He was a leading figure in black British music of the 1930s and early 1940s before his death while performing at the Café de Paris, London, when it was hit by a German bomb in the Blitz during the Second World War.

He showed some musical ability, but his early interest in a career in dancing displeased his father, who wished him to study medicine.

He was educated in Britain, but instead of continuing on to university, he travelled to New York, perfecting dance moves and immersing himself in the vibrant jazz scene in Harlem.

He returned to Britain and set up the Aristocrats (or Emperors) of Jazz, a mainly black swing band, with Leslie Thompson, a Jamaican musician.

Johnson filled the vacancies with musicians from the Caribbean; the band's popularity grew and its name changed to the West Indian Dance Orchestra.

Increasingly popular, they were employed as the house band at the Café de Paris, an upmarket and fashionable nightclub located in a basement premises below a cinema.

The West Indian Dance Orchestra were the leading swing band in Britain at the time, well-known and popular through their radio broadcasts, but their impact was more social than musical.

His main influence was Buddy Bradley, a well-known African American dancer and choreographer who ran a dance school in the West End of London.

[2] According to Andrew Simons, Head of Music at the British Library, it is likely that Johnson also saw the act of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, who performed a "stair dance" that was well-known on the New York vaudeville stage.

[4][6] He appeared on stage in August 1935 for a one-night performance in British Guiana; posters advertised him as "Ken 'Snakehips' Johnson, Direct in from Hollywood after contract with Warner Bros.

Wanting to achieve the same sounds as the American big bands, he said "I made them rehearse to get that lift that Jimmie Lunceford and [Duke] Ellington were getting on their records";[14] he described Johnson as "a stick wagger—he was no musician".

[11] On saxophone the band included three Jamaicans (Bertie King, Louis Stephenson and Joe Appleton) and Robert Mumford-Taylor, who was of Sierra Leonean descent.

Thompson was joined on trumpet by the Trinidadian Wally Bowen, the Jamaican Leslie "Jiver" Hutchinson and Arthur Dibbin, who was born in South Wales of West African descent.

Yorke de Souza, a Jamaican, was the pianist; Joe Deniz, who was born in South Wales of a father from the Cape Verde Islands, was the guitarist.

As Thompson could not find suitable black trombonists, he employed Reg Amore and Freddie Greenslade, both of whom were white but would wear blackface to ensure the band were seen as an all-black ensemble.

[33] Due to the threat of bombing, Willerby's closed in October 1939,[34] but the band were in demand and began an engagement at the Café de Paris, an upmarket nightclub in Coventry Street, London.

[32] The band's popularity rose, as did their profile: the Café de Paris was equipped to broadcast on the BBC, and they regularly performed on radio across the UK.

[35] The demand for their employment was aided by British musicians being conscripted for war service, which the largely West Indian orchestra were not.

[32] In 1940 Johnson began a relationship with Gerald Hamilton, a man 20 years his senior; the couple lived for a while in Kinnerton Street, Belgravia.

[38] Mad to celebrate this or that—a call-up, a promotion, an unexpected week-end pass, or a hasty marriage—they groped their way through the black-out to the Savoy and the Café de Paris ... and enjoyed the added thrill of dancing the night away while anti-aircraft guns thudded away outside.

With the club underground, beneath the Rialto cinema, the Café's manager, Martin Poulsen, advertised it as "the safest and gayest restaurant in town—even in air raids.

He wrote in his diary "Again that awful feeling of nausea which I had felt when France fell, and again the sensation of the ground slipping from beneath my feet".

[46] Hamilton was devastated by the loss of his partner and never travelled without a framed photograph of Johnson in evening dress, always referring to him as "my husband".

Many of Johnson's former colleagues played—Deniz and Bromley still showing the leg injuries they sustained—and they played several songs together, with other musicians filling in the gaps in the group.

[49] The BBC also broadcast two further programmes in February 1942, once when Perowne played Johnson's records, and once when the band reunited under Barriteau for a one-off performance.

[53] Such racial integration in mainstream British jazz and dance orchestras increased over the following years,[54] although many bands, including those led by Hutchinson, still faced what was called the "colour bar" when trying to gain bookings in clubs.

[61] The musical historian Roberta Freund Schwartz writes that the movement of "surviving members ... arguably improved the overall sound of native jazz".

[63] The same year the broadcaster Clemency Burton-Hill presented Swinging in the Blitz for the BBC, an exploration of the role of jazz in Britain during the Second World War; Johnson and his band's history was the focus for much of the programme.

[11] According to the writer Amon Saba Saakana, Johnson's "brilliant dancing and showmanship established the band's reputation as one of the best in Britain".

[75] Some of the arrangements of Johnson's music were done by the American musician Adrian de Haas, others by Barriteau and some by Kenny Baker—who later appeared in Ted Heath's orchestra.