening song from Steel Pulse's 1978 debut album. The song is a powerful protest anthem that captures both the struggles and resilience of the Black community in Handsworth, an inner city urban area that lies just outside the Birmingham city center.
• Written by frontman David Hinds, the track sprang from very real tensions: racist policing, economic neglect, and the not-so-gentle presence of the National Front, a far-right political group that seemed to treat Black neighborhoods as open-air provocation zones. "The NF marched through Handsworth a couple of times," Hinds told Uncut magazine, "but we bottled and bricked them out, so I wrote Handsworth Revolution. I was thinking that it was only a matter of time before we began to retaliate and tore the place down."
  
  As it happened, he was right - the 1981 riots, fueled by exactly these frustrations, erupted just a few years later.
• Musically, the song is a beautiful mess. There's a hypnotic bassline, rolling percussion, and Hinds' impassioned vocals. The band, by their own admission, were still finding their footing when it came to song structure.
  
  "We wanted to be authentic, but we had a completely different style to Jamaican reggae," Hinds said. "We used different chords to most Jamaican musicians; we arranged things differently and our harmonies had a certain ignorance. We didn't know what we were doing. We lacked knowledge about chords and tempos and the role they play in the song, and we had no concept of arrangements. A track like Handsworth Revolution had a completely unconventional structure. But it worked."
• Jamaican producer and sound engineer Karl Pitterson produced the song. Over the course of his long career, he has worked with a lengthy list of reggae legends, including Bob Marley and The Wailers, Peter Tosh, Burning Spear and Aswad.
• Released in July 1978, Handsworth Revolution reached #9 on the UK Albums chart, at the time an unprecedented success for a British reggae band.