Posts
Last year, during the first lockdown when friends and family were working hard to keep the spirits up, I decided to run down (on Facebook) a personal list of my favourite one hundred reggae tunes (an activity I'd previously carried out for The Fall and David Bowie). I enjoyed it doing it and had been meaning to compile them into a blog for months now. I realised I'm due to post my 800th blog and I wanted something special for it. What could be more special then one hundred amazing pieces of music. Enjoy.
100. THE PIONEERS - TIME HARD
"Everyday things are getting worse, everyday things are getting worse".
This seems a good way to start the list. A song of struggle and tough times delivered as if music itself has the power to pull you out of the bad times. It certainly has the power to lift you out of yourself and out of the doldrums. More, I think, than any other art form. Helpful right now. Helpful always.
Recorded on Orange Street in Jamaica in, I think, 1972 (that's when Trojan released it) and written by Desmond Dekker's half-brother George Agard, this mixes the lovely skanking beats that'll be cropping up pretty much daily now, a woozy psychedelic keyboard motif, and lyrics about people laughing at your dog in the market place. What's not to like?
Later covered by The Selector.
99. AUGUSTUS PABLO - KING TUBBY MEETS ROCKERS UPTOWN
Sometimes when I'm struggling to sleep or relax I put music on and lie on the couch in the dark. It relaxes me and then I can sleep better. Often that music is minimalist or drone like William Basinski or Stars of the Lid and sometimes it's classical (Satie's a favourite). Oddly enough, dub reggae works for me too.
So this top 100 will feature a few choice dub cuts and few come choicer than this. From the 1976 album of the same name, it was originally released as a single in 1974 and is a dub version of Jacob Miller's Baby I Love You So which Augustus Pablo also produced. AllMusic rates it as the finest ever example of dub music but I'll be serving up some other contenders as this list rolls on.
Earl' Chinna' Smith on guitar, Carlton 'Carly' Barrett on drums, it's either Robbie Shakespeare or Aston 'Family Man' (a nickname that came about before he had any children but one he lived up to, he's got 41 (forty-one) of them now), Barrett on bass, and Pablo on melodica. King Tubby, one of dub's great innovators, mixed the album. Both a historical document and a towering slice of sublime joy.
98 PETER TOSH - LEGALIZE IT
The first song from Tosh's first solo album, in 1976, after leaving The Wailers. On its release Tosh said, according to Wikipedia, "we are the victims of Rasclot circumstances. Victimization, colonialism, gonna lead to bloodbath" before having another toke and then (possibly) changing his mind.
Tosh was shot dead in Kingston, Jamaica in 1987 aged 42.
The eponymous album this introduces features a list of names that will start to become familiar, if they're not already, during this list:- Aston 'Family Man' Barrett, Robbie Shakespeare, Carlton 'Carly' Barrett, Rita Marley, Judy Mowatt, and Bunny Wailer. It reached no.199 in the US album charts.
Just need to work out what the song is about now. Could be Citizen's Band radio as that was illegal back then.
97 SCIENTIST - VOODOO CURSE
The thing with these dub albums is that you really need to listen to the whole album rather than just one track. You really have to sink into them. That, alas, is not the way of these lists so please settle for this glorious excerpt.
Scientist (aka Hopeton Overton Brown) specialises in a more electronic, dancehall flavoured, kind of dub and was taken on as a kind of apprentice by King Tubby at Studio One before moving over to Jo Jo Hoo Kim's rival Channel One soundsystem.
1981's album Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires' cover sees Scientist and a sidekick riding through the Everglades or something in a floating sound system and taking no shit from Dracula, the Mummy, a werewolf, Frankenstein's monster, and other assorted ghosts and ghouls.
Scientist is known and loved for his brilliant artwork and his fantastic concepts. Other albums saw Scientist winning the World Cup, encountering a lethal Pac-Man, and dressing up as a hero to beat the crap out of some unruly Space Invaders. Now, surely, is the time for Scientist to rid us of the coronavirus. Follow the science. Follow the Scientist!
96 LEE "SCRATCH" PERRY AND THE UPSETTERS - DREAD LION
First appearance of Lee 'Scratch' Perry on this list and SPOILER ALERT it won't be the last.
Super Ape was recorded at Perry's Black Ark studio in Kingston, Jamaica in 1976 and, along with albums by Augustus Pablo/King Tubby and Keith Hudson, is considered to be part of the holy trinity of seminal dub texts. Three years after recording Super Ape, Perry (whose eccentric behaviour is so notorious it often overshadows his absolute genius as a producer) burnt the Black Ark down.
As with other reggae albums of the era it's not totally clear which musicians play on which tracks but those on this album make for a long list of names and there's some impressive nicknames among them too. Drums are shared between Michael 'Mikey Boo' Richards and Anthony 'Benbow' Creary, Boris Gardiner's on bass (he's not just the I Want To Wake Up With You guy), on guitar it's Earl 'Chinna' Smith, Keith Sterling's on piano, and Prince Jazzbo crops up with a bit of toasting on the track Croaking Lizard. Best of all the flautist is some dude named Egbert Evans which is a name I can see myself borrowing.
In the words of Perry himself:- "instead of hate and malice, we should be sipping chalice".
95 - DR ALIMANTADO - I KILLED THE BARBER
"Everyone going around saying they know who shot the barber. I know who shot the barber! It was Tom, Tom, the Piper's son. I tell you, say".
Deejay time with this absolutely bonkers and brilliant deconstruction of John Holt's already excellent Ali Baba from 1978's superb Best Dressed Chicken In Town album. An LP that was recorded in four of Kingston's most legendary studios (the Black Ark, Channel One, Randy's, and King Tubby's) and became the very first release on the hugely influential Greensleeves record label in Ealing.
Elsewhere on the album the voices of Horace Andy, Gregory Isaacs, and Jah Woosh can be heard but it's Alimantado's toasting and discursive extrapolations as well as the production (King Tubby AND Lee Perry at the controls, as well as Philip Smart, Pat Kelly, and Lancelot 'Maxie' McKenzie) that really make the album. Dr Alimantado was born Winston James Thompson in Kingston in 1952 and he wasn't satisfied with just one nom de plume, also styling himself The Ital Surgeon. Along with the likes of Big Youth and U-Roy, Dr Alimantado became a firm favourite on the UK punk scene.
There's an interesting piece to be written, perhaps it's already been written, about the reggae obsession with baldheads, dreads, and doing horrible things to barbers and you could probably write something about that album cover, the doc's undone flies and red pants.
This demands to be played loud.
94 - JACKIE MITTOO - BLACK ORGAN
"He was an ambassador of our music worldwide, there can be no doubt. Read the legacy this young man has left behind. May his name be remembered and his music live on" - Coxsone Dodd on Jackie Mittoo, following Mittoo's untimely death from cancer, aged 42, in Toronto in 1990.
I bought the compilation album The Keyboard King at Studio One not long after Soul Jazz put it out back in 2000. At the time I was vaguely aware of his name but I loved the music and I loved the album cover of a young Jackie in a natty suit and tie bopping outside what looks like an airport runway with a fag in his hand.
A founding member of The Skatalites, he went on to become the musical director at Studio One before emigrating to Canada in the mid-70s. In the eighties he worked with Sugar Minott and visited Ghana with Musical Youth.
When
I compiled this list I wasn't thinking of days of the week but it was
sweet that this has fell on a Sunday as it's got a lovely laid-back
Sunday afternoon vibe. Mind you, everyday is like Sunday now as someone
who is likely to have some quite 'interesting' views on reggae once
said.
93 - KEITH HUDSON - RASTA COMMUNICATION
"We will live through this eternity".
First appearance for 'The Dark Prince of Reggae' in the top 100 but is it the last?
This is off his 1976 LP 'Too Expensive'. Hudson went to school, and organised concerts there, with Bob Marley and Ken Boothe but as the seventies developed he went down a much heavier, dubbier, route than those two although this track, recorded after he'd moved to New York, sees him moving away from that sound and finding a slightly uneasy balance between dub and pop. Eight years later, still in New York, Hudson died of lung cancer. He was only in his late thirties.
92 - BIG YOUTH - SCREAMING TARGET
Born in Trenchtown in 1949, Manley Augustus Buchanan took the names Jah Youth and, more famously, Big Youth and, like Dr Alimantado, became one of the leading deejays in Jamaica throughout the seventies.
Screaming Target comes from the album of the same name, Big Youth's debut (released in 1973), and was produced by Augustus 'Gussie' Clark whose huge list of productions includes albums by I-Roy, Shabba Ranks, Gregory Isaacs, Dennis Brown, Aswad, Cocoa Tea, and The Mighty Diamonds. This track makes uses of K.C.White's 'No, No, No,' rhythm which might, just might, get a rewind later in this top 100.
In the UK this was released on Trojan Records. Croydon doing its bit to keep Britain skanking.
91 - AUGUSTUS PABLO - EAST OF THE RIVER NILE
Augustus Pablo's second appearance on this list is the title track from his 1977 LP and it's a perfect encapsulation of the man born Horace Swaby's melodica soaked dub.
Production by King Tubby with some familiar names helping out:- Aston 'Family Man' Barrett, Robbie Shakespeare, Carlton Barrett, and Earl 'Chinna' Smith. Some of whom are members of Lee Perry's Upsetters and what do you know? Scratch himself turns up elsewhere on the album.
The Irish literary critic Vivien Mercier famously described Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot as "a play in which nothing happens - twice". East of the River Nile is a song in which very little happens - twice, four times, or a hundred times - and it's all the better for that. You could listen to it on an endless loop and hardly get bored.
90 - BLACK UHURU - GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER
"I appreciate the herb you brought for me, Natty Dreadlocks".
Michael Rose on vocals, Sly and Robbie on drums and bass, and Radcliffe 'Dougie' Bryan on guitar. Black Uhuru formed in Kingston, Jamaica in 1972 but the early-mid eighties were their most successful, and critically acclaimed, period. This album and it's successor Anthem specifically.
I've chosen Guess Who's Coming To Dinner from the album of the same name because that LP was available to take out at Forest Hill library when I first moved to London (1996) and I taped it, and many other reggae albums, so I could listen over and over again. I wasn't aware at the time that Keith Richards (yes, that one) played guitar on one of the album's other tracks, Shine Eye Gal.
Black Uhuru are still going but with only one original member:- Derek 'Duckie' Simpson.
89 - LORD TANAMO - I'M IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE
Pretty certain this is the oldest selection in this run down so far. Lord Tanamo, born Joseph Gordon in Kingston in 1934 (died in Toronto in 2016), is one of the seminal artists who bridged mento and reggae and created a form called ska. Mento was Jamaica's answer to Trinidadian calypso music and, indeed, Tanamo was inspired by probably Trinidad's finest calypsonian Lord Kitchener to the point that it seems certain that his choice of honorific was intended as tribute.
I'm In The Mood For Love is, by anybody's reckoning, a standard. Written by Boston's Jimmy McHugh and New Jersey's Dorothy Fields it originally appeared in 1935, just one year after Tanamo himself, and was sung by Frances Langford in the film Every Night at Eight. Later covered by Vera Lynn, Charlie Parker, Fats Domino, Rosemary Clooney, Paul Anka, Johnny Mathis, Pat Boone, Shirley Bassey, and Cliff Richard. Some good, some bad there. Post-Tanamo it's been subjected to interpretations by Jamiroquai, Jools Holland, and Rod Stewart which is a rogues gallery of music murderers in anyone's book.
Tanamo's version reached number 58 in the UK charts in 1998 after appearing in an advert for Paxo, the Eccles based poultry fiends.
88 - CHAKA DEMUS & PLIERS - MURDER SHE WROTE
"Murderation man"
OK. Before anyone starts, obviously I don't think Chaka Demus and Pliers had a bigger influence on reggae than King Tubby. This was a bit of fun to pass the time during a killer pandemic, it's a jolly distraction, and it's also a personal list - and some of my taste, I'm very pleased to announce, has not been curated by the music police and taste makers. This won't be the only one on this list that people sneer at.
It's not that Chaka Demus and Pliers weren't the real deal anyway although it's quite weird to think they had that period of pop success in 1993 which saw them have three UK top 10 hits (She Don't Let Nobody, Tease Me, and Twist & Shout (no.1 that one)). A few of us went to see them at Reading Rivermead Centre at the time and the audience was a bizarre mix of ageing rastas and schoolgirls.
Deejay is Chaka Demus (John Taylor) and singer is Pliers (whose real name, Everton Bonner, is almost as good as Pliers). Pliers' brothers perform under the names Richie Spice and Spanner Banner. Chaka Demus got his first big break deejaying on Prince Jammy's soundsystem. Their live gigs featured seasoned, and respected, Jamaican musicians and they were seasoned, and respected, Jamaican performers too. The use, in this tune, of The Maytals Bam Bam rhythm underlines that.
So, yeah. I like Chaka Demus & Pliers (even if I have no desire to hear their cover of The Police's Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic). Wanna make something of it?
87 - THE SKATALITES - GUNS OF NAVARONE
Ska! A ska cover of Dimtri Tiomkin's theme for the 1961 film of the same name starring Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn.
This came out in '65 and features 'vocals' by Roland Alphonso, drums by Lloyd Knibb, and bass by Lloyd Brevett and was released on Coxsone Dodd's Muzik City label. It became The Skatalites only UK hit, reaching number 36. Listen carefully and you can hear Lee "Scratch" Perry shouting around in the background.
