This looked like a throwback to some classic London reggae show of the 1970s. It was getting on for midnight at the Forum, and the hall was packed with an almost exclusively Afro-Caribbean crowd. The air was thick with marijuana, and there were portraits of Haile Selassie and Bob Marley on sale around the hall. On stage, a singer in a large brown hat, a red shirt and a scarf in the red, yellow and green colours of the Rastafarian faith, was lecturing his audience about Marcus Garvey and his ideal of the repatriation of the descendants of slaves to Africa. Miguel Collins, better known as Sizzla, was hard at work trying to revive and update the great days of reggae for a very different era.

Two decades on from Marley's death, reggae is still a mighty musical force around the world, and these days Marley's influence can be heard everywhere. Jamaican music has moved on since then, of course, with the furious dancehall styles of the 1980s and their preoccupation with guns, drugs and sex, now followed by "conscious" dancehall reggae, and an attempt to match that dancehall energy with some of the political and religious concerns of the classic reggae era.

Sizzla, is one of the more controversial and prolific exponents of this new Jamaican reggae. The Forum show should have been a major showcase for him, especially with such a large and enthusiastic crowd, but his performance failed to quite match the setting. He came on late, after two other singers, Bushman and Turbulence, had already effectively demonstrated how old-style reggae anthems and dancehall could be mixed, and proceeded to tear into his considerable repertoire.

Sizzla was a man in a hurry, and he never stopped switching styles. Fragments of melodic reggae anthems were mixed with furious lectures, bursts of half-spoken passages backed by drum, bass and keyboards, and then followed suddenly by gentle love songs. His energy level was impressive, as was that insistent rasping voice, but he didn't have time to do justice to his songs. At midnight, just 45 minutes into his set, the house lights came on, marking the end of the show. The crowds began to leave, with Sizzla still on stage. I never saw that happen to Bob Marley.