by Bob Stanley
Ska exploded in 1962, the year Jamaica became fully independent from Britain, when its goodtime feel was perfect for the atmosphere of positivity on the island. Anything uniquely Jamaican was embraced. Derrick Morgan’s ‘Forward March’ and the Skatalites’ ‘Freedom Sound’ soundtracked the dawning of a new era; Jamaican expats in London played the new sounds at house parties in Notting Hill Gate, and white mods picked up on this underground excitement. In 1962 three labels were launched to release Jamaican music in Britain: Blue Beat, a purely ska label and home to Prince Buster and Laurel Aitken; Island, baked-bean magnate Chris Blackwell’s creation; and R&B, based in a shop on Stamford Hill.4 Prince Buster toured the college circuit. Eventually, in 1964 Blackwell-produced Millie Small hit with ‘My Boy Lollipop’.
According to Derrick Morgan, ‘You might sell five thousand records in Jamaica, but you’d sell a lot more over there.’ Britain became a shop window for Jamaican rhythms, even if it lagged behind. By 1967, when Prince Buster (‘Al Capone’, no. 18) and Desmond Dekker (‘007’, no. 14) scored Top 20 hits in Britain, Jamaican pop had changed, become more mid-paced and supple, pushed brass to the back and syncopated its basslines. The result was rocksteady. It was silk smooth, its lyrics and diction crystal clear and, unlike ska, it was largely about wooing, cooing, and broken hearts. It was all about seduction. A generation of crooners (Ken Boothe, Derrick Harriott, Keith and Tex) and harmony groups (the Heptones, the Techniques, the Paragons) appeared. Coxsone Dodd’s Studio One label had the Heptones, whose ‘Equal Rights’ was playfully political (‘Every man has an equal right to live and be free … take a tip from me, don’t hang him from a tree’), but Duke Reid’s Treasure Isle label became the Motown of rocksteady, with a constant supply of hits from Alton Ellis (the genre-defining ‘Rock Steady’ and ‘Girl I’ve Got a Date’), Dobby Dobson (‘Loving Pauper’) and the Techniques (‘I’m in the Mood for Love’, ‘You Don’t Care’). Though rocksteady’s instrumentation was much closer to Anglo-American pop – guitar, bass, drums, three-part harmony – than ska had been, oddly it took even longer to filter through, eventually becoming the basis of the late-seventies British variant known as lovers’ rock (the finest example being Janet Kay’s 1979 number-two hit ‘Silly Games’) and the source of Blondie’s ‘The Tide Is High’ (a US and UK number one in 1980 originally recorded by the Paragons).
The kind of American soul sound that the rocksteady acts had been influenced by came from New York and Chicago, and was typified by Johnny Nash’s lush, smoothly emotive 1965 single ‘Let’s Move and Groove Together’. Nash stands as a key neglected figure in terms of popularising Jamaican music – for a start, his cover of ‘Stir It Up’ (UK no. 13 ’72) introduced the music of Bob Marley to the UK charts two years ahead of Eric Clapton’s cover of ‘I Shot the Sheriff’. He had first travelled to Jamaica in early 1968, and was introduced to the local scene by a group called the Wailers. Immediately impressed, Nash planned to break rocksteady in the States. He cut the gorgeous ‘Hold Me Tight’ (US and UK no. 5 ’68) and signed the three Wailers members – Bob Marley, Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh – to a publishing and recording contract with his JAD label. In 1972, while promoting his hit ‘I Can See Clearly Now’ (UK and US no. 5) in Britain, he brought the Wailers over as a backing group. They hooked up with Chris Blackwell, signed to Island, and recorded the Catch a Fire album; when Marley – at this point without dreadlocks – delivered the tapes to Island in the winter of ’72, Blackwell sensed that, with a concerted push, the Jamaican sound could break into the rock mainstream. Keyboard player Rabbit Bundrick (late of blues-rockers Free) and guitarist Wayne Perkins (who would go on to play with the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton) were drafted in to make Catch a Fire less overtly Jamaican, still rootsy but with a smoother European veneer. Tosh and Bunny Wailer were excised, and the songs were made less bright and perky, rhythmically squarer, so as to be closer to Anglo-American rock sounds. The dreadlocks appeared, the ganja was smoked, and a global audience of serious-minded rock fans was won over by this carefully marketed music. The intricacies of Jamaican music, for an easy sales patter, would remain hidden behind a dope and rasta mask. Here, Blackwell told the rock world, is your Jamaican Hendrix.