The Skatalites split later that year but reformed in 1983 and have been going ever since. There have been about a billion different people in the band during its lifetime, including Don Drummond, Jackie Mittoo, Tommy McCook, Cedric 'Im' Brooks, and Jerome "Jah Jerry" Haynes. The only founding member still alive is alto saxophonist Lester Sterling.
I was working backstage at Womad festival about ten years ago when one of The Skatalites approached me and asked if I had any weed. If you're in one of the world's biggest reggae bands and you're playing a festival and you're asking me for weed, something's not right!
86 - LEE PERRY - CURLY LOCKS
"The sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, too. But all I've got inside is lots of love for you, it's true"
The Dub Shepherd in his absolute pomp. This track manages to convey the best of both his eccentric production techniques and his surprisingly expressive voice and it combines sweet sentiments of love with reggae's eternal fight between the baldheads and the rastas. It's from his 1978 LP Roast Fish, Collie Weed & Corn Bread, Perry's first album in which he sang lead vocals on every track. Boris Gardiner's on bass and the lovely backing vocals come from the South African singer Aura Lewis (aka Full Experience) who also worked with Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff.
I used to think the line "your father is a poacher" was "your father is a pork chop". It seemed right, somehow.
"He's a baldhead, I am a congo dread. A living Rastaman, who's got lots of love for you"
85 - SMILEY CULTURE - POLICE OFFICER
"Well, what's your name then son?"
'My name Smiley Culture'
"Yeah, Where do you think you're coming from lad?"
'From seeing me mother'
"What's the registration number of the car then?"
'I can't remember'
"What you got in the boot then son?"
'A cassette recorder. Would you like to have a look?'
"Shut your bloody mouth. We ask. You answer. Now take the keys out of the car and step out of the motor. Me and my colleagues have got a few questions to ask ya. You'll be on your way as soon as we get an answer"
In 1984 David Victor Emmanuel from Stockwell, under his stage name of Smiley Culture, reached an impressive number twelve in the UK charts with this tune, a follow up to his song Cockney Translation. After a few minor hits Smiley Culture faded away from the public arena and next hit the news in 2010 when he was arrested under suspicion of supplying cocaine. His court case was set for March 2011 in Croydon but earlier that month police arrived at his house in Warlingham with a search warrant. An hour after the arrival of the police, Smiley Culture was dead from a stab wound to the heart. A closed investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission deemed the most likely cause of his death was suicide. Make of that what you will. Smiley's family certainly thought it was suspicious and so did many others. Many involved in the 2011 riots cited the case as an example of the kind of unpunished police abuse that led to the riots taking place in the first place.
It's a crying shame that his fatal run in with the dibble wasn't as innocent as he envisioned it back in '84:-
"You what? Did you do that record Cockney Translator?"
'In the reggae charts number one was it's number'
"My kids love it and so does my mother! Tell you what I'll do, a favour for a favour. Just sign your autograph on this piece of paper"
'Me cut him short and just draw out me Parker. Pon the producer me just sign "Smiley Culture"
84 - SYMARIP - SKINHEAD MOONSTOMP
"I want all you skinheads to get up on your feet, put your braces together, and your boots on your feet and give me some of that old moonstomping"
I'd never given much thought to the band Symarip even though this has been on irregular rotation for decades now. Compiling this list, and quite lazily too, I've checked out their Wikipedia page and they're British and not Jamaican as I'd probably have guessed in a pub quiz. They've also gone under the names Zubaba, The Bees, The Pyramids, Seven Letters, and, er, Simaryp! Formed in the late sixties the Zubaba era of the band saw them move to Germany and perform Afro-Rock tunes but it's their skinhead era they're most noted for. Other hits included Skinhead Girl and Skinhead Jamboree. Apparently the bassist Mike Thomas married a Finnish woman, moved to Finland, and kicked off the whole Finnish reggae scene which SPOILER ALERT won't be worrying us on this countdown.
This tune was originally recorded by Derrick Morgan with the title Moon Hop and reached #49 in the UK singles chart in 1969. Symarip's cover came out a year later but didn't bother the charts until it was reissued, in 1980, on the back of the Two-Tone craze. It then reached #54 and soon became firmly entrenched as a tune at skinhead discos.
Though hopefully not the National Front Disco. How on Earth did a skinhead subculture that started off dancing to ska and reggae end up becoming a home for some of the nastiest, most violent, racist thugs in the country? I don't know but there's a great Don Letts documentary about it that's worth watching.
"Shine your boots, brush your teeth, because the man on the moon look different from man on the Earth".
83 - SIZZLA - BLACK WOMAN AND CHILD
In the late nineties I got well into Sizzla or, to give him his birth name, Miguel Orlando Collins. He was knocking albums like Black Woman & Child (this, obvs, being the eponymous track) and Praise Ye Jah out at quite a clip - and I was snapping them up. His work rate's not slowed. At 43 years old he's put out FIFTY-SIX solo albums (six in 2002 alone). But I stopped buying them a long time ago.
Sizzla said, and sang, some pretty vile and ignorant homophobic things and along with Bounty Killer, Capleton, and, most famously of all, Buju Banton he became the target of the Stop Murder Music coalition and was banned from playing gigs in Canada and Germany. Too fucking right. I can't claim that I stopped buying his records because of this, it's too long ago and I just can't remember, but as with other musicians who have not just sullied their copybook but continue to sully it every time they open their mouth (I'm thinking Morrissey again) listening to their music becomes problematic. Separate the man (and it almost always is a man) from the music and all that but I'm sick and tired of people preaching hatred.
It's not what he's doing in this song in which you can hear how talented he actually is, mixing up toasting and singing in a latter incarnation of the singjay style. I genuinely thought he might go on to have the cultural impact of someone like Bob Marley and perhaps he might have done. But instead he let his prejudices define him. I couldn't leave him out of the list as it would be denying the music I have loved over the years but he's lower down than he'd be if he wasn't a nasty homophobe.
There will be (a little) more about this later on. Because it's important.
82 - RED RAT - SHELLY ANNE
What a brilliantly terrible album cover! Red Rat, or Wallace Wilson as he's known to his mum, probably won't win any points either for graphic design or in the cool stakes but I don't care. This is a great slice of late nineties dancehall and features Red Rat making frequent use of his catchphrase "oh no". Why don't more singers have catchphrases?
Mr Rat (whose other big hit, Tight-up Skirt, comes from a, er, different era) later went on to work with Groove Armada. OH NO!
81 - HORACE ANDY - SKYLARKING
"Skylarking, skylarking. That's what youth do today. Skylarking, skylarking. Before they stand up firm on their feet".
You could not imagine how much I'd love to be in the park with a can of Red Stripe and my friends listening to a sound system blasting this out today.
OK, you probably can because you'd probably all like to be doing something at least quite similar. As we (especially those of us who live in flats) couldn't get out into the sun for very long during lockdown we used music to bring the sun into our flats, and into our hearts, and Skylarking overflows with radiant sunbeams.
From Horace Andy's debut album of the same title, released in 1972 on Studio One and produced by Coxsone Dodd. Research for this (looking at Wikipedia, more or less) reveals that Coxsone Dodd was born Clement Dodd but because of his cricketing abilities as a youngster friends nicknamed him after the Huddersfield born Yorkshire seam bowler Alec Coxon who played one test match for England in 1948!
Horace Andy went on, as you surely know, to work with Massive Attack on the songs Spying Glass and Five Man Army as well as One Giant Leap and Easy Star All-Stars and, topically, release a cover of Bill Withers' Ain't No Sunshine. More disappointingly, he was another to propagate Christian fuelled homophobia with the lyric "the Father never made Adam and Steve, he made Adam and Eve". To their credit, and it's arguable they could have gone further, Trojan Records forced him to remove the track containing the offensive couplet before they'd release the album that would have hosted it.
80 - STEEL PULSE - KU KLUX KLAN
"Walking along just kicking stones, minding my own business. I come face to face with my foe disguised in violence from head to toe".
This is from Steel Pulse's debut album Handsworth Revolution (and was, in fact, the band's debut single) and Handsworth was the part of Birmingham the band hailed from. Steel Pulse were the first non-Jamaican band to win a Grammy for best reggae album for 1987's Babylon The Bandit.
In 1978, the year of Handsworth Revolution's release, the band supported Bob Marley & The Wailers on a European tour that began in Stafford's New Bingley Hall as well as appearing on the Live at the Electric Circus compilation album (with the excellently titled track Macka Splaff) alongside Joy Division, The Fall, Buzzcocks, and John Cooper Clarke. They also played Victoria Park's Rock Against Racism carnival on a bill with The Clash, The Tom Robinson Band, X-Ray Spex, and Jimmy Pursey (though, seemingly, not the rest of Sham 69).
"I was waiting for the Good Samaritan but waiting was hopeless. It was all in vain. The Ku Klux Klan back again".
79 - DESMOND DEKKER - 007 SHANTY TOWN
When I first started working for PRS we could access a database that had details of where musical composers lived. Obviously, I was all over this and was soon looking up the home addresses of Tanita Tikaram, Geri Halliwell, and Mark E Smith. The best find, though, was Desmond Dekker who, it turned out, lived a couple of roads away from me in SE23. I was very tempted to knock round for him and see if he fancied coming out to play.
He died in 2006 so I missed that bus. A better anecdote was to come when my friend and colleague Sharon (who I later appeared on Eggheads with, it's all glitz and glamour you know) told me that the young Mr Dekker had propositioned her mum at a discotheque. Sharon's mum turned him down on account of his "wonky face".
Her loss. Desmond Dekker was great and SPOILER ALERT this won't be his last appearance in this top 100. This rocksteady tune was released in 1967 by Desmond Dekker and the Aces on the Pyramid label with production duties overseen by Leslie Kong who ran an ice cream parlour/record shop on Orange Street in Kingston and also worked with Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Ken Boothe, and The Maytals. He's quite a big deal in Jamaican music history.
007 (Shanty Town) was the first record produced in Jamaica to reach the UK top twenty and was later covered by The Specials, The Bodysnatchers, and Musical Youth.
78 - THE PIONEERS - LONG SHOT KICK DE BUCKET
Leslie Kong again!
The Pioneers formed in 1962 and are, fifty-eight years later, still going. Just like The Rolling Stones and The Beach Boys. Golden Earring, The O'Jays, and The Zombies have been going a bit longer (1961), The Four Tops since 1953 (one original member still alive), and, winners of this grisly race against death (and artistic differences) are The Blind Boys of Alabama who formed in 1938 and are still going with one original member. Dude's called Jimmy Carter and it seems likely he's even older than the, also still alive, former president who shared his name. The peanut farmer (remember a time when the worst thing an American president did was farm peanuts?) is ninety-five now.
The classic Pioneers line up was Sydney Crooks, Jackie 'Harry Hippy' Robinson, and George Dekker, Desmond's half-brother.
"What a weepin' and wailin' dung a Caymanas park. What a weepin' and wailin' dung a Caymanas park. Long Shot, him kick de bucket. Long Shot kick de bucket"
77 TOOTS & THE MAYTALS - TIME TOUGH
"I go to bed but sleep won't come".
"The coronavirus anthem" according to YouTube commenter pensfans870! This 1974 cut is Frederick Nathaniel "Toots" Hibbert and his band The Maytals first appearance in the reggae top 100. Their 1968 single Do The Reggay was the first song to use the word reggae (or, indeed, reggay) and the word was adopted to describe an entire genre. It seems likely that a band as influential, and enjoyable, as Toots & The Maytals will crop up again later on this list.
"Can't blame the minister and you can't blame the preacher and you can't blame your brother and you cannot blame your sister. Can't blame your friends cuz today is judgement day and that's why everyone have to pray"
76 - BORIS GARDINER - MY COMMANDING WIFE
When it comes to Borises I'm more a Gardiner or a Karloff (or even a Yeltsin) man than I am a Johnsonian. You may have noticed. This tune probably isn't one of the hundred best reggae songs ever (and its message is somewhat, er, unreconstructed) but it's included because it reminds me, very strongly, of the spring and summer of 1990 - and that was a great spring and summer.
In the first half of that year I took control of a Ford Transit and drove five other lads (aged between 17 & 22) to Manchester to see Happy Mondays and then Spike Island to see The Stone Roses (stopping off at Gloucester to watch the New Fast Automatic Daffodils and at Blackpool in a fruitless attempt to see the band Bob which ended up in a very drunken night in and around the Pleasure Beach). All six of us slept in the van and, if I remember correctly, barely washed or changed our clothes once during either trip. We (meaning I) ran out of petrol on the M4 on the way back and four of the lads had to walk along the hard shoulder to fill up a can.
I'd taped a load of episodes of John Peel to listen to in the van and this song, along with Hugo Barrington's Yo Yo (which isn't even on YouTube) became kind of anthems for a load of enthusiastic and idiotic nutcases to shout nonsense out of van windows, vomit in Knutsford service station, and try to scale the walls of Blackpool FC's Bloomfield Road ground in a vain attempt to sleep on the pitch. Good times.
There are a lot of other stories about those weekends. Some of them, though, are best not printed here. When we all go to the pub again I'm pretty sure those stories will join us even if, very sadly, one of the friends from that trip won't be able to.
75 - DERRICK MORGAN - TRAIN TO SKAVILLE
"BEEP BEEP"
Originally recorded by The Ethiopians, I find myself more often drawn to Derrick Morgan's version of Train To Skaville. Morgan's from Clarendon in Jamaica and he began his career impersonating Little Richard at talent shows before going on to record for Coxsone Dodd. He had a beef with Prince Buster who accused Morgan of nicking his ideas and released a song called Blackhead Chinaman which attacked both Kong and Morgan. They continued bitching for a few years before others intervened and a truce was called. Morgan went on to have loads of rocksteady, ska, and skinhead hits and even covered Ben E King to go with his Little Richard routine.
