Thank Get a little back We must begin to jam There's a world waiting for you Music, you know, it's the lifeblood. It's like lifeblood of the people. Like oil is to Saudi Arabia.
Yeah, there's a great truth you should know To be young, get a little back Get up, stand up DJ, yeah, stand up No one in their wildest dreams would ever have thought that a small island like Jamaica has now been able to create a music that is part of the mainstream. We need it, we must have it. The music is something like a gravity, like a magnet.
It's a big thing. It insists to hold on to you. I've been touched by an angel. Forward!
On August 5th 1962, Princess Margaret finally pulled down the Union Jack after more than 300 years of British rule in Jamaica. The soundtrack to this newfound freedom was the first truly Jamaican music, the newly invented Skiath. Because the time has come, then we can have some fun, so take a run.
You know, it was just a simple song, and the people, they jumped to it, and, you know, going around. Whoa, whoa, whoa, we're in the... and they flashed them hands and it was great.
That was something to see and never can come back in Jamaica. Independence came at that time on the scale. was in its peak. Yes.
And so it was just jubilation all around. You know, with the acceptance that we were now a free country and Ski is at its peak. Everyone just went crazy for it. You couldn't go to a party before 62 to play ska. After that night, you had to play ska for the party to be successful.
It was unbelievable. Everyone gravitated to it. It was something new. and I noticed something too, they had pride. When they looked at it, they said, this is ours.
It would have been nice to say that independence caused people to want their own music, but the music preceded independence. But it was a wonderful coincidence, because independence gave it further drive. The music came first. The story of modern Jamaican music starts in the early 1950s in the poorer areas of downtown Kingston with the emergence of a uniquely Jamaican phenomenon still at the heart of the music 50 years later the sound system.
The sound system is essentially a street discotheque with speakers big enough to raise a family in. It's where poor Jamaicans have been coming to dance till they drop ever since they stopped listening to jazz bands in the now ruined clubs all over the island. You had sound system before recording.
First it started, the Jamaica music started with orchestra dance. But when the sound system started, came in, they replaced the musicians because people used to hire these bands to play, but the musicians used to stop and eat a lot of Korygo, so it burned up a lot of time. The band would go into intermission, and intermission forever.
So the people got to get fed up with this new dance, but in the dance. So in the intermission, they made a mistake. They agreed that the first sound system should play in the intermission.
That was the end of them. I never turned back. It was all about rhythm and blues. As the 1950s rolled on, the music of Fats Domino, Ray Charles and Louis Jordan was streaming into the island from Southern American radio stations just over 90 miles away. And with the sound...
blasting it out most nights of the week, downtown Kingston went dance crazy. And like any craze, it was rich with opportunity. People used to make money from it.
You sell your own beer and you sell... sell your own curry, goat and rice, and you got the sounding system from 8 o'clock till like 6 in the morning, and they're eating and dancing in the street. You get like 2,000, 3,000 people, and you make a bound. Sound systems became the biggest local industry in downtown Kingston, and competition was fierce.
To pull in the punters, you had to have the best music blasting out of your system. The race was on for the hottest American tunes. He's the Rickie sensation. You know, American people, they need cheap labor.
So they bring me to cut them cane and things. But while you're out there cutting cane, if you buy Rhythm & Blues, six times more money you get because you're gonna sell it back to Sound System people. So everybody's anxious to go to Farnborough, but not to cut cane.
They want to go buy some record. You know? Out of this fierce competition, two giants emerged, Clement Coxendod and Arthur Duke Reed.
Combining their liquor businesses with their sound system dances, they were effectively the barons of downtown Kingston and would continue to control the Jamaican music business for the next 15 years. They could run the country those days because people, anywhere the sound string up, you have the crowd of people there before. They used to play in competition. It come in now like I'm Joe Freeze and Holly. Joe Freeze is the man who go out on this dance and go out the gate and get everybody out of the gate money for coming out on them dance.