Marley’s subsequent elevation to godhead (and he is the most famous Jamaican of all time – nobody on the island would deny him that) isn’t that perplexing in one sense – he wrote simple, anthemic, mellow brotherhood songs like ‘One Love’ (‘let’s get together and feel all right’). But it is quite amusing. People had been yearning for something other, for something they perceived to be real or authentic since Monterey drew a line between supposed serious and non-serious pop. What they got, and what they happily accepted, was Bob Marley, who was as niche-marketed and musically simplified as the Bay City Rollers.
Besides, it wasn’t as if Britain and America couldn’t handle un varnished Jamaican pop. Desmond Dekker’s ‘Israelites’ had been a UK number one in 1969 – the sheer oddness and exoticism of it struck the British public forcefully, and its lyrical incomprehensibility was a part of its attraction. It was followed into the UK Top 10 by Dekker’s similarly alien ‘It Mek’ (no. 9 ’69), the Upsetters’ pure groove ‘Return of Django’ (no. 5 ’69) and a stream of sweeter 45s: Jimmy Cliff’s ‘Wonderful World, Beautiful People’ (no. 6 ’69), Bob and Marcia’s ‘Young, Gifted and Black’ (no. 5 ’70) and Dekker’s second-biggest hit, ‘You Can Get It If You Really Want’ (no. 2 ’70). These last three were overdubbed with strings in the UK by Johnny Arthey, who had written the theme to kids’ TV series The Double Deckers. Arthey’s reggae handi work was dubbed ‘the Willesden Sound’, a sound which purists and critics perceived to be watering down Jamaican roots music for white European tastes. More likely is that Arthey was mimicking the sweet sound that African American Johnny Nash had introduced with ‘Hold Me Tight’ in ’68, at that point the only Jamaica-produced record to have made the UK Top 10. Nash, then, was indirectly responsible for the most lauded and the most reviled reggae in the UK, neither of which had much to do with what was happening in Jamaica.
Ah yes, reggae. I’ve deliberately avoided the term until now as it wasn’t coined until 1968, and certainly wasn’t a catch-all term for Jamaican music.5 Coxsone Dodd, once again, can stake a claim to its creation. He imported an echo unit from Britain and used it on Larry Marshall’s other wise unremarkable ‘Nanny Goat’. The familiar ‘chang’ of the off-beat guitar now sounded more like ‘chang-ah’, or ‘skanga’, or ‘reggae’ if you wanted to verbalise it. Hammond organ was introduced, the beat sped up, and a jerky dance called the reggae took over in ’68. The percolating organ of Harry J’s ‘The Liquidator’ (UK no. 10 ’69) marked it out as something different from rocksteady, but the real difference between reggae and its Jamaican pop forerunners was the freedom to improvise. The music suddenly had more space.
Osbourne ‘King Tubby’ Ruddock would take the nascent reggae sound in a quite unexpected direction. Like Joe Meek before him and Juan Atkins later, Tubby was an indoors type who loved to tinker with anything electrical. He cut discs at Treasure Isle, as well as having a popular sound system. One day in 1969, having been given access to Treasure Isle’s master tapes, he cheekily ran off some acetates – or dubplates – with virtually all the vocals removed. Later that week, singer Dennis Alcapone went to see Tubby’s sound system, with star turn Ewart ‘U Roy’ Beckford: ‘Tubby did it quietly. Him and U Roy start the dance off as normal, and after a while he play “You Don’t Care” by the Techniques, then he switch it to the dub version and, after a couple of lines, all the crowd could hear was pure rhythm. Then U Roy come in toasting, and they went nuts.’ The best sound systems had always given their crowd something extra, something they couldn’t hear anywhere else, but U Roy’s patter and Tubby’s tape manipulation opened up new vistas – right here, for starters, is the beginning of hip hop – and they were justifiably proud when the first 45 they released, ‘Wake the Town’, was a massive Jamaican hit: ‘Wake the town and tell the
people about this musical disc coming your way!’
Tubby’s genius was to grasp reggae’s new freedom and give it an entirely new dimension, music for the mind as well as the feet. He transformed drums into a melodic instrument. San Francisco psychedelia had tunnelled itself down into something thin and silvery; Tubby’s dub was a dark space you could climb inside.