74 - JACOB MILLER - BABY I LOVE YOU SO
Jacob Miller on vocals, Augustus Pablo on production, and a b-side featuring a hugely popular King Tubby dub.
This is, quite simply, a lovely piece of music. Miller was recruited, after this, to sing lead vocals for Inner Circle although he'd long gone by the time they had a huge hit in 1986 with Sweat (A La La La La Long), a song that won't be troubling this run down.
Miller died in 1980, aged 27, in a car crash in Jamaica just before he was due to go on an American tour in support of Bob Marley and the Wailers. Lewisham boy Maxi Priest is Jacob Miller's cousin.
73 - BEENIE MAN - WHO AM I (SIM SIMMA)
"Zim zimma, who got the keys to my Bimma?"
In 1997 Anthony Moses Davis, aka Beenie Man, reached the UK top 10 with this dancehall track from his eighth album. His debut album had come out fourteen years before when he was ten years old and was called The Invincible Beany Man - The 10 Year Old D.J. Wonder and contained a track called Bony Punanny suggesting a somewhat precocious take on the female anatomy. Then again, he'd been toasting for five years even by the time that came out.
Disappointingly, Beenie Man, like Shabba Ranks, Horace Andy, Sizzla, and many others, is on record as holding violently homophobic views (something covered in an earlier post in this series) and he's also come in for stick for dissing forebears like Yellowman and King Stitt as ugly people. This a great tune (and his straight country track from the same album Ain't Gonna Figure It Yet is definitely worth a listen, it's remarkable) but I'd suggest that Beenie Man's views make him far uglier than Yellowman.
72 - UB40 - DREAM A LIE
"Why do I have to dream of you when I don't want to dream a lie?"
A number ten hit from 1980 when it was released as a double-A side with The Earth Dies Screaming. I'm expecting to get more stick for this than any other selection in this list so I shall explain the rationale.
UB40 were a great band and they were a reggae band. They weren't, always, a great reggae band but songs like One In Ten, Food For Thought, If It Happens Again, and, for me - most of all, this one were important parts of my youth. I loved Madness, Dexy's Midnight Runners, The Specials, and Bad Manners even more but I'm not including any of them on this list even though some of their music can definitely be considered to come under the category of ska. The fact UB40, intentionally, lacked the punk energy of those bands both works for and against them but it is the reason they've made the cut.
It mostly went downhill for UB40 after Red Red Wine and their cover of I Got You Babe was a total waste of time although the album it came from was called Baggariddim and that's a satisfying word to say in anybody's book.
There was a documentary on BBC4 about UB40's break up and ongoing feuds a few years back and it was essential viewing. As messy as you like and, as for the video to this, I can't even find the words.
"A lonely room, an empty bed. It always seems that way".
71 - NORA DEAN - BARBWIRE
I nearly forgot this one and had to remove another track to put it in. It's probably too low in the 100 anyway but judging by the lyrical content going low was Nora's speciality.
This is absolute filth from start to finish but Nora didn't stop with barbwire in underpants. She later recorded songs about scorpions in underpants and, one year before this, with Upsetter at the controls, she was involved in a brilliant but incredibly inappropriate tune called The Same Thing You Gave To Daddy in which, to one of Scratch's incredible rhythms, a small boy hears his mum making daddy very happy and fancies some of the same. Errr!
Nora Dean later moved from Jamaica to New York and returned in the eighties doing lovers rock and, again, in the nineties doing gospel. Presumably to save her soul! She died in 2016 and, in her life, she'd worked with Lee Perry, Rita Marley, and Jimmy Cliff. Female reggae artists have been under represented but there will be plenty more in this list. Hey, even Nora might crop up again.
70 - BOB MARLEY & THE WAILERS - WAITING IN VAIN
"It's been three years since I'm knocking on your door and still I can knock some more".
You're probably familiar with this guy! Remarkably it's nearly forty years since he died, aged just 36, in Miami.
This track comes from his 1977 album Exodus which also includes Three Little Birds, Jamming, and One Love/People Get Ready making it almost a greatest hits collection.
It was his/their ninth studio album and came at a time when Marley's music was becoming more generic and tailored more and more for a rock audience. There are two schools of thought with Bob Marley and it sometimes seems like he's more liked by traditional rock fans than actual reggae fans. Those in that school tend to have the iconic posters and know the hits but rarely delve deeper into his music. Conversely there are many reggae fans who find his music bland and boring and, in the past, I've found myself siding more with them. But, as with most things, I'm a proud centrist these days and a reggae top 100 without a single Bob Marley track would seem like contrariness for the sake of contrariness. The question is, though, will he feature again? Stay tuned.
69 - JACKIE MITTOO - SUMMER BREEZE
"Summer breeze makes me feel fine, going through the memories of my mind"
I've already written a bit about Jackie Mittoo but one of my favourite songs of his is this cover of Seals and Crofts' 1972 soft rock anthem. Mittoo dispenses with many of the original lyrics and simply inserts his own as if he couldn't be bothered to even check. It only adds to the charm of the song.
Also covered by The Isley Brothers and, er, Type O Negative!
"See the moon and the stars and the sunlight moving on in a brand new sudden flight"
68 - TOOTS & THE MAYTALS - BROADWAY JUNGLE
The 2nd track from Toots and his Maytals is this stonker which I first discovered on a 300% Dynamite Soul Jazz compilation where it shared space with tracks by Lee Perry, Jackie Mittoo, Wayne Smith, Sister Nancy, Prince Buster, Hopeton Lewis, and Augustus Pablo. Many of which will appear, or already have appeared, in this top 100.
"Everything is alright. Let's go to Broadway"!
67 - KEITH HUDSON - PICK A DUB
To me, this album is bliss from start to finish. I could have chosen any track (and might still choose more) but I've gone for the title one because when you hear Augustus Pablo's melodica at the start it signals you're in for thirty-four minutes and twenty-three seconds of pure aural bubblebath. It acts like the opposite of an alarm. Instead of telling you it's time to get up and be active, it says it's time to lay back and relax.
It's not the first time The Dark Prince has bothered this top 100 but it's the first from his imperial phase. Lloyd Bradley, author of This Is Reggae Music, ranks Pick A Dub (the album) as one of the four seminal dub texts. Alongside The Upsetters' Super Ape, King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown (King Tubby/Augutus Pablo), and African Dub Chapter 3 by Joe Gibbs & The Professionals. Jon Savage rates it as the greatest dub album ever. Oddly enough I picked it up when Mick Hucknall (of all people) rereleased it in 1994 on his Blood & Fire label.
Drums and bass on this 'deep and gothic' album are by the Barrett brothers, Aston and Carlton, who, if you've been following this list you'll be familiar with by now.
66 - CLANCY ECCLES - FATTY FATTY
"I really love you fatty fatty".
Male reggae artists love large women so much there's an entire Spotify playlist devoted to the subject. John Holt's Fat She Fat and Lee Van Cliff's Look How She Fat being memorable contributions with Laurel Aitken's Big Fat Man and Derrick Morgan's Hey Fat Man keeping the gents in the picture. Best of all though is this belter by Clancy Eccles.
Eccles is praised for bringing a political dimension into reggae so I wonder if it irked him that he became best known for writing and producing a skinhead reggae paean to overweight loving. His career kicked off after competing in a talent show organised by Coxsone Dodd. He later went on to become a tailor who made stage outfits for Byron Lee and worked, musically, with such luminaries as Lee Perry (he helped him set up the Upsetter label), King Tubby, Niney the Observer, Beres Hammond, Alton Ellis, King Stitt, and Joe Higgs. When Michael Manley became Jamaican PM in 1972 he appointed Eccles as an adviser to the music industry and he organised a huge countrywide tour featuring Bob Marley & The Wailers, Dennis Brown, Inner Circle, and Max Romeo to promote Manley's policies.
Fatty Fatty was later covered by Bad Manners. Of course it was.
65 - MARCIA GRIFFITHS - FEEL LIKE JUMPING
"I feel like jumping, I feel like shouting now, I feel like moving, I feel like grooving now".
Despite reggae's wonderful history of smut (a subject this list will certainly be touching on again as it goes on) this 1968 cut does seem to simply and innocently extol the joys of dancing and the joys of life. There is nothing in the lyrics to suggest the kind of jumping that Marcia Griffiths feels like is anything more x-rated than one of Gus Honeybun's magic jumps.
Marcia was, with Bob Andy, part of the duo Bob and Marcia but she also recorded duets with Bob Marley and was, with Marley's wife Rita and Judy Mowatt, one of his backing singers. They styled themselves The I Threes. A 2012 album saw her work with John Holt, Beres Hammond, Freddie McGregor, Gregory Isaacs, and Buju Banton. The production on this (as with so other many great tunes) is by Coxson (who seems to have dropped an e) Dodd
When I drew up this list music, rather than gender, was forefront in my mind but I checked this morning to see how much female representation there was. Twelve songs out of one hundred. Which disappointed me and made me think I need to listen to more female reggae artists in the future. As it goes it turns out this is my eleventh favourite female tune in the genre.
64 - SIZZLA - SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK BLUES
"Johnny's in the basement mixing up the medicine. I'm on the pavement thinking about the government".
I wrote earlier in this list of some of Sizzla's vile prejudices and what a pity it was they detracted from his otherwise excellent music. Strangely enough that's best illustrated on this Bob Dylan number.
Possibly one of the best cover versions ever in any genre of music. It comes from a 2005 album on Real Authentic Sound called Is It Rolling Bob? (A Reggae Tribute To Bob Dylan) which also featured tracks by Gregory Isaacs, Luciano, Toots, Beres Hammond, and The Mighty Diamonds. Sizzla took one of the songs seemingly most ill suited to a reggae makeover and did this with it.
63 - THE SLICKERS - JOHNNY TOO BAD
This is just joyous. The Slickers were Derrick Crooks, Sydney Crooks, Winston Bailey, Abraham Green, and Roy Beckford. Derrick and Sydney were also in The Pioneers who, on the whole, had a lot more success but when it comes to individual songs this is the most well known.
Probably because it appeared on the soundtrack to Perry Henzell's 1972 film The Harder They Come alongside The Maytals, Desmond Dekker, Scotty, and, of course, Jimmy Cliff.
This track was later covered by UB40 and, in 1980, by John Martyn for his Grace and Danger LP. Phil Collins played drums on that version.
62 - JOHN HOLT - MR BOJANGLES
"I met him in a cell in New Orleans, I was down and out. He looked to me to be the eyes of age as he spoke right out. He talked of life. He talked of life"
This won't be the last John Holt track in my top 100 but it is my first and that was not how I'd originally planned it. Police in Helicopter from his 1983 album of the same name missed the cut by one place when I remembered a song I'd previously overlooked. The fact that Holt would reappear later made it easier to drop it.
This is from his 1973 album 1000 Volts of Holt. A string drenched album of covers by artists like Billy Joel and Diana Ross. Holt's version of Kris Kristofferson's Help Me Make It Through The Night, from the album, made it to number six in the UK charts but I prefer this track.
Mr Bojangles was originally written, and recorded, by New York country artist Jerry Jeff Walker and has since been covered by a list of artists that really do range from the good to the the bad to the ugly:- Bob Dylan, Dolly Parton, Edwyn Collins, Elton John, Lulu, Harry Belafonte, JJ Cale, Neil Diamond, Sammy Davis Jr, John Denver, MC Neat, Cat Stevens, Whitney Houston, Garth Brooks, Bradley Walsh, and Robbie Williams. The best version, surely, even better than Holt's, is by Nina Simone. I heard it playing one summer Sunday afternoon while having a pint in Peckham's Victoria Inn and it brought tears to my eyes.
61 - GOOFY - FUDGIE
"Here comes the fudge man with a box of satisfaction".
Chad 'Goofy' Simpson didn't have a long career in the dancehall/bashment game. Just the one album, I Don't Give A Damn, on the Greensleeves label in 1999 and a ludicrous number of singles over a ten year period either side of the album. Many of them with more famous names like Beenie Man, Luciano, Red Rat, Wayne Wonder, Spragga Benz, Ward 21, Sanchez, and the opera/ragga mash up artist Buccaneer. Many of his songs, like Whining Machine, Oo-Oh, and Tatty Boom seem to be about rumpy-pumpy, schnoodlypooping, and polishing the porpoise.
It's most likely this is too although I like to imagine it really is about an ice cream man who drives a pimped up clown car round Kingston. It certainly sounds like it.
60 - SUSAN CADOGAN - HURT SO GOOD
"First you take my heart in the palm of your hand and you squeeze it tight. Then you take my mind and play with it all night. You take my pride and throw it up against the wall. You take me in your arms, baby, and bounce me like a rubber ball".
Alison Cadogan was born in Jamaica in 1951 and grew up in Belize before returning to 'yard'. While recording an early record she met Lee 'Scratch' Perry who was so impressed with her voice he recorded an album of songs with her. He also renamed her Susan! This Millie Jackson cover has Scratch on production duties and Boris Gardiner on bass and reached number four in the UK charts. Her next single was produced by Pete Waterman. Perry to Waterman is probably a progression few artists have made.
In 1995 Jimmy Somerville took the song to number fifteen.
59 - GLAMMA KID - MOSCHINO
This song never bothered the popular music charts but it brought Glamma Kid to the attention of Basement Jaxx who provided vocals for their great, and zeitgeisty, hit Fly Life later that year. Glamma went on to chart four more times (twice with Shola Ama) in the next three years and win Best Reggae Act at the '98 MOBOs before seemingly fading back into cult obscurity. For me, he never topped his banger.
