Rebels, guns, drugs and great music

The footage is extraordinary: snake-haired Rastafarians smoking marijuana from enormous pipes; gunmen on the streets firing indiscriminately; alleyways of incredible poverty and mountains of impossible beauty. And all the time an ever-changing soundtrack, which moves from ska through reggae and dub to gruff dancehall.

This is Reggae: The Story of Jamaican Music, is a two-part BBC documentary that traces the social and political history of Jamaica as much as it showcases the music from this small Caribbean island.

It devotes equal time to the ska musicians of the 50s and 60s - and the expat Jamaican community in Britain of that period - and the figurehead of Bob Marley.

With archive footage, including some from the late Dylan Taite's interview with Marley in Auckland in '79, and scenes from ghettos today, it offers a rare overview of Jamaica, a country that the producer/director Mike Connolly says was a pretty obscure place before Marley took his music to the world.

A pleasant Irishman who has just completed a series on British jazz, he spent six weeks in Jamaica and was surprised by the openness he found among musicians.

"Often doing music stories you are dealing with agents, record companies and managers and there is a formal way of approaching artists to be interviewed. Often you don't get through or it's very controlled.

"We spent six weeks in Jamaica and people would say, 'Oh yeah, give us a ring' and they were all in the phone book. It was very refreshing.

"Filming was actually difficult because people wanted to tell their story, because reggae is so often reduced to the Marley story by outsiders, it becomes just the story of the 70s. But when we went to people like Prince Buster and the giants of ska in the 60s they were only too pleased to tell their story and to grab some well-deserved limelight."

Connolly says the Marley archives are a complex and convoluted journey through agents and intermediaries, which can work out incredibly expensive, so he was delighted to find Taite's interview.

"It was an excellent interview and quite straightforward, I got the impression Marley was very big in New Zealand."

The documentary used as its model Lloyd Bradley's book When Reggae Was King, which places the story of reggae in its social and political context, so there is footage of politicians such as former Prime Ministers Michael Manley and Edward Seaga, the arrival of Haile Selassie on the island, and acknowledgement that when cocaine from South America replaced locally grown marijuana the culture of the island changed rapidly. The music reflected that.

What the series tried to mirror was Bradley's story about the making of modern-day Jamaica. Coming from an underclass the music quickly reflected social circumstances.

"It's a very volatile history. Reggae is popular music, folk music in its purest sense. When I was there in the early 80s there were these see-through plastic bags you got at a grocery store and they were called scandal bags because you could see what people were buying. Within a month there were tunes out about the scandal bags.

"Because music there is a cottage industry, not big record company corporations investing money, it really is the voice of the people and that was one of the things we wanted to emphasise, that this was a downtown culture."

The documentary doesn't shy away from the distasteful aspects of the music either, notably the homophobic lyrics of Buju Banton in the 90s. And it's being replayed again with people such as Elephant Man and Beenie Man.

"Reggae is always aspiring to go international and artists want to be part of the hip-hop nation and of black popular music, but at the same time they come out with all these homophobic lyrics. But you say that to them and it doesn't seem to have an effect. You say, 'Have you not learned anything by the whole Buju Banton experience?' and the answer is, 'Well, maybe but this is the way we do it, like it or not'."

Jamaica is a fascinating place.

* Reggae: The Story of Jamaican Music screens on Sky's BBC World tonight at 10.10pm and next Saturday at the same time.