Champagne, double deckers and dirty bass lines

On a Sunday afternoon in July in Addington Park in Croydon, the unmistakable bass line of dancehall thunders across a field. White coaches pull up and the passengers descend, groups of partygoers dressed in white. There’s pearls, sequins, diamanté, fishnet, lace. Everyone looks beautiful. 

This is Hollywood glamour, or a Friday night in Mayfair via Jamaica: hair perfectly coiffed, box-fresh trainers and white gold chains. Inside the gates, stalls serving cocktails and food abound, the air smelling of jerk chicken and fried plantain. The DJs on stage are warming up the crowd with some old-school dancehall tracks and over by the VIP section, champagne bottle girls in pink shiny minidresses and matching eyeshadow are impressively navigating the grass in their perspex platform heels. In the centre of the field, giant 12-foot-high light-up letters provide the perfect selfie backdrop: “BUS DRIVERS LINK UP”. 

The Link Up is a popular biannual celebration set up for the capital’s bus drivers to let loose, although nowadays us passengers can also attend. It’s not a concert, not quite a party, and it’s not a commercially managed, money-grabbing festival (looking at you, Wireless). Its lifeblood is organiser Orville Russell, known to most as Junior. He cuts a glamorous figure — think Gatsby if he came from Kingston — and at last year’s Champagne and Brandy Ball wore a black satin suit with peaked lapels showered in a starburst of gold diamanté with a matching gold cravat, his beard groomed to perfection. 

At this summer’s White and Bright event, where the dress code is “more edgy”, he is pristinely dressed in a white t-shirt with “STRAWBERRY GUCCI” emblazoned in purple across his chest, a silver chain, designer trainers and a flashy gold watch. Where others might retreat into their fifties wrapped in a Berghaus fleece and Gore-Tex, Russell steps forward, sequins optional, big smile compulsory.

On the ground, he seems to be everywhere all at once: instructing the caterers and the countless security through walkie-talkies, while posing with celebrities like MC-turned-nation’s sweetheart Alesha Dixon, British garage artist Donae’o, and Jamaican dancehall star Demarco. He’s on FaceTime with the lady at the media entrance gate (they’ve run out of red wristbands) and fist-bumping the DJs setting up for the night ahead, all while updating attendees via his Instagram account. 

Bus Drivers Link Up began as a birthday party Russell threw for himself 16 years ago, after a difficult period in which he split from his wife and moved out of the home he shared with his family. The party had such an impressive turnout of bus drivers that one guest declared, “it’s like a bus driver link up!” The name stuck, and he began to establish the events as a business, investing his money and time to give his TfL colleagues a permanent fixture on their social calendar. 

At the time, Russell was in his third year of driving buses and saw that many of his fellow drivers had little to no social life — they were focused on making as much money as possible without a thought for their mental wellbeing. Coming from Jamaica only a few years before, “the social life I know and love is shaking a leg,” says Russell. Growing up between Kingston and Spanish Town, Russell spent his younger years working in a bank, but always with one foot in the music scene. “I’ve always had a passion for music; there was a time when I wanted to be a performer,” he says, though he found himself more comfortable on the business side, rubbing shoulders with artists such as Shaggy and Elephant Man.

These musical connections have helped Russell fix up some big-name dancehall artists for his events, such as last year’s headliner, Busy Signal. When selecting artists, Russell chooses names that will appeal to attendees. “They may not be the most current, but they can still connect with an audience because their catalogue is so good,” says Russell. “Some of their songs are timeless dancehall classics.” 

Presumably another consideration is what artists will attract the female contingent to his events. And if this year’s party is anything to go by, Russell is succeeding: by the end of the night, the stage was surrounded by several rows of immaculately dressed women. I speak to a couple of female bus drivers, Elise and Janae, who have come to the transport industry later in life and are part of the growing number of female bus drivers. What do they make of the Bus Drivers Link Up? 

“It’s a classy event,” says Janae. “We work hard for our money and it’s always a 10/10 experience, because you know it’s not like some big company is trying to make a profit. This is for bus drivers by bus drivers.”  

Janae has brought several of her non-bus driver friends to the event after they saw the line-up advertised. While female drivers are still a minority — only 16% of bus and coach drivers in London are female — the numbers are steadily growing each year. “Being a bus driver suits my life as a mother,” says Elise, who is dressed in a white lace catsuit and J-Lo style sunglasses. “I make pretty good money and can work my shifts around my family life at home.” 

Bus Drivers Link Up events have a unifying feel typical of grassroots Caribbean celebration. This sense of community is perhaps missing from the now heavily franchised TfL — with different operators vying for bus routes, there is a sense of disconnectedness both individually and within the sector itself. It’s a gap that Russell is trying to bridge. When he moved to London from Jamaica in the early 2000s and began his career as a bus driver for TfL, he was treading a well-worn path of Caribbean immigrants to England, taking on jobs that keep the city moving ever since the first docking of Empire Windrush in 1948.

“I know the feeling of isolation, the feeling of depression because you’re trying to adapt to a new culture,” he says, acknowledging that his events are filling the role that was once held by London Transport before it became TfL and split into different operators. “Back then, it was even more organised because [London Transport] had sports clubs: cricket, football, dominoes… the stuff that we enjoy in the Caribbean. It was more like a big family.”

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Bus Drivers Link Up pulls some big numbers as well as big names: at the last outdoor event in 2022, there were 3,200 attendees and this event looks to be a similar number. “I keep outgrowing the venues,” says Russell, who is proud to leave his children with a legacy to uphold. The demographic is pretty firmly in the African-Caribbean community — “about 90—95 %,” says Russell. He would love to diversify, though that would require the assistance of TfL to help to spread the word.

At the moment, Russell publicises his events through social media and old-school posters and pirate radio station adverts, though he accepts that the underground pirate radio scene is dwindling since the emergence of online streaming platforms. Physical tickets are sold in local businesses like hair salons and Caribbean takeaway restaurants, and digitally via Eventbrite. Organising and publicising the events alongside a full-time job is no mean feat, especially in the climate of London’s floundering nightlife and party scene.  

What does the future of Bus Drivers Link Up look like? Russell would like to see the event enter the mainstream with the help of sponsorship,  although some drinks companies have already turned the opportunity down — perhaps wanting to avoid any risk of association with drink driving. 

The next Bus Drivers Link Up is already being promoted: a “Jamaica Nostalgia” event in January. The winter event promises to be an elegant affair, with ballgowns, dinner and — of course — dancing until 3am, when coaches, Cinderella-style, will bring our glamorous bus drivers back to their homes.

Despite the benefits, a bus driver’s life can be an isolated one. “The work is very hard. It’s rigorous. It takes a lot of concentration,” says Russell, who now works as a bus controller. The drivers face a lot of pressure: from other road users, London’s seemingly constant roadworks, and  even their passengers — according to a Unite survey last year, 82% of TfL bus drivers were subject to abuse last year. 

Most of us will have felt a little heart tug when our bus drivers pass each other with a wave or a honk of the horn, a little glimmer of moral support as they make their way along the lanes of London. For Russell, Bus Drivers' Link Up is there to show drivers that “there’s a community and a camaraderie. So even if you might not be spending every day with each other, knowing that they’re still on the road, that’s a good feeling”.