SADLY THIS HAS BEEN REMOVED FROM YOUTUBE SINCE I FIRST MADE THIS LIST
58 - BARRINGTON LEVY - UNDER MI SENSI
"Hey natty dreadlocks, a where you come from?"
From Levy's 1985 album Here I Come, this track was produced by Jah Screw (Paul Love to his mum) using an African Beat rhythm he developed in London a year earlier. Jah Screw went on to work with Cutty Ranks and, later, to put out jungle remixes of his earlier work.
Barrington Levy's solo career was established by the age of fourteen and he went on to work with Roots Radics, Henry 'Junjo' Lawes, Sly & Robbie, Rebel MC, Handsome Boy Modelling School, and Tenor Fly. This is, quite simply, a joyous song and plenty of the credit for that should go to the guitarist Eric 'Bingy Bunny' Lamont who lends the song something of a Congolese feel. While we're on with those crazy reggae nicknames, the album this comes from features the keyboard work of Carlton 'Bubblers' Ogilvie, the bass of Errol 'Flabba' Holt, and two drummers in Lincoln 'Style' Scott and Lloyd 'Jah Bunny' Donaldson. Nice work lads.
"Me only smoke cigarette and strictly shag"
"No no no. You don't love me and I know now".
Despite her brief career on the late sixties rocksteady scene it's what she's most known for. Which is good enough. The song's lyrics are credited to Penn as well as Bo Diddley and Willie Cobb. The Arkansas blues musician Cobb had recorded a song called You Don't Love Me back in 1960 which Penn later covered but Cobb's version incorporated elements of Diddley's 1955 track She's Fine, She's Mine. The song's weird and wonderful life has continued since Penn released, and had a big UK hit (number three) with, it in 1994. Rihanna has sampled it and Beyonce has performed it live.
This version had Steely & Clevie at the controls and it perfectly encapsulates the joy of tooting on a bottle of poppers at a poorly lit basement party at 3am in the morning which is, surely, how we all spent the nineties.
56 - JIMMY CLIFF - YOU CAN GET IT IF YOU REALLY WANT
"Persecution you must fear. Win or lose, you're about to get your share. Got your mind set on a dream. You can get it though hard it may seem now"
Famously used in 1972's The Harder They Come, Jimmy Cliff's version of this song never bothered the UK charts but Desmond Dekker took the song to number two and it's also gone on to become something of a standard. Covers exist by Johnny Hallyday, Stiff Little Fingers, Sabrina, The Cimarons, and even Sebastian the crab from The Little Mermaid. That's why you lot like it. Because you know it. That's what you're like.
Cliff was born in 1948 in Saint James Parish, Jamaica and after moving to Kingston to study he met up with Leslie Kong before launching a recording career which has now lasted forty-six years. He's had two UK top ten hits:- Wonderful World, Beautiful People and Wild World. I'm telling you about them now because they'll not be coming up again in this list. He's alright is Jimmy Cliff. It's just, on the whole, I prefer a spicier curry. A statement I will go on to contradict several times during the next fifty-five tunes.
"You'll succeed at last"
55 - I ROY - TOUGHER THAN TOUGH
It's about time that Roy Samuel Reid showed up in this damned list. Here he is, back in 1973, knocking out a tune he co-wrote with Derrick Harriot. John Peel used to regularly play tracks from I-Roy's 1997 Blood and Fire compilation Don't Check Me With No Lightweight Stuff and the cover of The Observer Book Of I-Roy is one of the best album sleeves ever.
I-Roy's no longer with us. He died in Spanish Town, Jamaica in 1999, aged 55, of heart failure. But during his time he worked with many of Jamaica's top producers:- King Tubby, Keith Hudson, Bunny Lee, Byron Lee, and, of course, Lee 'Scratch' Perry. He owed a debt, though, to U-Roy whose style, and even name, he remained faithful to. Oddly enough, unlike I-Roy, U-Roy wasn't called Roy.
54 - JANET KAY - SILLY GAMES
"I've been wanting you for so long, it's a shame".
Dennis Bovell, the writer and producer of this song (which made no 2 in the UK charts in 1979), explains his thinking behind it:- "there was an advert for Memorex where Ella Fitzgerald sang a note and broke a glass and I wanted a song with a note like that. Little girls always try to sing a high note so when I wrote Silly Games and put that high note in there it meant that every female in the dance would try and sing that note". I reckon he pulled it off.
Barbados born Bovell aka Blackbeard is one of the key figures in British reggae history. As guitarist with Matumbi, for his many collaborations with Linton Kwesi Johnson, and for a production career that spanned acts as disparate as Madness, I-Roy, Fela Kuti, The Slits, Orange Juice, The Pop Group, Alpha Blondy, Bananarama, and The Thompson Twins. Me and my friends Mark & Natalie had a ticket to see him DJ in a pub in Walthamstow a couple of summers back but there was a problem on the tube line and I couldn't make it. Pity. Because, apparently, it was a great night.
When Janet Kay played in a local pub in Forest Hill a few years before that I sadly only heard about it after the event. The Willesden girl got her first break when Aswad's keyboardist Tony 'Gad' Robinson introduced her to the rocksteady artist Alton Ellis but it was Silly Games that gave her her big break. Later singles fared less well but she did go on to play Angel in the Channel 4 sitcom No Problem!
This song and, more so, the lovers rock genre it's a flagship for has been dismissed as wishy-washy and lightweight but it many ways that was the point. It was even a, small p, political decision. Attested to by a whole chapter on the lovers rock Wikipedia page (which reads, in places, as if it's been written by bell hooks) which is devoted to the politics of the genre. Here's just one line:- "it portrayed patriarchal discourses through its creation of politically contentious erotic spaces that challenged racism while also encapsulating the struggles of gendered oppression dealt with by women. Though much more subtle than other politically outspoken music, lovers rock did portray its own stance on the political climate of Britain in the mid-1970s.". So that's you told.
"I've got no time to play your silly games".
53 - ALTHEA AND DONNA - UPTOWN TOP RANKING
"Gimme little bass, let me wind up me waist"
This was number one when I was nine years old in 1978. It knocked Wings' Mull of Kintyre off the top spot (which had been there for what seemed like an eternity) and stayed there for one week before being replaced by Figaro by Brotherhood of Man. Some, of course, dismissed it as a novelty as they did, later that same year, when a nineteen year old Kate Bush topped the charts with her first single Wuthering Heights. Both Kate Bush and Althea & Donna have stood the test of time better than Mull of Kintyre or Brotherhood of Man. Novelty, as Lawrence might say, rocks.
There seems to be a weird, and slightly racist, history of dismissing any reggae single that does well in the charts as a novelty. It happened with Millie, it happened with Apache Indian, and it happened with Althea & Donna. I must have heard this song hundreds of times and yet it never disappoints. I never get bored of hearing about 'Cosmo spring', 'check how we jamming and ting', and 'me khaki suit'. In fact 'love is all I bring' to this song.
Contradicting my whole rant about dismissing the song as a novelty it did actually start out life as a mess about (but then so did plenty of Beatles songs and they're rarely dismissed as novelty - except Yellow Submarine). Althea and Donna recorded themselves ad-libbing over Trinity's Three Piece Suit, Joe Gibbs produced it, they liked it so (with the help of dub producer Errol Thompson) they honed down the lyrics, John Peel played it (apparently by mistake), people started requesting it, it made the charts, they appeared on TOTP, and it slowly worked its way to number one. They never bothered the charts again and are now listed with Anita Ward's Ring My Bell and Lee Marvin's Wand'rin Star among the brilliantly curious one hit wonders of the seventies. It doesn't matter though because, with this single, their work was done.
"No pop, no style, us strictly roots"
52 - ANDY CAPP - POP A TOP
I first heard John Peel play this about twenty years ago. Once it was finished he remarked that he'd just spoke to somebody who'd never heard it before and found that extraordinary. I'd never heard it before and I found it extraordinary.
Andy Capp (Lynford Anderson to his mum) passed away earlier this year, aged 79, in the US state of Georgia and even though he's not one of the big names in reggae history he certainly left his mark with this 1968 banger. One of the first 'talking' or 'deejay' tunes in which the narrator takes a fairly loose and improvisational approach to both singing and lyric writing. It's something of a skinhead reggae classic and, for me, the vinyl crackles on this recording simply add to its charm. About halfway through the song, if you listen carefully, you can hear him saying "taste the tits, taste the tits". It drew a few complaints over the years.
Behind the scenes, Capp worked with Leslie Kong and Byron Lee and set up the Upset record label with Lee Perry. In the US he became an audio engineer for the United Nations.
51 - CULTURE - TWO SEVENS CLASH
"My good old prophet Marcus Garvey prophesize, say "St. Jago de la Vega and Kingston is gonna read" and I can see with mine own eyes it's only a housing scheme that divide".
Culture's first album, Two Sevens Clash, produced by Joe Gibbs, came out in 1977 but the numerology doesn't stop there. This song, the title track, was based on Marcus Garvey's apocalyptic prediction that there would be chaos on 7th July 1977 when the two, or four, sevens clashed. When Culture's Joseph Hill expounded on that, quite bonkers, idea it was taken pretty serious by some in Jamaica and many businesses and schools closed their doors for the day, a hush descended on Kingston, and an air of foreboding filled the city.
Apart from the nonsense about dates (see also 1984,1993, 1999, and so on and so on) it sounds remarkably familiar to us now. Talks of higher power and weird conspiracy theory shit is never a good look but, that aside, this is a wonderful piece of music. Joseph Hill's vocals and Sly Dunbar's drumming give it a sense or urgency but, for me, it's the keyboard work that really lifts it into another dimension. I'd like to tell you who's playing it but the album credits three keyboard players so I will too. They are Franklyn 'Bubbler' Waul, Harold Butler (poor Harold doesn't get a nickname), and Errol 'Tarzan' Nelson. Regular readers will be pleased to note that Eric 'Bingy Bunny' Lamont's turned up to play guitar alongside Robbie Shakespeare.
"I take a ride sometimes on Penn Overland and Bronx and sometimes I ride on bus X-82, say what"?
50 - ALTON ELLIS - I'M STILL IN LOVE (WITH YOU GIRL)
Alton Nehemiah Ellis, aka The Godfather of Rocksteady, was born in Trenchtown in 1938 and died in London in 2008, two years after he was inducted into the International Reggae And World Music Awards Hall Of Fame. The covers, or interpolations, of this song by Sean Paul and Marcia Aitken are both really good too but I've chosen Ellis' original from 1967 produced by Coxsone Dodd. Not totally arbitrarily but because it's got that warmth and crackle of innocence, because he wrote it, and because Aitken and Paul are already represented on this list and Ellis isn't - and he really needs to be.
While working as a labourer and a printer in Kingston he formed an early duo with John Holt, recorded with both Dodd and Dodd's arch rival Duke Reid, and cut sides with his sister Hortense. When the rudeboy skinhead culture got violent in Jamaica, Ellis made records whose sound fitted in but whose message was anti-violence, he toured the UK with Ken Boothe in the late sixties, worked with producers like Keith Hudson and Bunny Lee and then, in the eighties, he kept moving forward by collaborating with King Jammy, Henry 'Junjo' Lawes, and Sugar Minott. His riddims were appropriated by Yellowman and, in the world of hip-hop, by Tupac Shakur, Notorious B.I.G., and KRS-One. It's quite a legacy for a guy who seemed happiest in the get up of an old fashioned romantic dressed in a natty suit singing sweet and tender love songs.
49 - DESMOND DEKKER - ISRAELITES
"Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir, so that every mouth can be fed. Poor me Israelites"
Second appearance in the 100 for Desmond Adolphus Dacres but is it his last? This, recorded under the name Desmond Dekker and the Aces, went to number one in the UK pop charts in late 1968 when I was but a wee bairn. It seems unlikely I didn't hear it blasting it out of the wireless and I like to imagine that it was the first reggae tune I was exposed to and my love for the genre developed through that cultural osmosis.
In the early nineties Vitalite co-opted the tune for their adverts and, according to a not entirely reliable looking website, supermarkets in Brixton ran out of that particular brand of butter so successful was that marketing campaign.
"I don't want to end up like Bonnie and Clyde"
48 - THE PARAGONS - THE TIDE IS HIGH
"I'm not the kind of man who gives up just like that"
Reggae artists cover a lot of songs, it's an important part of the genre, but John Holt's The Tide Is High, of course, is famous for being covered. Very successfully so as well. Blondie took it to number one in 1980 and Atomic Kitten repeated the trick in 2002. My nephew Dan was 3/4 years old then and when the Blondie version came on the radio he got upset and screamed it was "the wrong one". My initial surprise and delight that he was a precocious reggae purist was predictably ruined when I realised he wanted to hear Atomic Kitten.
The original, 1967, version was produced by Duke Reid (of Trojan Sound System renown) and the music was played by Tommy McCook and The Supersonics but it was credited to The Paragons, The vocal trio of Bob Andy, John Holt, and Junior Menz. Following on from the Alton Ellis track, it's another slice of romantic rocksteady.
"The tide is high but I'm holding on. I'm gonna be your number one"
47 - THE HARRY J ALL STARS - THE LIQUIDATOR
A ska classic that can hardly fail to bring a smile to your face and a shimmy to your hips.