And the people they believe in all the cocks and dance and come on the Joe Creed. Sometimes they just take the money and go out on the cocks and dance just the same. So it's like that. All of them used to be at work. The sound system thing man is a...
Is a... It's a traditional thing. You can't stop it.
It comes from way back, you know? Come on. Yes, suddenly rum is served to sophisticates because suddenly Jamaican rum has regained its place among the great drinks of the world.
You think that rum is down selling in the stores? If you think rum is strong, you ask about it. Rude to your parents.
When you throw water, you know what happens? Yes, throw cheese in it. What do you think happens? Smoke. The smoke, vapors thing, right?
And that is what the brother of mine drink. Like they have cocaine now, that was for them cocaine. So after jukery, give them two drinks of rooty appearance. And send them to go and cocks and dance. The dance done.
People are jumping fence to get out the fast pass. Duke Reed had a program on the radio, I think 4.30 on a Saturday afternoon called Treasure All Time. They would advertise the liquor business and then he would, on those programs, they would play newly made Jamaican records.
To promote their sound systems, Reed and his competitors had turned to record producing by the end of the 50s, but not as we know it today. They had no intention of selling records to anyone else. They brought jazz musicians down from the tourist hotels. hotels to play Jamaican versions of American R&B, and then they just made one copy of each record to play on their sound system and achieve the much-prized exclusive.
We start imitating the rhythm and blues songs, like Smiley Lewis or Professor Longhair or Louis Jordan, you know, those kind of beats. We tried to imitate it. It didn't turn out that way, so we decided to keep this as our own. That's how that scale come in. Styling like those was really rhythm and blues.
What we did to this rhythm and blues is like you'll be doing... One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. This kind of we change it to one, two, three.
And then it's more two, four, two, four, instead of one. It's coming. I feel this loving, feel this loving, but baby why you don't turn? This is Jamaica's first musical revolution.
And we call it Skiah. And then Skiah was a dirty word. But what it was, it was terribly influenced by Jamaican activities and people, you know. The culture of Jamaica was pushed into it.
And when the people took it on that fast, right, they just grabbed to it because it was them. This is the way of life of the lower class people. We haven't got anything else. What else do we have?
I mean, the middle class. class or the upper class can buy a ticket and go to Miami or somewhere like that. That's all you have, you don't know anything else. You would not find the creative force that comes out of the inner city in the residential areas in Jamaica because they are more settled into a pattern, into a tradition. There's a social divide and a cultural divide.
We live in two countries. Wenskau is popular downtown. It had no popularity uptown. In 1960, much of uptown Jamaica still preferred American music, and many of the jazz musicians who had invented skya were making a living playing the tourist resorts of the North Coast. I used to have a serious type of class prejudice in those days, let's call it that.
You know, and it would have hurt my... my career in a certain sense. You couldn't go uptown and play ska music, so it was really like an outlaw type of music, you know? In 1960, Prince Buster started his own sound system.
To steal a march on his rivals, he approached the ultimate outcasts of Jamaican society, the Rastafarians, who since the 30s had looked to Africa rather than Europe as a model. He persuaded Count Ozzy and his master drummers down from the Warwicka Hills into a recording studio. In those days, if you say there's a rasta, all the avenues are black for you.
When I met Carolina, that rasta, the whole rasta, spoke. Because now, it was not the music world. They could only speak English.
If you play it by sound system, if you play it by sound system, on the island everybody going to hear you. In the early years in Jamaica, the Rastafarian community went under so much pressure, at one stage or another. I think there was a decree in Jamaica.
To kill the Rasta man. To kill the Rasta man and question him after, you know. Count Azzi. Count Azzi. Count Azzi, you know.