His main rival in dub was Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, a skinny four-foot-eleven character with a penchant for ‘I’m mad, me’ self-promotion who played Salvador Dalí to Tubby’s André Breton. Armed with only a four-track ¼-inch TEAC reel-to-reel, a Mutron phaser and a Roland Space Echo, Perry piled on sound effects like crying babies and thunderclaps; on the Upsetters’ ‘Black Ipa’ he twists and tweezers the horns until they sound like both a children’s toy and something entirely alien. He also had pop smarts and scored UK hits with the Upsetters’ ‘Return of Django’ and Susan Cadogan’s ‘Hurt So Good’ (no. 4 ’75). Perry was also smart enough to know that if he created a myth of madness – claiming that he drank bottles of tape-head cleaning fluid for fun – then people would remember his name. It worked. But Perry didn’t invent dub, he just knew how to play the media.
Neither Tubby nor Perry had anything like the impact of Bob Marley, though, because Marley fitted a preconception about Jamaican culture that suited a white audience. This misunderstanding, or patronising view of Jamaican pop, was summed up on the Clash’s best record, ‘(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais’ (UK no. 32 ’78): in it, Joe Strummer goes to see a show by Ken Boothe expecting intense roots reggae, but instead feels alone and confused at a cabaret show which everyone else is lapping up. It is a moment of self-awareness and embarrassment unparalleled in pop. This gulf between white expectations of black culture and what the black audience wanted was bridged by Bob Marley.
Without Marley as a figurehead, though, it’s hard to imagine hard-edged records like Althea and Donna’s ‘Uptown Top Ranking’ (UK no. 1 ’78) becoming hits. As time progressed, his benign smoky presence on the walls of student dorms softened Europe and America for reggae to affect and gently transform modern pop. Fifteen years later, in 1993, there would be two dozen Jamaican-made singles in the charts, the biggest of all being Shaggy’s ‘Oh Carolina’ (no. 1). This, the first of four number ones for Shaggy, was an irresistible, chug-a-bug update of the Prince Buster-produced Folkes Brothers single that had soundtracked Jamaican independence back in 1962. Jamaican pop didn’t need Chris Blackwell-style manipulation or Johnny Arthey’s sweeteners any longer.
1 Sound-system hits – and inspirations for ska – include the walking bass and easy dancefloor action of Nina Simone’s ‘My Baby Just Cares for Me’ (producer Coxsone Dodd was particularly fond of jazz) and Fats Domino’s ‘Be My Guest’. The more popular R&B records in Jamaica hinted at ska before it happened. Rosco Gordon from Memphis had patented a style he called ‘back to front boogie’ by emphasising the second and fourth beats of the bar: his ‘T Model Boogie’ was a ska blueprint, while ‘Just a Little Bit’ was a Merseybeat favourite when it was covered by the Undertakers. Obscure threads like this between the States, Jamaica and Britain are such a joy to discover.
2 Chris Blackwell’s wealth came from his mother’s side of the family – she was a sugar-cane heiress, and the inspiration for Pussy Galore in the James Bond movie Goldfinger.
3 It was Ranglin’s record, but he didn’t want his name anywhere near it: ‘It was ghetto music and in Jamaica they put that music down. I also had to be playing at the society functions and the hotel dances and there they would be looking down at me. Maybe I wouldn’t get enough work. You had to walk the line.’ ‘Easy Snappin’’ came out credited to pianist Theophilus Beckford.
4 R&B didn’t stand for rhythm and blues, but was the initials of Rita and Benny King, a Jewish couple who opened their shop in 1959. A few years later they started releasing Jamaican singles on their own labels – first the parent label, R&B, and then subsidiaries King, Ska Beat, Giant, Hillcrest, Caltone, Jolly and Port-O-Jam. While Benny looked after the shop, beehived Rita travelled to Jamaica to buy the tapes and meet the acts. The couple’s roster would go on to include Laurel Aitken, Delroy Wilson, Derrick Morgan, Dandy Livingstone, Ken Boothe, the Wailers, the Maytals and the Skatalites. The shop was almost unique in stocking so much Jamaican music, and became something of a social club and community hub. It eventually closed in 1984 when Rita and Benny retired.