Harry J Allstars took The Liquidator into the UK top ten in November 1969. It reached number nine while Sugar Sugar by The Archies held the top spot. I'm willing to wager you're far more likely to hear The Liquidator than you are Sugar Sugar now - and not just at nights like 100% Dynamite. The Liquidator took off as a football anthem and many teams (Chelsea, Wolves, West Brom, Northampton Town, Wycombe Wanderers, Yeovil Town, and St Johnstone) have played it as their players run out on to the pitch. West Midlands Police actually requested West Brom and Wolves stopped using it as their fans were singing rude words about their rivals over the tune and getting so worked up it often ended in violence.
Which really doesn't seem to be, despite its title, the vibe of the song. Harry J is Harry Zephaniah Johnson from Clarendon Parish, Jamaica (1945-2013). He worked with Bob Marley, Burning Spear, Bob and Marcia, Augustus Pablo, and Ken Boothe and his studio became a hang out for Chris Blackwell, The Rolling Stones, The Who and Grace Jones.
It's unusual for a band to be named after their producer (but this is reggae which makes up its own rules) and even more so considering the calibre of the musicians involved. Drums and bass by the brothers Carlton 'Carly' Barrett and Aston 'Family Man' Barrett and the Hammond organ that totally makes the song by one Winston Wright who also played with Tommy McCook and Toots and the Maytals.
This apparently deathless tune has been covered by The Specials while The Staple Singers nicked its bass line and intro for 1972's I'll Take You There.
46 - BOB MARLEY - MR BROWN
"Mr Brown is a clown who rides to town in a coffin"
"Is Mr Brown controlled by remote?"
When I posted Waiting In Vain at number 70 in this list I asked if Bob Marley would appear again. Well, here's your answer. But will he make a third appearance?
You'll have to read on and see. This one's from 1970 and was recorded at Randy's in Kingston, produced by Lee Perry, and written, it seems, by both Marley and Glen Adams.
It's got a spooky theme and tells of a ghost (or duppy) causing problems, "upsetting the town", and riding round in a three wheeled coffin with three accompanying buzzards who'd ask to talk to Mr Brown. Perry, you'll not be surprised to discover, loved that story so he suggested The Wailers record a song about it. The instrumental version is called, of course, Dracula and DJ Spooky has done a remix. Just listen to the intro on this.
"What a botheration"
45 - THE MAYTALS - MONKEY MAN
Third appearance on the list for (Toots and the) Maytals. A 1969 classic that's since been covered by Amy Winehouse, Madness, Melt Banana, Reel Big Fish, No Doubt, and Kylie Minogue with The Wiggles.
That's versatility. The story goes that the object of Frederick 'Toots' Hibberts' affections chose another man over him. An indie singer would have got a whole album of ball-achingly dull introspective and passive-aggressive ballads out of that. Toots, with producer Leslie Kong on board as he so often was, simply called the guy a rude name (the titular 'monkey man'), set it to an uplifting ska beat, and knocked out a party anthem that's now endured for half a century. There's a lesson there for all of us.
44 - YELLOWMAN - ZUNGGUZUNGGUGUZUNGGUZENG
"Seh if yuh have a paper, yuh must have a pen and if yuh have a start yuh must have a end. Seh five plus five, it equal to ten and if yuh have goat yuh put dem in a pen and if yuh have a rooster yuh must have a hen"
Alton Ellis and Coxsone Dodd's 1967 tune Mad, Mad, Mad formed the basis for a riddim that Henry 'Junjo' Lawes appropriated for Michigan & Smiley's tune Diseases in 1981. It came to be known as the Diseases riddim and has been used, over the last nearly forty years, by Sister Nancy, Buju Banton, Bounty Killer, Frankie Paul, Cocoa Tea, Beenie Man, and Vybz Kartel in the reggae world as well as crossing over to hip-hop where it's been sampled by the likes of 2Pac, Dead Prez, KRS-One, Joe Budden, and Black Star.
But, to my mind, never more effectively than, in 1982, by one Winston 'Yellowman' Foster. A man, it seems, who would have struggled to make a mark in any other genre other than reggae. Yellowman, an albino (which generally didn't go well down in Jamaica in the sixties and seventies) who was abandoned by his parents and grew up in an orphanage, hit the scene in the early eighties. With Junjo Lawes as producer, he released a string of sexually explicit records (Yellowman Getting Married, Cocky Did A Hurt Me). He was described as representing 'slackness', a term he rejected. He's toned down his act in recent years, collaborating with Run DMC and Fats Domino as well as being awarded an Order of Distinction by the Jamaican government.
Zungguzungguguzungguzeng is, sadly, not admissible in the game of Scrabble. There's not enough Zs in the sack anyway!
43 - DESMOND DEKKER AND THE ACES - IT MEK
"You think I never see you when you jump over de wall. You think I never see you when you accidentally fall. Me said a it mek"
Second track from Culture and second track from their debut album, 1977's Two Sevens Clash. Production by Joe Gibbs.
Third time in the top 100 for our Desmond. A number 7 UK hit in 1969. It mek (sometimes spelt It miek) means, roughly, 'that's the reason why'. Leslie Kong, as so often, on production duties.
"I told you once and I told you twice. Why, sweet nanny goat a go run him belly good. Me said a it mek"
42 - KEITH ROWE - GROOVY SITUATIOn
"Something's happened to me. I've found someone you see (oh yeah). No more lonely nights. No more ugly fights"
To say something is one of Lee Perry's best ever productions is to say something is one of reggae's, music's even, best ever productions. But Keith Rowe's Groovy Situation from 1977 is absolutely that.
For all the talk of burning down his Black Ark studio, marrying a Swiss vampire, and being the king of piss and shit, Perry's
clown act was always secondary to his skills at the mixing desk. And
those skills are as subtle as they are deft. Listen here as he cracks
open a channel to let the sound of the room in. The sound of people
chatting and laughing in the background adds both texture and
verisimilitude to Rowe's romantic ruminations. The fact it's a lovely
tune and that Rowe, formerly of rocksteady duo Keith & Tex, croons
it like he means it all add up to making this one of the most
understated pleasures in the whole of Perry's, and reggae's, canon.
41 - CULTURE - GET READY TO RIDE THE LION TO ZION
Second track from Culture and second track from their debut album, 1977's Two Sevens Clash. Production by Joe Gibbs.
40 - YELLOWMAN - TWO TO SIX SUPERMIX
"If you're feeling sick you rub up with Vicks"
Winston Foster's second appearance in this top 100 comes from 82's Mister Yellowman album on Greensleeves, Henry 'Junjo' Lawes at the controls. If you can work out what Yellowman's going on about let me know. To me, it's one of those brilliant stream of consciousness songs that dancehall artists and toasters so excel at. During this he runs through various medicines, lists a few compass points, alludes to winning a talent contest, and does an impression of a frog. Ribbit!
"You go to the pharmacy and buy a Panadol"
"Gimmicks, gimmicks. Just lyrics, lyrics"
39 - U BROWN - TU SHENG PENG
I-Roy is not the only artist to be so inspired by U-Roy he not only riffed on his style but also his name.
Kingston's Huford Brown was also a fan and it's pretty clear here as he bangs on about 'drum and bass style', knocks out a few 'bomdiddleys', makes Sheng Peng sound like Sean Penn, toasts a middle eight that'd be a class single on its own, and, of course, as if in honour of Yellowman, chucks a handful of ribbits into the mix. Listen to the guitar. Imagine yourself in a drama about cocaine in 1970s New York. Ah, ah, ah, ah.
38 - SEAN PAUL - LIKE GLUE
"Well I don't really care what people say, I don't really watch what dem waan to do. Still I got to stick to my girls like glue and I mon nah play number two"
2002's Dutty Rock LP by Sean Paul Ryan Francis Henriques was a big hit with me and this tune was a carnival monster for many years. I can still remember seeing folks go absolutely nuts to it on All Saints Road.
It perfectly introduces dancehall into pop and is, obviously, smothered with sexual innuendo and out and out smut. The producer, Tony 'CD' Kelly, may, in retrospect consider his nickname to look a little dated.
37 - BOB MARLEY AND THE WAILERS - STIR IT UP
Stir it up, little darling?
Ok. I will. At number 37 this is the last appearance of Bob Marley during this top 100. I like Bob's music and I like his vibe but, for me, there are so many better reggae artists.
I don't wanna throw shade on an all time great or discount the affect he had on bringing this wonderful music to the public but, you know, there's stuff out there that touches me more.
I'm not gonna say any more about it because you all know about Bob Marley anyway. I'll waffle on about more underappreciated artists for the remainder of this list.
36 - GREGORY ISAACS - NIGHT NURSE
"Tell her try your best just to make it quick whom attend to the sick cause there must be something she can do. This heart is broken in two. Tell her it's a case of emergency. There's a patient by the name of Gregory"
"Oh Gosh. Oh, the pain is getting worse"
The Cool Ruler. The Lonely Lover. Mr Gregory Isaacs with his biggest hit from the 1982 album of the same name.
Backing from The Roots Radics with additional synth by Wally Badarou, a French musician who was a long time collaborator with Level 42. But it's Gregory's voice and soulful pleading for love and understanding that makes it such a strong song and makes it so potent to listen to again at a time of such division. Produced by Errol Flabba Holt. Later covered by Simply Red, Sinead O'Connor, Horace Andy, and Freddie McGregor. By the time of his death, aged 59, in 2010 Gregory Isaacs had released over five hundred albums.
"There's no prescription for me. She's the one, the only remedy. Night nurse. Only you alone can quench this jah thirst"
35 - SISTER NANCY - BAM BAM
Sister Nancy is widely held to be the first female dancehall DJ and has also performed under the name of Muma Nancy. Her real name is Ophlin Russell and she was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1962.
One of FIFTEEN siblings! One of her brothers, Robert, performed under the name of Brigadier Jerry and she followed him into DJing despite it being very much not the thing for women of her background to do at the time. She worked with the Twelve Tribes of Israel Jahlovemuzik sound system, with Duke Reid, and with Winston Riley before collaborating with Henry 'Junjo' Lawes and Yellowman. Both Sister Nancy and Brigadier Jerry made their UK debuts in Brixton in 1982.
Bam Bam's chorus was inspired by the sixties song of the title recorded by both The Maytals and Byron Lee and the Dragonaires and samples Ansell Collins' Stalag 17 riddim. It's since been sampled by Jay-Z, Kanye West, Lizzo, Beyonce, and Lauryn Hill. It's an all time classic.
34 - DAMIAN "JR GONG" MARLEY - WELCOME TO JAMROCK
"Out in the streets, they call it murder"
Damian Marley higher in the top 100 than his old man shocker!
The man they call Jr Gong is the eleventh and youngest of Bob Marley's known children and was just two years old when his father died. His mother, Cindy Breakspeare, won the Miss World contest in 1976!
Unlike his father's loins, he's not over-productive. He's released just four albums in the last twenty-one years and this, from his 3rd of the same name - self-produced with his brother Stephen in 2005, was easily the most successful. This track reached number thirteen in the UK charts. It borrows a riddim from Ini Kamoze's World-A-Music (originally played by Sly and Robbie), chucks in some (at that time) au courant air horns, and creates a tense space for Gong to smartly weave a tale of crime, poverty, and political corruption in Jamaica of the era. Later covered by Alicia Keys.
"Welcome to jam down, poor people are dead at random. Political violence can't done, pure ghost and phantom"
33 - WAYNE SMITH - UNDER ME SLENG TENG
"Way in my brain. No cocaine. I don't wanna, I don't wanna go insane"
Widely regarded as the track that ushered in the new era of digital reggae that would eventually give birth to ragga, Wayne Smith's Under Me Sleng Teng mixes the lyrical concerns of Barrington Levy's Under Mi Sensi with a Casio MT-40 keyboard rhythm based on Eddie Cochran's Somethin' Else. Production duties by Prince Jammy.
Although Smith did have other (minor) successful records it's for this one, groundbreaking, piece of music he'll always be remembered. Having died, aged 48, in 2014.
32 - TOOTS AND THE MAYTALS - 54 46 WAS MY NUMBER
"Stick it up mister. Hear what I say"
Resisting the hilarious temptation to place this at number 54 or 46, this is Frederick 'Toots' Hibbert's fourth appearance in this top one hundred - but it's not his, or his band's, last.
A reggae anthem, standard even, that tells of Toots' time in prison for possession of marijuana. Produced by Leslie Kong (I didn't realise just how much great stuff that guy had been behind until I started running down this list), it's been covered by Aswad, Byron Lee, Ernest Ranglin, and Vanilla Ice and it's been sampled by Foxy Brown, Major Lazer, and Rebel MC as well as appearing on the soundtrack of Repo Man, This Is England, and Narcos. For ska fans of a certain age it can turn a dancefloor wild as witnessed by a group of severely refreshed quinquagenarians (not including your narrator - honest guv) totally losing their shit to it in The Elephant's Head in Camden, Xmas 2018.
"Right now, someone else have that number"
31 - NINEY THE OBSERVER - BLOOD AND FIRE
"There is no more water to out the fire. There is no more water to out the fire. Let it burn, let it burn, let it burn, burn burn"
Out of Montego Boy, Niney the Obersever wrote, sang, and produced many great sides but this, from 1971 and sampled by PJ Harvey forty years later for Written on the Forehead on her great Let England Shake LP, is the pick of the bunch.
Born George Boswell, he changed his name to Winston Holness, and later, inspired by Lee Perry's Upsetter moniker, to Niney the Observer. Perry may want to upset. Mr Boswell/Holness merely to observe. Although the fact he named his label Destroyer Records suggests a mischievous nature.