You know, 90% of the grassroots music was really played or created by the Rasta people, you know. Rasta and Jamaican music have been inseparable ever since. Even at the independence celebrations, Count Azzi and his troupe were part of the pageant laid on for Princess Margaret.
whose reaction remains unrecorded. We brought with us most of the music of Africa. The rhythm, the kumina as a form of dancing, the nabingi drumming by our Rastafarians. To that has been fused some of the jazz influences emanating from our sisters and brothers in New Orleans..
I am king, from the beginning, I was made king, like on stage, I am king, and now I'm king. What it developed from was Calypso. Calypso singers sing about, they sing about, well, lots of them used to sing about sex.
But they also sing about topical things like that, so it's coming out of that. You want to know what's going on, I mean, you know, you listen to the songs. It is a kind of folk music. Our country contested at the Lyceum the title Miss World. They numbered 40. The emerging nation was full of optimism, and with prosperity increasing, everybody wanted to own the Skiar records that up until now they only had heard on the sound systems.
He started buying Jamaican records. Jamaican records was accepted as the record to buy, because you're hearing yourself, you're hearing things to do with you. Eager to capitalize on this new market, the sound system operators reinvented themselves at record companies.
Prince Buster's Voice of the People, Duke Re- Creed's Treasure Isle, and initially the top label, Coxon, run by the taciturn Clement Dodd. He was the first to realise that you could make a living beyond the sound system. With his profits, he set up the legendary Studio One, the first recording studio in Jamaica to be owned by a black man. Studio One was a permanent place that people recorded almost every day. We were always free to go there and record whenever we feel like.
And these are the kind of facilities that you've got that made it a special place. you know, because it's like home, musically. Studio One is like Jamaica's Motown. That's where all the great artists, you know, we say they graduate at this place, Studio One.
It was like a nine-tooth. five job. We went there early morning and we would record all day. When I went in there at seven, I used to live at Mr. Dad's house with his children. So every morning I'd go to the studio with him and open the studio.
He would pick up an assistant, his name is Bim Bim. He'd pick up Bim Bim first, and we'd go to the studio, we'd open the studio and make his rounds. We'd close the studio every night, drop Bim Bim home. It's like heaven. Just like in the old days of the sound system, Coxon constantly needed new sounds to stay ahead.
Every Sunday morning, young hopefuls gathered in his yard, hawking their songs and looking for a shot at the big time. Listen to all them guys go up and sing. You know, and every time, but, you know, we would sing around.
around the side, you know, and they would say, you're so good, you know. And every time them say, your turn, man. I say, no, make them go on, make them go on. I saw Coxon himself did an audition, right? Or some auditions, too, before I started that.
and he would tell artists that he figured weren't ready. I didn't want them back. I said, okay, come back seven years time, you know?
It was six o'clock in the evening. I was the last person to go up. You know the place was still packed.
And you know my first song, You got to be sure of a woman's love. Everybody crowd around man. Everybody say Univisor! Univisor! Everyone crowd around, you know, and Mr. Dad said, nice, you know, the Tuesday.
I'm going to do my first two songs. Another group of youngsters signed by Coxon were the Whalers, Barney Whaler, Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. In 1964, within a year of Studio One's opening, they sold an astonishing 70,000 copies of Simmer Down. People that used to say That sweet honey girl Trenchtown was vibrant with a lot of activities.
The place was like a what do you call it? Like a Piccadilly. Like Hollywood. Music has been the center. ...tour of attraction.
Everybody was singing like a family. So if the Soul Heads have a recording, you'd have Bob, Peter, Bonnie, Delroy, you know, guys from the Paragons, everybody would come to give background. support. If the waiters have a session sometime, you will have to ask us, girls, come work with us tonight.
We have two children listening, looking at all the harmony. So that was like fun. We weren't being paid because Coxon.
We didn't get money at that time. Sometimes we'd get money to buy us a patty or cocoa bread. And if we were going on Fridays, we would get a pound or 30 shillings or something like that. But we didn't have a problem.