5 The reggae era lasted from 1969 until 1983, when dancehall became the dominant rhythm.
30
IT CAME FROM THE SUBURBS: MARC BOLAN AND DAVID BOWIE
At the Flamingo on Wardour Street in 1962, American servicemen mixed with young Jamaicans from Notting Hill and younger mods from London’s outer ring, all outsiders, finding common ground in the fresh blue beat of Derrick and Patsy’s keening ‘Housewife’s Choice’, the popping Hammond-organ jazz of James Booker’s ‘Gonzo’ and the live stylings of a former Larry Parnes protégé called Georgie Fame. Two kids hopped up on pills and cappuccinos from the New Piccadilly cafe represented their district: Mark Feld came from the Jewish neighbourhood of Stamford Hill, wore his curly hair greased down into an immaculate side parting and had recently featured, aged thirteen, as one of London’s most stylish self-inventions in the gentlemen’s magazine Town; this gave him bragging rights over David Jones, a Beckenham kid who wore his hair in a pompadour, had different coloured eyes and played saxophone (unsuccessfully). They stood in the shadows, in opposite corners of the club, trying not to chew on their cheeks too much, trying not to be intimidated by their rivals. Feld and Jones looked smart, but no smarter than the mods of Finsbury Park, Chiswick, Plaistow or White City. Impatiently, they drank their Coke.
Once in a while a bit-part player comes along and changes the course of pop. Someone still largely unknown to the pop public, like Chelita Secunda. One day in early 1971 Chelita, the wife of Marc Bolan’s manager Tony Secunda, decided that Marc – formerly Mark, formerly Feld – was very pretty and was wasting his looks in nettle-dyed vests and flared jeans. They went into town and hit her favourite boutiques, picking up feather boas, Zandra Rhodes tops and beautifully embroidered jackets that hung exquisitely on his tiny frame. And when they came home with their booty, she threw glitter on his cheeks. Chelita transposed her look to Bolan, and glam took off from there.
What pop needed in 1970, more than anything, was a new consensus act to give it direction, effectively a new Beatles; in 1970 it still seemed possible that a new Beatles would eventually appear – it was just that nobody knew where they were hiding. So when, backstage at Top of the Pops, Chelita Secunda dabbed her magic dots of glitter under Marc Bolan’s eyes, people were happy to believe the answer was Stamford Hill. Just over a year later Marc Bolan and T. Rex were the subject of the first high-street cinema pop movie since the Beatles’ heyday. That Born to Boogie was directed by Ringo Starr1 just seemed to confirm the passing of the torch.
As Bolan cruised through ’72 with a brace of number-one (‘Telegram Sam’, ‘Metal Guru’) and number-two singles (‘Solid Gold Easy Action’, ‘Children of the Revolution’), an old sparring partner was coming up on the rails with an album called Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
Marc Bolan and David Bowie both grew up in suburban London; both had brushes with UK rock ’n’ roll (Bowie as sax player in the Joe Meek-recorded Konrads, Bolan serving soft drinks at the 2i’s when he was ten); both had been mods, then hippies; both were on the make, eager to please, peacocks, poseurs, part-time models. And both had released a string of flop records in the sixties that meant they were familiar to every A&R man in the land but to pretty much no one else. In both cases this toughened them, prepared them to play the game in the seventies; had either of them broken through any earlier they might have fizzled out quickly. Bowie’s early songs smelt of woodsmoke over the suburban fence, of railway stations, platforms and waiting rooms – the golden road to London Town. He sketched the suburban-mod theme better than any of his contemporar
ies on a trio of 1966 singles: ‘Can’t Help Thinking about Me’, the sarcastic ‘I Dig Everything’ and the funereal ‘The London Boys’, with its references to pill-popping, queasiness and losing face.2
As Bolan vacillated between garage blues (‘The Third Degree’) and folk mysticism (‘The Wizard’), Bowie got a deal in 1967 with Decca’s new progressive offshoot Deram and cut his first album. He’d moved to the Smoke and outgrown mod. It came across as a mixture of music-hall grotesque and Geoffrey Fletcher’s pencil sketches of underclass London. ‘I was the world’s worst mimic,’ he smiled later, in his 1973 pomp. ‘I mean, I was Anthony Newley for a year. He stopped his world and got off, which is terrible, because he was once one of the most talented men that England ever produced … there’s a lot of Monty Python in there – left-handed screws and right-handed screws.’ The Newley-indebted Deram album remains a curio, the least intense work in his entire catalogue. Soon after it was released – and bombed – he was setting up the Beckenham Arts Club (little more than a pub backroom with a couple of speakers and a knackered sofa, but already he had the vocabulary to draw people in) and studying mime.