The Niney part of his name came from an unfortunate workshop accident that left him thumbless on one hand. He's worked with Joe Gibbs, Bunny Lee, Lee Perry, Dennis Brown, Jacob Miller, Johnny Clarke, Freddie McGregor, Max Romeo, I-Roy, Dillinger. and Yami Bolo among many many others.
"All weak hearts shall lick up and spit up and all righteous shall stand"
30 - MAX ROMEO - WET DREAM
"Every night me go to sleep me have wet dreams. Every night me go to sleep me have wet dreams"
"Lie down gal, let me push it up, push it up. Lie down".
Not totally sure what this one's about so I was fortunate when MrRomeo turned up on a documentary about reggae to explain the genesis of the song. Apparently him and his girlfriend had moved into a rather shabby flat and the roof leaked which was causing the aforementioned 'wet dreams'. Romeo, ever the gentleman, chivalrously offered to move the heavy bed on to a higher, and drier, part of the room. To save his beloved any more problems with drips he said she could just lie on the bed while he pushed it up.
Sounds legit, although I'm still perplexed as to how the line "give the crumpet to bigfoot Joe, give your fanny to me" fits in!
It is, of course, reggae smut of the highest order and appeared on Trojan's 2007 Slack Reggae box set. An album which featured Beenie Man's Boney Punaney, Sister Wendy's Wood in the Ring, Tullo T's Pum Pum Mash Up, and Fuckist (yes, really) by Squiddly Ranks (yes, really). Derrick Morgan offered up several tracks including King Dong, I Come To Grind Your Daughter, and I'll Give My Cock To You that seem to move steadily from sexual innuendo to sexual promise and on to sexual threat.
Max Romeo, however, gets away with it because Wet Dream is both silly and an absolutely fantastic tune. Released in 1968, with Harry Robinson and Junior Smith on production duties, it became Pama Records' best selling side ever shifting a quarter of a million copies. When an older Max Romeo (born Maxwell Livingston Smith) was asked why he'd put such wanton vulgarity on record he said "the devil made me do it".
29 - KOFFEE - TOAST
While Max Romeo likes 'crumpet' for breakfast, Koffee prefers a more humble slice of toast and she gives "thanks like we need it the most"
Hell, Mikayla Simpson has even corrupted the name of a popular breakfast beverage for her moniker. I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that Koffee (born in 2000!) is very much the future of reggae. It's not much of a limb though. This video's had over 168,000,000 views on YouTube so it's probably safe to assume she's already there.
Remarkably, this daughter of Spanish Town is the first woman to win a Grammy for Best Reggae Album as well as the youngest ever winner of that award. Oddly enough, she's not actually released an album yet and won that award for last year's Rapture EP from where this track hails. She's been calling out gun violence and government neglect in her native Jamaica and has worked with Protoje and Chronixx as well as hip-hop acts like Gunna and Tory Lanez. She also supported Harry Styles and played Alexandra Palace (in support of Chronixx).
"Gratitude is a must"
28 - MILLIE SMALL - MY BOY LOLLIPOP
"My boy lollipop. You make my heart go giddy up. You are as sweet as candy. You're my sugar dandy. O, o, my boy lollipop. Never ever leave me because it would grieve me. My heart told me so"
When I started running down this reggae top 100, Millicent Dolly May Small was still with us. On 5th May last year she passed away, aged 72, in London and it's safe to say, despite other great records including a brilliant put down of Enoch Powell, this is the song everyone will remember her for. Despite it being held off the number one spot by The Four Pennies' somewhat drippy, massively forgettable, second division beat band drivel Juliet.
And that's absolutely fine. It's two minutes of pure pop perfection from the minimal intro that leads straight into the chorus, hell - this song is ALL chorus, to the harmonica solo that urban legend had, for many years, was played by Rod Stewart! It wasn't. It was probably played by another member of the band The Five Dimensions (a band Rod the Mod had at least been in). The guitar is played by musical arranger Ernest Ranglin. Ranglin's also worked with Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, and Prince Buster and I'm being entirely serious when I say this is the work he should be most proud of.
The story behind the record is that Island Records head honcho Chris Blackwell had bought a copy of My Boy Lollypop by Barbie Gaye (the song had been written as My Girl Lollipop by Robert Spencer of the Harlem doo-wop band The Cadillacs, a title Bad Manners would revert to when they later covered the song) and had been so impressed with it he wanted to put out a Jamaican version. The Jamaican music scene at the time had become massively influenced by the songs they were hearing from across the Gulf of Mexico in southern states like Louisiana and Tennessee. Artists like Professor Longhair, Fats Domino, and Louis Jordan. Clement 'Coxsone' Dodd and Arthur 'Duke' Reid put a Jamaican spin on the R&B shuffle sound and, to cut a long story short, ska was born and ska became the parent of reggae.
In May 1964 sixteen year old Millie Small was brought over to the UK by Blackwell to record this song. It immediately went ballistic and became the first Jamaican hit, the first ska hit, and the first reggae hit in the whole of Britain. It launched Island Records (who'd go on to sign Queen, U2, The Weeknd, Amy Winehouse, Pulp, The Killers, and Bob Marley) in to the big league and it launched Chris Blackwell's career too. David Rodigan cites that seeing Millie perform the song on Ready Steady Go! as a schoolboy shaped his life long love of reggae music and the song has become such a part of our cultural landscape that it was even included in the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony. More than any other song it announced Jamaicans, and West Indians, as part of the British cultural milieu. So, of course, it was (like so many other innovative pieces of music) dismissed as a novelty tune at first.
Now rock orthodoxy has, thankfully, for the most part died without lament, nobody's saying that any more and anybody with any belief that music is a vehicle for sharing joy will simply admit it's one of the greatest pop songs ever recorded. I was at Notting Hill Carnival in the early 2000s when a DJ dropped this into the middle of a set full of ear splitting bashment and mega BPM ragga and it went down an absolute bomb. Both as comforting and as life affirming as a cool glass of crystal clear water on a hot day, a rainbow over a verdant valley, or a smile on the face of a person you love the bones of. If the song doesn't put a smile on your face and a skip in your step go and see a doctor. There's probably something wrong with you. If it doesn't make your heart go giddy up you probably don't have a heart.
"I love you, I love you, I love you so"
27 - MAX ROMEO AND THE UPSETTERS - WAR INA BABYLON
"It sipple out deh (what you say?)"
"The barberman no like the dreadlocks man. The dreadlocks man no like the barberman. The policeman no like the dreadlocks man. The dreadlocks man no like the policeman"
It's not long since we had Max Romeo (in his twenties) delivering up the silly, smutty, and rather excellent, Wet Dream but by the time Romeo had reached his thirties his subject matter had got much more serious although his chops for knocking out a tune remained as well honed as ever.
This is the title track from 1976's War Ina Babylon and it's one of Lee Perry's finest creations in a long and ridiculously fruitful career. The Dub Shepherd admits as much himself, putting this with Junior Murvin's Police and Thieves and The Heptones' Party Times (both from 77) into what he calls his Black Ark holy trinity. By 1979 Perry had burnt down the Black Ark studio in Kingston and relocated to London.
Everything about this song is remarkable:- Romeo's soulful voice, the weird ratcheting noises that became a trademark of Perry, and the plinky plonky synth sounds that seem to predate Bowie's Ashes to Ashes and much of the 1980 UK pop scene. It's as catchy as it's powerful and it demands, as I've discovered many times, multiple rewinds. It sipple out deh.
26 - DILLINGER - COCAINE IN MY BRAIN
"A knife, a fork, a bottle and a cork. That's the way we spell New York"
Dillinger's massive Cocaine In My Brain is full of the kind of delicious non-sequiturs and abstracted streams of conscience ("no matter where I treat my guest they always like my kitchen best" "where is Jim, man?") that may, indeed, spring forth from a man who's been over indulging on the Class As.
It's neither a pro drugs or an anti drugs song. It's hardly even a song about drugs. More a song that kind of IS drugs and, rightly or wrongly, it's brilliant. From 1976's CB 200 LP, Dillinger punctuates his absurdist poetry with yelps and shrieks while Joseph 'Jo Jo' Hoo Kim's production borrows heavily from Philly soul act People's Choice's Do It Any Way You Wanna and Enoch Light's disco track Hijack. It became a huge global smash reaching number one in the Netherlands (it knocked Yes Sir, I Can Boogie by Baccara off the top spot and was replaced by Donna Summer's I Feel Love - an outstanding summer for the Dutch charts) and number two in Belgium and has remained a worthy and wonderful dancehall anthem for the last four decades.
Joseph Hoo Kim started out in the slot machine industry but in 1970 the Jamaican government made gambling on machines illegal so he moved into music and set up sound systems working with Bunny Lee and I-Roy. He died in New York two years ago aged 76.
Dillinger's still about. He's 67 now. The man born Lester Bullock took his initial inspiration from U-Roy, Big Youth, and, more than anything, Dennis Alcapone. So much that he initially styled himself Dennis Alpacone Jr. A name, quite remarkably, that was too daft even for Lee 'Pipecock Jackson' 'Scratch' 'The Upsetter' 'The Dub Shepherd' Perry. Perry suggested Bullock take the stage name Dillinger in dubious honour of the Great Depression era US gangster John Dillinger. Working with producers like Yabby You, Niney the Observer, Augustus Pablo, and Coxsone Dodd as well as Hoo Kim, Dillinger gained popularity with punks in the UK and ended up spending a lot of time in Britain hanging out with them. Earning himself a namecheck in The Clash's (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais.
25 - PRINCE BUSTER - WHINE AND GRINE
"Shake up long, shake up strong. Stay on your feet and you can't go wrong"
In 1998 the BBC hosted an evening's entertainment to celebrate the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush into Tilbury docks and, more importantly, the mostly Caribbean people who arrived on it and other boats that followed it to make a new life in what many saw as the mother country (Jamaica did not become an independent nation until 1962). The cultural impact of those people and the children and grandchildren they had here changed, forever, the face of Britain. I believe in a fundamentally positive way. In 1998 the new Labour government of (pre-Iraq invasion) Tony Blair knew that and celebrated it. Recent Conservative administrations (particularly those of Theresa May and dog-whistle racist Boris Johnson) have done nothing to accentuate the positives of immigration and, instead, have stirred up a hornet's nest of race bait, not for ideological reasons but to win populist votes. Boris Johnson, certainly, has called black people 'picanninies' with 'watermelon smiles' and Muslim women 'letterboxes' (and let's not forget gay men are, to Johnson, "tank topped bum boys") and Theresa May arranged the deportation of people of colour who had lived almost their entire lives in the UK and were British citizens. I don't even believe, deep down, these people are racist. I think the even more depressing truth is that they know there is a significant number of voters who racism plays well to and they're courting that vote.
To their eternal shame. Sorry for the political rant but it's pertinent to the times we're living in and if anyone's been wondering why the Black Lives Matter protests are happening and why statues of slave traders are being pulled down you may want to look, before apportioning blame, to those that have sought to divide our communities with xenophobic rhetoric for so long. Not just Johnson and May but generations of like minded, Etonian, entitled white men before them. As a white man (though certainly, and proudly, not an Etonian) running down a list of my 100 favourite reggae songs I simply can't ignore this.
Cecil Bustamente Campbell, aka Prince Buster, was, long before that '98 Windrush celebration, an indirect influence on my coming to love this music. As a schoolboy I was less interested in The Police and Adam and the Ants than I was in bands like The Specials, Dexy's Midnight Runners, early UB40, Bad Manners, and, perhaps most of all, Madness. I once refused to go to school until I'd copied out the lyrics to My Girl in their entirety. Madness's first single, The Prince, was a tribute to Prince Buster and their second single, One Step Beyond, was a cover of one of his songs. The band even lifted their name from Buster's 1963 single Madness. Though Suggs and the boys later brought a vaudevillian music hall element to bear in their music, from the outset they made it clear where they were coming from. From a geographical perspective they may have been straight out of Camden on the Northern Line but from a musical one they were fresh from yard. Without the Jamaican influence, Madness would have remained a fair to middling pub band and my musical, and political, journey may have been a very different one.
Prince Buster grew up in Kingston singing Frankie Lymon and Fats Domino songs before hooking up with Coxsone Dodd and Rico Rodriguez. He produced The Folkes Brothers Oh Carolina (later, famously, covered by Shaggy) before releasing a string of hugely influential and catchy ska and bluebeat singles like Judge Dread, the aforementioned Madness, Al Capone, Ten Commandments, and, this, Whine and Grine. It is, of course, pretty smutty. Apparently "if you have your brush you can avoid the rush" because she wants both a "rough rough stroker" and a "cool cool stroker" but, in reality, it's about as harmless as a saucy seaside postcard. Just funnier, and with a better tune. The racists may be in power in the UK but one thing they'll never have is the best music.
24 - SISTER NANCY - TRANSPORT CONNECTION
Sister Nancy's second appearance in the reggae 100.
For a little of Nancy's history see my post on her track Bam Bam (no.35 in the list). I don't know much about this song except (a) it's great, (b) it was produced by Winston Riley, and (c) I heard it playing one evening in the much lamented Indo bar on Whitechapel Road and it lifted my spirits immeasurably at quite a low time. So no lectures with this one, I'll just leave it here.