It was a very productive period in Jamaica's musical history. Hit after hit, you know, every month there would be a new hit for different singers. It was as if all the singers and the talent in popular music had been kept locked up in a cupboard.
But from the first hit was made, it was as if the cupboard doors opened and all this talent just poured out. Studio One's music was made downtown for downtown people. The musicianship necessary wasn't that easy to achieve if you were poor in Kingston.
But luckily there was also a downtown academy. If Studio One was Motown... the Alpha Boy School was the Juilliard School of Music. Belfour Boys'School is a school that caters to the unfortunate.
It teaches them trades, that they can earn a living after they leave here, and some go abroad. you met Rico Rodriguez, he's a trombonist. My mother couldn't anger me no more and that's where I ended up in Alpha.
Maybe she feel I'm more protected up there. The young man, him grow very quick, you know what I mean? Him become very wise very quickly, you understand? Because life, tough life, you know? Life hard.
and out of fervour to bring out wisdom. Well, the reason why I'm here was because my parents abandoned me. But I thank God for that in some reason. I always said, most of them die mother and father, but I still love her. And in the future, I'd like to find her.
So, at Alpha, Alpha is good. I learned music. and also learn education. Many of Jamaica's greatest musicians have been from Alpha. Coxon in particular was quick to appreciate the value of the kind of discipline and ability you might expect from that institution.
The backbone of his house band were largely Alpha old boys and they became the first superstars of Skiah, the Scatterlights. Oh yes, Scatterlags. That was Johnny Moore. He is touring France now, and Lester Sterling, he's in America. Tommy McCook was very good at that.
He was a saxophonist. You had dumb drummers. He was very quiet.
He loved his instrument. And when he was still in school, he was about the best. ...strombonist in Jamaica. Catalytes were a great set of people.
At the time they were... The masters, they were learned musicians. They were not just people who played music by the breath. They were doing it by the paper. And we the Wailers were really enthused to have been working with the Scatolites.
There came on the scene this talented aggregation, the most formidable array of talent which Jamaica has ever seen in a single band and dare I say is ever likely to see in the future. They were it, anywhere they played. For dances, the place would be Ram Jam.
We play at a place one night and see the place, loaded with people and a woman come and dance the skirt. And I'm watching that woman dance and I'm such a kickback. And when we finish playing ball, I hear a woman dance. and the deck of roach, scusity to drop them all dead. Serious thing, man.
Bunch of the skull killers. Yeah, man. Scatterlight carry a heartbeat. Yeah. Yeah, man.
The two years after independence, with the Scatterlights at their peak, was the golden age of Jamaican Skiah. But the foundations of the band were shaky. They became frustrated with the insularity of the Jamaican music scene.
And more significantly, Don Drummond, the band's greatest genius, was slowly losing his mind. Drummond's virtuosity was the reason why he was so successful. trombone playing lay at the heart of the Scatolites greatest moments.
A lot of his compositions were minor chord tunes. Smooth, more... Melodic kind of flow, while Rico would be more brassy and more like orchestrated, like, you know, to the beat. Don slides with it.
Drummond took Skiah to new heights of virtuosity. He had a unique style with a disturbing emotional undertone that reeked of Africa and mirrored the demons in his head. He got in friendship with this lady and he didn't like her dancing and so that brought a sort of a bone of contention between them jealousy and the lack of material and career advancement built up disastrously in the mind of the introspective drummond and on new year's eve 1964 he killed his girlfriend margarita I used to say to myself, I wonder if he's really guilty of doing that act.
But they found him guilty and then they placed him in the madhouse, Bellevue that is. And after a while he had some altercation with somebody there, or with people there, and... or some fuss and he died.
I was sorry to hear because he was such a great musician, very, very great, regardless of how mad he was. Without Don Drummond, the Scatterlights were never quite the same again. And anyway, musicians couldn't make that much money in Jamaica.