23 - KEITH HUDSON - MICHAEL TALBOT AFFAIR
The
Dark Prince of Reggae's third appearance in this top 100 following
Rasta Communication (number 93) and Pick A Dub (number 67). This is from
the album Pick A Dub (as, unsurprisingly, is Pick A Dub itself) and I
could have picked any track from this album because the lengthier format
is the best way to take in Hudson's work. I wrote before about how it's
one of the essential works in the dub canon so I won't bang on about
that again. This isn't an album of words so much as it is one of textures,
of impressions, and of feeling. To me it's almost a classical piece and
Michael Talbot Affair is merely the most striking of the 'movements' in
that piece. Alas, I have been unable to ascertain any information as to
who Michael Talbot is or what kind of affair he was involved in.
22 - JUNIOR MURVIN - POLICE AND THIEVES
"Police and thieves in the street (oh yeah) scaring the people with their guns and ammunition"
When The Clash included a punk/reggae cover of this on their 1977 debut album they helped cement the link that was already there between the two genres and turn a lot of white kids on to reggae. It also inspired Bob Marley to write Punky Reggae Party.
Their version was great too but Murvin's original, produced by Lee Perry and with Boris Gardiner on bass, Ernest Ranglin on guitar, and Sly Dunbar on drums, is even better. It became a UK top thirty hit in 1980, four years after its release, and it's, quite simply, a beautiful song about a troubling subject. Listen to Murvin achieve those high notes.
"All the peace maker turn war officer"
21 - JOHNNY CLARKE - NONE SHALL ESCAPE THE JUDGEMENT
"None shall escape the judgement in this time. These words I sing to all mankind"
"Arise Black man! Jehovah has come, forwarding to Babylon to declare equal rights and justice among the heathen"
Topical! But then equal rights should always be topical. While I'm not on board with the religious message of this song I am as totally aligned with its message of equality and justice as I am fully enamoured with the music and, most of all, Johnny Clarke's amazing voice.
Released in 1975, with production by Bunny'Striker' Lee, it was the title track on Clarke's debut album. That year, and the next one - '76, Clarke was named Artist of the Year in Jamaica and he became one of the first artists to sign to Virgin's Frontline subsidiary (along with I-Roy, Prince Far I, Tappa Zukie, and Althea & Donna). His popularity in Jamaica never really waned and, when he wasn't praising Rastafari, he diversified into covering Bob Marley songs and Sam Cooke's Twisting The Night Away.
20 - KEN BOOTHE - EVERYTHING I OWN
"You sheltered me from harm. Kept me warm, kept me warm. You gave my life to me. Set me free, set me free. The finest years I ever knew were all the years I had with you"
"Ken Boothe for UK pop reggae" sang Joe Strummer in (White Man) in Hammersmith Palais and it was a cry that resounded down the ages in a way Strummer possibly didn't intend. Ken Boothe was seen as a lightweight, as a pop performer rather than a reggae one, and, in the parlance of the time, a purveyor of music for "girls". As if that was a bad thing. As if musical appreciation could be gendered.
I remember, or at least I remember remembering, watching this on TOTP in 1974 when I was six years old and, along with Terry Jacks version of Seasons in the Sun, it was one of the first two songs I ever heard in which I experienced sadness. Having previously been a fan of Little Jimmy Osmond's Long Haired Lover from Liverpool it was a powerful experience and, like most people, I've loved sad songs ever since. They say so much!
Of course I thought this was about his girlfriend leaving him and it was a good few years before I discovered (a) it was written by David Gates for Bread and Boothe's version was a cover and (b) it was about the loss of a parent. I'd like to say the idea of losing a parent would have been unthinkable to the six year old me but, to be honest, the idea of having a girlfriend would have been unthinkable to the six year old me as well. Maybe I thought it was about him losing his Matchbox cars down a drain or something. It doesn't matter. It was the unbearable and exquisite ache of sadness that was the point.
Boothe's cover spent three weeks at number one in the UK charts in October/November '74 (sandwiched between Sweet Sensation's Sad Sweet Dreamer and Gonna Make You A Star by David Essex) suggesting that, sitcoms and NF marches aside, the seventies were more progressive than we retrospectively interpret them. Thirteen years later Boy George took a rather drippy cover of the cover back to number one in the UK charts
"I would give anything I own. Give up my life, my heart, my home. I would give everything I own. Just to have you back again"
19 - YELLOWMAN - MORNING RIDE
"What you think about the morning ride, sir?"
"The morning ride is a very nice ride"
I'm not sure Yellowman's talking about his commute. Yes, following Junior Murvin's scathing indictment of police brutality, Johnny Clarke's call for an existential reckoning, and Ken Boothe's paean to a lost parent, here's Winston Foster to lower the tone with a song, of course, about doing it. Most of Yellowman's early songs are, more or less, about 'having it off' and this one, from his debut - 82's Mister Yellowman, is no exception.
Following Zungguzungguguzungguzeng at number forty-four and Two To Six Supermix (no. 40) it's Yellowman's third and final 'entry' in this top 100.
18 - DR ALIMANTADO - JOHNNY WAS A BAKER
"I go to London town, I go to New York City, I go to Africa trying to find Johnny. When I was in Africa someone say "This is Johnny". I said, "Good day Johnny. My name is Doctor Alimantado"".
The second and final cut from the good doctor and the second from 1978's Best Dressed Chicken In Town (following I Killed The Barber at number 95) sees him employing his unorthodox bedside manner to travel three continents in the hope of finding a baker called Johnny who's chosen the rather unusual name Brown Paper for his daughter. Engineered by Augustus 'Gussie' Clarke this track was only added to the album on later reissues.
"I hear that you are a baker. I hear say you used to live in Jamaica. I hear you have three daughters, one named Brown Paper"
17 - DENNIS BROWN - TRAVELLING MAN
"I've got to move along. I've got to find myself a job"
Dennis Emmanuel Brown was known as The Crown Prince of Reggae and this track comes from his 1975 album Deep Down. Recorded when he was just eighteen years old, it presents Brown as a conscientious father whose concerns seem to be, primarily, finding work and looking after his wife and kids ("I'm a family man, I'm a travelling man").
Mixed at King Tubby's studio and produced by Niney the Observer, it was one of 84 albums Brown released before dying, aged 42, in 1999. Over forty albums of his have been released since his passing. The official cause of death was a collapsed lung but it's widely held that years of cocaine abuse had most likely brought his body to such a state in the first place. Tributes were released to him by Whitney Houston, Wyclef Jean, and The Mountain Goats and a Brooklyn concert was held in his honour with performances by Johnny Osborne and Half Pint. NPR Morning Edition, in 2010/11, compiled a list of the fifty great voices in musical history and Brown found himself, posthumously, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Maria Callas, Enrico Caruso, Nat King Cole, Placido Domingo, Umm Kulthum, Asha Bhosle, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Howlin' Wolf, Janis Joplin, Freddie Mercury, Roy Orbison, and Iggy Pop.
Bob Marley was on record as claiming Brown as his favourite singer. Brown himself had, initially, been inspired by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Sam Cooke, Brook Benton, and Nat King Cole and, in the arena of Jamaican music, John Holt, Ken Boothe, and Bob Andy. As well as Niney the Observer he worked with producers like Derrick Harriot, Coxsone Dodd, Joe Gibbs, Prince Jammy, Lee 'Scratch' Perry, and Prince Buster. His debut album, No Man Is An Island (produced by Dodd) was recorded when he was twelve years old and includes a cover version of Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head.
16 - THE SOUL SISTERS - WRECK A BUDDY
"Getting drunk will do you good. Use your brush to stiff up your wood. The stiffer the wood the longer the stay, for when it's big you can push it my way"
When it comes to filth in reggae music the boys (the likes of Yellowman and Max Romeo) don't get it all their own way. The Soul Sisters (Nora Dean (of Barb Wire fame and also, along with Lee Perry, responsible for the frankly disturbing The Same Thing You Gave To Daddy), Rita Marley (Bob's wife), and Cecile Campbell) started off recording gospel sides for Coxsone Dodd and covering Dusty Springfield's Son Of A Preacher Man but soon found they could enjoy far more renown with fairly blatant songs about sex. They kept it up (see what I did there?) until 1976 when Nora Dean moved to New York. During their career they also recorded as The Ebony Sisters, The Lovers, The Rude Girls, and The Sexy Girls. This song came out, of course, in '69.
"If he's ugly I don't mind. He has a dick and I want to grind"
15 - SOPHIE GEORGE - GIRLIE GIRLIE
"One:she's a lawyer. One:she's a doctor:One:we dem work with a little contractor"
Sophie George's Girlie Girlie entered the UK charts in late 1985 and by January 1986 it had slowly worked its way up to number seven. West End Girls by Pet Shop Boys (last year voted, by The Guardian, the greatest number one single of all time) was top of the pops at the time. Of course it was dismissed by many as something of a novelty. I must admit I'd almost forgotten about it until a few years ago when I heard it playing in a bar. It's been on fairly constant rotation since. How could I have forgotten how infectious the pan sound, George's delivery, and the arrangements of Anthony 'Sangie' Davis were/are?
In Jamaica it stayed at number one for eleven weeks and George had further successes with songs like Lazy Body and It Burn Me Belly but she never troubled the UK charts again. In the mid-nineties she moved to Miami and then Los Angeles. The only misstep in this song is the contention that a young man can be "too girlie girlie". It wouldn't apply to her offspring though as, in America, her son, Patrick Chung, has outstripped her fame completely, winning three Super Bowls as a safetyman for the New England Patriots.
"A big fat one who's a go go dancer. A little slim one who's a radio announcer"
14 - JOHN HOLT - STONED OUT OF MY MIND
"When you led me to the water I drank it but I drank more than I could hold. When you took my mind and my body now you're going to take my soul. Where can I run? Where can I hide? Who can I talk to? Tell me what, what can I do?"
Written by Eugene Record and Barbara Acklin, Stoned Out Of My Mind first appeared on the eponymous Chi-Lites album (their sixth) from 1973. It's an album that also included Homely Girl, a song later covered by UB40, so clearly one that lends itself to reggae covers.
John Holt's is far superior than UB40's. It also came out in 1973 (quick off the mark) on the album 1000 Volts Of Holt in which the ex-Paragons member also covered Mr Bojangles, Help Me Make It Through The Night, Girl From Ipanema, and Baby I'm A Want You (another reggae Bread cover). Holt's big trick was to drench his tracks in strings and to amplify the use of soulful female backing vocals. I've no evidence for this but I always imagine he was hugely influenced by the Philly Soul acts like The Three Degrees, The Stylistics, and MFSB.
One night, many years ago, drunk and heartbroken, I sat in a bar in Brixton and listened to this over and over again. The lyrics weren't particularly pertinent to my situation but the feeling, the emotion, and the desperate longing in both the song and Holt's ever spot on delivery spoke deeply to my mood at the time and it's stuck with me, becoming a firm favourite, ever since. I can even listen to it without welling up now.
13 - BARRINGTON LEVY - HERE I COME
"Extra size, extra size, extra sizer than sizeway. Extra broad, extra broad, extra broader than broadway"
It's the second track from Barrington Ainsworth Levy in the reggae 100 and I won't be saying much about him because I covered that with Under Mi Sensi (number 58). I bought the 7" of this record (on the London imprint) in a record shop in Basingstoke when it came out in '85 and I loved it immediately and have done ever since.
12 - LEE PERRY - PEOPLE FUNNY BOY
"Now that you reach the top and you turn big shot. All I have done for you. You not remember that. When you were down and out I used to help you out. But now that you win jackpot you don't remember that"
The sound of a crying baby is, necessarily, not a pleasant one. I have a theory that in the cold blooded old times the babies that cried the loudest were the ones that got the most attention so they survived and we all evolve from them. Perhaps it explains why massive cry-babies like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage rise to such positions of prominence.
I digress. Lee 'Scratch' Perry (in what, surely, is one of the first ever examples of sampling in popular music) incorporated the cry of a baby in 1968's People Funny Boy. His first big hit on his new Upsetters Record label (at this point he was calling himself, as you can see on the vinyl, Upset - or, sometimes, Lee 'King' Perry) had an insistent shuffling beat that people called 'steppers' at first, before finding a new name for it:- reggae! This, and Do The Reggay by The Maytals the same year, were probably the first two records ever to be termed reggae so not only are Toots Hibbert and Lee Perry all over this list like a rash, they're pretty much the reason this list and, far more importantly, this music exists in the first place.
People Funny Boy was a dig at Perry's old boss. Lyrically, by Scratch's standards, quite a traditional diss track. But, sonically, a game changer. Not just in Jamaican music but creating a roadmap for future hip-hop, R&B, and grime producers to further change the face of music. There's a lot more I could write about Perry but you'll not be surprised to learn that this is not his last appearance in this top one hundred.
11 - MR VEGAS - HEADS HIGH
In 1998 Clifford "Mr Vegas" Smith released this deathless dancehall anthem. Despite its hugely boring, and disappointing, anti oral sex message ("just mek a bway know you nah blow") it remains a wonderful piece of music. Production by Haldane 'Danny Brownie' Browne who also cut sides with Red Rat, Spragga Benz, Machel Montano, General Degree, and some dude using the name Chuckle Berry.
When Mr Vegas was younger he was hit in the face with a crowbar and had to have his jaw wired shut. Desperate to sing along to Beenie Man's Who Am I he demanded the wire's removal at too early a juncture resulting in his speech patterns being altered and his unorthodox flow. The couple of years following the release of Heads High were Vegas' most productive, winning a MOBO award and recording with Shaggy, and in the following years he's become more of a guest artist on other people's records. Those artists, however, have included Beyonce and Major Lazer.
10 - TOOTS AND THE MAYTALS - PRESSURE DROP
"When it drops. Oh, you gonna feel it"
Top ten time. Following Time Tough (number 77), Broadway Jungle (68), Monkey Man (45), and 54-46 Was My Number (32) this is Toots, and his Maytals, fifth and final appearance in this top one hundred. There's only a couple of other artists who can compete with that and we'll be hearing more from them soon.