To make a living, many of the most talented musicians joined the thousands of other Jamaicans. on the boat to England. I just want to change from Jamaica.
I've played music a long time and I really play with no banner or nothing. So, coming to England, try out with luck. To the newly arrived Jamaican, London nightlife was a strange and often It was an unnerving experience. When you go there, you know what they was playing? Bottoms up and the choo-choo-choo and all these kind of things.
Knees up. Are you coming from Jamaica where you used to? So we couldn't take it. And the jazz club... Well, Stevan, every club you go in London is sorry.
You've got to be a member. Won't let you. Once you're black, you can't get in.
You know what I mean? You couldn't get into Ronnie Scott. You couldn't get into Lions Con. house the big jazz club so then I said to Vinnie look you build a sound we will support you and get the record like Jamaica from America and this is how it starts my parents were only here five or six seven years to nine sixty sixty five so it was almost like a letter from home hearing rhythms rhythm tracks from Jamaica Shabeens and blues dances weren't just exclusively for people. It started off exclusively.
They were in certain areas. You worked on the buses, right? And you were the conductor and the driver's wife. And then, you know, you can't help but be together all day long, right? And you talk about what you do for recreation.
And then you say to the driver, look, we're having a party over so and so and so and so. And he comes round and thinks, oh, that's nice, isn't it? And he tells another few of his friends, We used to go down to number nine, Blenheim Crescent, where there was a little cafe with a little jukebox.
And you'd get some food. And I always remember, oh, Carolina was on the jukebox. And in back there was a kitchen with a chef, and you could get meat and rice.
That must have been 1961. water Jackie fell down on the bus to come Sister Ignatius from Halfa gave me the money to come to England. I was like her number one boy, like best boy then, you know what I mean? And she used to look after me in school very good.
He took the trumpet and he was very helpful because I used to send him to my brother's store and so on. He used to do shopping, plumbing. There was this great cultural mix.
And at the same time, Buster came over from Jamaica and we had access to West Indian records. Greatly opened areas, because the British mark, I mean, British record releases was pretty limited at that time. We were hearing cover versions. We had to hear the original. Yeah, we had access to the real thing.
You felt like you were at the start of something. By 1962, the scene was big enough to move from West London to the West End. Soon, Count Sackles'The Roaring Twenties in Carnaby Street became one of the hippest venues in town. It was a late-night dive. Maltese, prostitutes, striptease girls, the old Ludoists.
Everybody, white, musician, because they come down the Rolling Stones. They were scruffy, all of their stones. Because they used to play around the corner at a club called Le Cine in Wilmille Street, down the street.
A girl named Sandra used to run it. People was like coming at five in the morning sick and that's when I met Christine Keeler, Mandirac Davis and Profumo. I mean I didn't know he was a minister at the time but he just come down with the girls.
We used to say he was a sugar daddy. I come at around 20, sometimes it's 20 of us, 20, 50, you know. I'm going home with... It was a problem so far. We couldn't get no taxi to go home.
Sometimes we have to walk. Sometimes along the way you get thirsty. So you drink all the milk and the orange juice inside.
So you have a lot of fun. You're so tired coming from the dance. It's snow. So it was an experience in the sixties when I just come here. You know I wonder when I come the first time to England, remember?
First time I leave Jamaica, right? When I come over London, I look through the plague. And I want the people to live here.
In your storybooks, I read so much about three little pigs and the wolf. And you see the trouble is they draw the house in the book. Then when I come in, all the house look like... Pure that house We hide, we hide in here and you look down Pure that kind of house, I say Oh yes And I look for the wolf in the back Skia in Britain was distributed on the Blue Beat label, which was how it became known. Blue Beat was the music of choice for the mods, the scooter-riding youths who flocked to the concerts and made Britain a hugely important market for the music.
I'm not going away No way, way, way, way, way, yeah They saw me as a rebel and identified themselves as such So there was some compatibility there I think so because You should have seen them when I made my show It just come like me and them as one And them protect me right through the tour Like the lucky old sun Give me nothing to do By 1964, Jamaican record on entrepreneur Chris Blackwell was convinced he could get a UK hit with a Skia record. He had the right singer in Millie Small, so he bought over Ernest Ranglin to London to provide the spark. In my house it was more on the blues spot, you was listening to a couple of blue beat tunes and stuff like that, you know.
And then the biggest breakthrough was when, you know, Milly Smalls came out with My Boy Lollipop and I think that changed everybody. We started to get hits in England because that's where it became an international music, especially with My Boy Lollipop by Emily Small. That put us on the map. So the uptown people started to take notes to make it a national sound rather than downtown sound. Yes, this is ska, original and indigenous.
These instruments are playing a monotone. tonic, grassroot rhythm. As Uptown Jamaica and the rest of the world joyously accepted Ska, downtown the music and the mood were changing. The Ska was upbeat.
It expressed how the spirit of the people was. And then after, people start to observe and say, oh, this independence, I'm not really independent. What's going on?
The music slowed down. Let's rock it. it steady and see what's going on.
Slow down. Poverty breeds crime. You wake up in the morning and you don't know where the next meal is coming from.
You know, all kinds of things start going through your mind. By 1966, downtown Kingston was a lawless place. This was the era of the so-called rude boys, the ruthless gangsters who terrorized the nation.
The rude boys come in a dance man, no care you dress in a three-piece suit. Them guys change things, them just come in a shorts and no shirt and all turn up back way. The girls flapped them and them just said this, that's how the rap said the name did come in, you know.
And the DJ have to play, when he reach he say, cry tough with Alton Ellis and anything you can do I can do it better, I am the toughest and him show back. up here in the air and it mash. This guy come to me and said, he named Busby, he was a rude boy. When I say rude, I mean rude. Because he would travel with a gun, and he'd travel with a knife, and he would...
He would take any buckle and cut you, anything. Come to me one day and say, boy, I hear everybody has seen Rude Boy cry tough on all seven of them guys. I want you to make one of me.
You just want both me, and I want it by Friday. And so I said, OK, I'll make you a song, sir. I sang like a lion. We are iron. Rude is no fear.
Boss B listened. I said, play it back. I am so in.
He's strong like a lion. He'll take out two of the bears, throw it against the wall and crash it and say, I am! Everybody gets in panic now because they're afraid of him, because they know him, what he can do for what he won't do. The whole night is one song, it comes like the dance-stop.
I don't know if he didn't like the song, what he would do. But anyhow, he did love him. But he didn't love it for long. He didn't love the song for long because he lost his life the following day. We just cut out the road boy songs and said, well, if it's going to cause corruption, just leave it there.
As things hotted up downtown. people sang and most of them escaped into old-fashioned boy meets girl love songs. This was rocksteady, Jamaica's first pop music, the era of singers who replaced the largely instrumental Ska and for many it was the most glorious phase in Jamaican music. This way before I know there is some way today. It all came from the American R&B music, you know, because we're always...
being influenced by the impressions, all them soul R&B groups. We would listen to a Dionne Warwick song and try to... sing it exactly as Dion did it. If you are a group you try to study the Supremes, Mata Reeves and the Vandellas.
If there was a group who comes from abroad to our shores we would want to go and see them because they have something to teach us. It's a cultural thing for Jamaicans to sing. In the ghetto, you'll find more singers than anywhere else too, because it's a thing we used to pass the time away. She's a progressive child, always work for what she want With no confidence and never yet said she can Tend the love you know she have, healing the broken heart From she coming on my life, me no stop advance Rearrange my lonely life and turn it right from start Now I'm happy with this woman and we will never part Me know she clever and she smart I've been touched by an angel Most of us, we only wanted to hear our voices on the record.