Recorded in '69, released in '70, produced by the near ubiquitous Leslie Kong, it's inclusion on the soundtrack to 1972's The Harder They Come helped launch Toots' career outside of Jamaica. The Wikipedia page on this contains a lengthy paragraph about barometric pressure and the advent of modern weather forecasting which appears to be missing the point but they come good eventually and get round to Toots Hibbert's intended message of karmic justice with this quote from the man himself:-
"It’s a song about revenge, but in the form of karma: If you do bad things to innocent people, then bad things will happen to you. The title was a phrase I used to say. If someone done me wrong, rather than fight them like a warrior, I’d say: 'The pressure’s going to drop on you'".
It's been a reggae and ska anthem for nearly half a century now and shows no signs of dying. Covers have been made by the likes of The Specials, The Clash, Keith Richards, and Izzy Stradlin and the Ju Ju Hounds (and it's been used as an advert for Coors beer) but the original has an urgent simplicity that can't be bettered. Toots Hibbert grew up singing gospel music in May Pen, Jamaica and fell under the influence of Otis Redding. As I wrote about People Funny Boy, it was Hibbert and the Maytals, along with Lee Perry, who did the most to evolve the rocksteady sound into the one we all recognise as either ska or reggae today.
9 - EEK-A-MOUSE - WA DO DEM
"A wa do dem a wa do dem dem dem, a wa do dem a wa do dem dem dem"
They don't write 'em like that anymore. Here's Ripton Joseph "Eek-A-Mouse" Hylton with the title track of 1981's Wa Do Dem LP. Eek-A-Mouse, along with the likes of Michael Rose, Yami Bolo, and Anthony Red Rose, brought the 'singjay' style to the late 70s/early 80s dancehall scene. After working with Joe Gibbs he moved on to the dancehall maestro Henry 'Junjo' Lawes (Yellowman, Scientist, Barrington Levy, Frankie Paul) for whom he cut this great single and this great album. Later albums saw him work his name for puns-a-plenty:- Eek-A-Nomics, Mouseketeer, Eek-A-Speeka, and Eeeeksperience. On a much darker note Hylton was extradited from Paraguay to North Carolina in 2012 where he faced charges for lots of very unpleasant things (rape, kidnapping, and a 'crime against nature'). Some of which he was found guilty of but it seems unclear what exactly. It's always problematic liking good music by people who have done bad things and one or two in this list may have been rated higher had they not said, or done, some truly horrendous things. Sadly, Eek-A-Mouse (despite his silly name) seems to have been one of the worst offenders on that front.
"Me love fi see her when her hair full of curl. Anywhere she go people love her in the world. She don't worship diamond, she don't worship pearl"
8 - LEE SCRATCH PERRY - HAVING A PARTY
"Hello. This is the skeleton Marcus Garvey from outer space having a party. It gonna last all night".
During this top 100 I've, occasionally, tried to make the case that Lee Perry's production skills outweigh his not inconsiderable ability to play the clown and act the giddy goat but on this track, which I believe first appeared on the 2000 LP Techno Party, Perry does a very good job of handing the production duties over to someone else (Guyana's Neil 'Mad Professor' Fraser) while doing a very good impression of reggae's court jester.
From the footsteps that open the track, to Perry's final exhortation of "Jesus! Negus!" over gusty wind affects it's a slithering, svelte, funky number full of wonderful curling guitar lines and nifty rhythms. All overlaid with Scratch playing the host of a very bizarre party:- "bank managers will be there", "international bankers will be there", "but if you drunk don't drive", and, who could forget?, "this is the skeleton from outer space with his Remington in his suitcase".
In a top one hundred that contains tracks by Dillinger and Dr Alimantado, it's good to see Perry show them all who's the master of chatting shit.
7 - THE CONGOS - FEAST OF THE PASSOVER
"There was an assemble, yeah, up on the mountain, brotherman. Idren and Idrens, yeah, chanting together, yeah. It was the feast of the passover. It was the feast of the passover"
"Ashanti" Roy Johnson (tenor), Cedric Mylton (falsetto), and Watty Burnett (baritone) are probably Jamaica's finest vocal group so it's no surprise that when they teamed up with Lee Perry as producer they came up with such startlingly beautiful and sonically innovative music as this. 1977's Heart of the Congos on Perry's Black Ark record label is widely, and correctly, held as their masterpiece but this, from their second album - 1979's Congo Ashanti on CBS, is a superb standalone track.
Lee Perry's Arkology compilation album came out in 1997 and if you're a serious fan of reggae or of music production in anyway it's a must have. Over 3 CDs (Dub Organiser, Dub Shepherd, and Dub Adventurer) we're treated to over fifty examples of the man's amazing production skills including tracks by Max Romeo, Junior Murvin, Mikey Dread, The Heptones, Augustus Pablo, Keith Rowe, and Jah Lion. Many have already featured in this one hundred.
"Hail Natty Dread. Have you any herbs, brotherman?"
6 - TENOR SAW - RING THE ALARM
"Some sound sound like a big drum pan. Listen this sound it a champion. Ram the dance inna any session. Rock up the woman and rock up the man"
In Houston, Texas in August 1988 Clive Bright from Kingston, Jamaica (better known as Tenor Saw) was killed in a traffic accident. He was twenty-one years old. It's impossible to know if he'd have gone on to have a long and fruitful career or not but he'd already made a huge name for himself both in Jamaica and abroad as one of the leading voices of the emerging digital dancehall era of reggae. Not least with 1985's Ring The Alarm.
Ring the Alarm made use of the Stalag riddim pioneered by The Techniques and later used by both Sister Nancy and Public Enemy (Don't Believe The Hype). It was the song that brought Tenor Saw to prominence and he was soon working with King Jammy on Pumpkin Belly and recording with Sugar Minott and Freddie McGregor. Not long after that he moved to Miami and within two years he was dead. A hit and run accident that's provided plenty of scope for conspiracy theorists who believe that Tenor Saw was murdered. Touchingly his friends Nitty Gritty and King Kong released tribute singles (Who Killed Tenor Saw? and He Was A Friend). Super Cat's Nuff Man A Dead was a roll call of reggae legends that have passed and Tenor Saw found himself in the exalted company of Bob Marley, Jacob Miller, and Lee Van Cleef. Tenor Saw's higher in this list than any of 'em.
"Remember this sound, it's the talk of the town, talk of the country, hey"
5 - MAX ROMEO - CHASE THE DEVIL
"I'm gonna put on an iron shirt and chase the devil out of earth. I'm gonna send him to outer space to find another race"
Maxwell "Max Romeo" Livingston Smith's third and final entry in this top 100, following Wet Dream (number 30) and War Inna Babylon (27), is this 1976 Lee Perry produced single. It's the fifth song from Perry's '97 anthology Arkology in the list. Underlining, once again, just how vital Perry's work has been throughout various eras of Jamaican music.
Romeo and Perry fell out not long after recording this and Romeo went to live in the US where he performed backing vocals on The Rolling Stones' Emotional Rescue LP and eventually found himself working in a store selling electronic goods. In the nineties he found himself in the UK where he worked with Mafia & Fluxy and Jah Shaka. His two sons are called Ronaldo and Romario suggesting he's very
likely a fan of the Brazilian national football team.
Many people first came to this tune via The Prodigy's brilliant Out of Space in 1992 but it's also been sampled by Kanye West (working as producer on Jay Z's Black Album) and covered, in 2005, by Madness on The Dangerman Sessions Vol.1. An album which also included songs by Bob Marley, Desmond Dekker, Prince Buster (of course), Jose Feliciano, The Kinks, and The Supremes.
Never forget that "Satan is an evilous man" even if he "can't chocks it on I man"
4 - DAVE AND ANSELL COLLINS - DOUBLE BARREL
"I am the magnificent. I'm backed by the shack of a soul boss. Most turnin' stormin' sound o'soul. I am W O O O"
Dave and Ansell Collins' Double Barrel knocked T Rex's Hot Love off the top spot in 1971 and occupied the number one spot for two weeks before being replaced by Knock Three Times by Tony Orlando and Dawn. Following that it was Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep by Middle of the Road and then T Rex were back with Get It On. What a strange time it was for music.
Despite the fact that 1971 also saw chart toppers by Clive Dunn (Grandad) and Benny Hill (Ernie - The Fastest Milkman In The West) I'd wager that Double Barrel was the oddest sounding of all - and, along with T Rex, it's certainly aged the best. Following Desmond Dekker's Israelites (number 49 in this list) it was the second ever UK reggae hit parade topper. But, whereas Israelites is a fairly conventional pop tune in comparison, Double Barrel is leftfield avant-pop at its very finest. Vocalist Dave Barker (whose surname the pressers forgot to add to the original record) had worked with Coxsone Dodd, Harry J, and Lee Perry so would have been quite comfortable spitting out random boasts ("Good God", "too much") and snake-hipped exhortations to either dance or 'do it' ("you're fine baby", "push your lips now", "enter the shack at the back of your soul, baby") as the rest of the band (Ansell Collins is the keyboard player) deconstruct James Brown's urban American funk into some kind of abstracted cubist shakedown that manages to sound exactly like the future while simultaneously remaining firmly planted in the past.
It's a masterpiece, and the follow up Monkey Spanner (also written by Winston Riley, formerly of The Techniques) capitalised on the single's success by becoming a big hit too. But, after that, as a band they pretty much disappeared from view. Their work, for the most part, was done. An attempted comeback in the early eighties floundered and another return in 2012 saw them playing primarily to the revival circuit - including a show at Notting Hill Carnival which I somehow missed. Ansell Collins also worked with The Upsetters, Black Uhuru, U-Roy, Jimmy Cliff, Pama International, Gregory Isaacs, Barrington Levy, and The Mighty Diamonds. Barker's CV is less star studded but he did some vocal work for The Selecter.
Chas Smash of Madness nicked many of Barker's yelps and exhortations for his work in Madness and Daniel Ash from Bauhaus (whose early stuff has a huge reggae influence) cites this as the first record he ever bought. Nealy fifty years on the imprint and influence off this tune can be felt not just in reggae but in many many other genres of music.
3 - HUGH ROY AND JOHN HOLT - WEAR YOU TO THE BALL
"I'm gonna wear you to the ball tonight. Put on your best dress tonight"
"Did you hear what the man said, baby? Well, be your best 'cos this gonna be a musical test"
This hits the sweet spot for me, combining as it does John Holt's early mellifluous style of reggae singing and music with U-Roy (then trading as Hugh Roy or, sometimes, The Originator) spitting mad deejay bars about soul brothers, soul sisters, being tougher than tough, and having the musical stuff over the top of it. Either would be great on their own but together, despite what you might imagine to be quite jarring styles, they work perfectly and the fact it's an insanely catchy tune that's been an earworm for me for many years now (like much on this list) just makes it even more enjoyable. From its crudely recorded skinhead reggae intro to Hugh Roy's final yelp there's not an ounce of fat on this 1970 banger.
"Wow. Chick-a-bow, chick-a-bow, chick-a-bow-wow-wow"
2 - THE CONGOS - DON'T BLAME IT ON I
"For when a wolf kill a guy out there, they blame it on Ras Tafari"
It's The Congos again and it's another Lee Perry production. This was actually an extra track on a 2008 re-release of Heart of the Congos but it's so beautiful, so wonderfully executed, that it sends a chill up my back. Not least when Cedric Myton unleashes that incredible falsetto.
Recorded at Perry's Black Ark studio in 1976 or 1977, the musicians include Sly Dunbar on drums, Boris Gardiner on bass, and Ernest Ranglin on guitar. It really is a meeting of some of Jamaica's all time best singers, musicians, and, for my money, the island's very best producer.
Only one more selection to go and to think we've not had Sid Owen's cover of Sugar Minott's Good Thing Going or even Paul Nicholas' Reggae Like It Used To Be yet. They can't both be number one!
"Anything the heathen do, I and I a get the blame"
1 - THE UPSETTERS - RETURN OF DJANGO
So, here it is. Number one - and it's not even got any lyrics for me to post! In truth, almost any track in the top 20, top 30, top 40, or beyond could have been number one in this list.
There's so many great reggae, ska, dancehall, and rocksteady tunes out there it seems almost churlish to enforce even arbitrary order upon them. I chose this to top the pile because it's blithe, it's irrefutably chipper, and, despite its brief playing time (just two and a half minutes), it's an absolutely deathless earworm. It reminds me of my childhood (it reached number five in 1969 so was out before I even understood what music was), it reminds me of being a younger man (I had the record sleeve design on a t-shirt that I've still got, now very frayed around the neck), and it reminds me of festivals and nights out. Essentially it seems to encapsulate, with ease, all that is good and all that is great about Jamaican music and, befitting the way this list panned out, it is, of course, by Lee 'Scratch' Perry.
It's the opening track on The Upsetters' 2nd album, also called Return to Django, and has since been used in Grand Theft Auto, This is England, and, er, an advert for the Inland Revenue. Which given Perry's odd fixation with global banking and finance at least seems strangely apt.
I hope you've enjoyed many, or at least some, of these reggae selections. It was an absolute pleasure posting them during 2020's first lockdown and revisiting it now has brought back lotds of wonderful memories. I'll leave you with a couple of quotes from the dub shepherd, Perry, himself.
"Instead of hate and malice, we should be sipping chalice"
"Take your time, dig it man"
No comments:
Post a Comment