To see people, to hear it on the radio. is a dream come true. To see people dancing and singing to your record for the first time is another matter completely. There was no thought of any money or anything else more than honesty, sincerity and purity.
And that is what I think that music is full of. That is why it's lasting so long. The songs lived. You'll have a song man one year straight. Selling for one year, not a little thing like some tune come on your cell for one month and done.
Them tunes they sell and live. If I ever die, people still buying them. My biggest sales in this store is all this. And I have everything up to date, and I'm up to date. Rocksteady saw a power shift in the music industry.
It was still dominated by the former Sound System bosses, but Coxon and Studio One would never be quite the same force again. Many of the artists, like the Paragons, Alternes, and the Melodians, promptly signed up with his old rival Duke Reed, who still ran his own sound system and realised the potential of the more easily danceable rock steady beat. When the first song came out, I had to sing a song called Girl I've Got A Day.
Doom, doom, doom, doom, doom, doom, doom. Doom, boom, boom. Doom, doom, doom, doom, doom, doom. And when Duke Weed put on that song, I was there.
He had to play the song about one dozen times. And you can see his car was very fast. He had to spin, he had to dance, he had to dance in a fast pace.
So what we did was, at the time, most of them had the same bass line, because the bass man didn't have enough time to emphasise on his bass. So what we did was cut it down a little so the bass man could more move his fingers and have a line. So that's how you come to have these really lines.
You give him more time to do that. In the sky you couldn't do that. Reed's Trojan sound system had been notorious for the vicious fights that often accompanied his dances. Experiences which made the ex-policeman the ideal man to be. to set up his Treasure Isle studio amongst the rude boys of downtown Kingston.
He was a no-nonsense man. He never harboured any foolishness. Police used to go and come.
If you was a rude boy, you have to leave your rude boy business outside, right? Then you could have seen. As I say, he was a no-nonsense man. And this is his studio over there, on top. Where's his studio?
You know, his engineer was... There was a man called Smitty, one of the best in Jamaica. Mr. Smitty, the engineer. Now down here was his liquor store. You'd have a lot of boxes parked on the roads with liquor and drinks and all that, and nobody take anything.
Well, you see, Duke, he respected around here, and he's very armed. He got at least three guns on him. One, long one, one on his hip, and one on his feet. That's Duke, the first gunman in Western Kingston. If Duke even not in the studio, he have a box downstairs in him liquor store.
And when everybody upstairs dancing, say, boy, this gun, this gun. And out and over here, blagoom, boom, boom. And that Duke fire shot and the whole studio get quiet. Then you see the big man, he will run up the stairs. He said to Tom McCook and all those people,''What are you playing?
I don't want that! I want this, I want that! ''Everybody just shut up and listen to what he said.
Then he had a handman, he's dead now, named Marquis. He said,''Listen, and you...''He played back Smitty and quiet, and Marquis put out a mid like this and said,''Yes, yes, the boss was right. The two need a 17 there, sir.''Rocksteady lasted 18 glorious months.
But finally there was no escaping Jamaica's worsening conditions. Baselines became heavier and the subject matter more socially concerned. We're going to reggae now.
And how we get reggae now? Reggae is a different changing of the drum. We have the drum playing more burro-like. I don't know if you understand. Tap, ta-da, pa-da, pa-pa-da, pa-da, pa-pa-da.
And change the bass pattern. If the music even slow it, make it sound like it fast. That is what the reggae do to the rock steady.
And that was it. Reggae, reggae, reggae, reggae, reggae, reggae. Reggae was everywhere. Dozens of studios sprang up and sheer volume saturated the market.
Producers needed a new outlet for the music. A guy was working with Island at the time, Dave Betridge, come out here and meet me and they invite me over to England in 68 and I see what the people love. England is the gateway to really reggae music. The English market became essential to Jamaican producers with its large and by now settled Caribbean community. When I went to London, Bob Andy and myself, that was when I first learned that Feel Like Jumping was also a big song in England.
We were just in Jamaica not knowing what was happening. What was... happening was that by the late 60s companies like trojan records has spotted the large underground following that had developed for this new reggae pop music white kids that were hanging out with the black kids from the same areas grew up on them music you know we were all hearing it and it was just a fashion in the youth culture of the day we only had the youth clubs you know i mean nobody was old enough to go to nightclubs anyway trojan records came to enjoy iconic status as the purveyors of jamaican music in the uk they released 2 000 singles in seven years initially on a fairly small scale through specialized shops catering to jamaicans and to white working-class youths who reveled in its danceable beat and outlaw status, the skinheads. You get kicked out of Saturday morning pictures when you're too old for it.
You've got nowhere to go for it for yourself. So somebody said, oh, let's go up to Strep and Locarno. We're talking about the 60s, sort of the skinhead period, really.
And so I used to go to Strep and Locarno and listen to music. And we didn't really dance. People did dance, but me and my friends, we used to just... sort of hang back and just watch, you know, because it was all the skinhead thing, you see, and because they never played that music on the radio, so in some ways, for us, it became our music. The skinheads at the time were really into reggae.
I mean, they are branded now as what you call a neo-Nazi group, who don't like black people and Jews. In my time, I was being protected by the skinheads. Look, I've been to a town that was like, Guilford was a racist.
down in my time. And this guy said to me, hi, Mr. Block. So I said, hi, Mr. White. And he spit in my face.
I said, what the heck? So the kids wanted us to beat him. I said, no.
Forget it, man. I just white spit off, and that was it. What was happening, it couldn't be denied that this was developing into something that was becoming more and more commercially interesting, commercially successful.
As more and more people discovered the music through the clubs. And that was making all sorts of problems for us because we just... I think there was a perception amongst the reggae labels that the BBC dismissed reggae to a certain extent. To be fair, I think possibly, yes, I think they might have a slight case there. Bob Marley and the Wailers failed their BBC audition because in the view of the panel, they didn't know how to play reggae, which was...
But then you get some kind of... The BBC Dance Orchestra are doing a strict tempo version. version of reggae people say that's how reggae should be.
If our music had an open door like let's say a freeway we could be wild in any part of the world because we have class music like anybody else. We just did that. song because we were teenagers wearing afros and you know trying to be too conscious black people and we said this is a good cover song for us to do Trojan were determined to break reggae to the mass market and pulled out all the stops for their new releases when they introduce strings on the British versions of the songs I think it made quite a difference because they made them more into not so much the raw sound would probably be acceptable elsewhere, but it made it more into a pop record and then went to a Much bigger market. Reggae became part of pop mainstream. Skinheads, the BBC, school dances.
Suddenly everyone was playing reggae. Dave and Ansel Collins went to number one as did Desmond Decker. Jimmy Cliff, the Scatterlites, Prince Buster and Ken Booth all stormed the charts.
And everyone loved it when Max Romeo turned out to be a new kind of rude boy. Of course, there was the wonderful Max Romeo Wet Dream thing, which was just such a great pop record. Obviously, the lyrics, you know, you can see why they had a problem with that Lie Down Girl, Let Me Push It Up, Push It Up. Lie down, can't make me push it up, push it up, lie down.
I tried to explain, I said, look, man, it have none to do with sex. I'm talking about my house leaking here. Me and my lady sleeping in bed, rain falling, the roof is bloody leaking. She's getting up. up to plug the leak and I'm saying, lie down girl, I'll push it up.
They didn't buy that. The last couple of years of the 60s were a reggae explosion, and by 1969, Desmond Decker was filling Wembley like visiting royalty. That reggae pop music, I suppose, you know, we were beneficiaries of it as well, you know.
The doors had been opened and people had been softened up enough to start listening, you know. The music of downtown Kingston had not only conquered Jamaica, but made it to the heart of the old colonial masters, and there was...