Sounds Like London

by Lloyd Bradley

  “Caught You In A Lie” sold tens of thousands of copies in the first few weeks of release, but very few in chart return shops, and did not trouble the mainstream music media in the slightest. Louisa herself cut a couple more successful records for Coxsone, then gave it all up for three years to concentrate on her school work. Before that, she had such an effect on her black British female contemporaries that once again the usually self-assured Lloydie Coxsone was astounded:

  Louisa Mark, whose “Caught You In A Lie” kick-started the lovers’ rock recording industry in 1975, died mysteriously in the Gambia in 2009.

  ‘It was a surprise so many came forward. I knew it was a special record when we made it, but I don’t think I fully realised what the demand for something like that was out there. Every time you make a song you do your best because you think it will do well, but you don’t know where it’s going to go. But these young ladies identified themselves in that song, which had never happened before, and they took to that straight away. Then if a record does do something like that, then right away you have to recognise it.’

  Dennis recognised it to perhaps a greater degree than anybody else. At that same session, on the same fundamental riddim as “Caught You In A Lie”, he cut two more smooth reggae songs with his band Matumbi, “After Tonight” and “The Man In Me”. Both were huge hits, and the latter got the group onto Top of the Pops. Far more important than that, though, he turned this new brand of reggae into a London cottage industry.

  AWAY FROM HIS DAY JOB AS BASS PLAYER and leader of Matumbi, Dennis enjoyed a prestigious residency with his Sufferah HiFi sound system at the Metro Youth Club in Ladbroke Grove, and played dances all over south London. He had been observing changes within the London reggae scene from two different angles, and knew that something like “Caught You In A Lie” had been on the cards for a few years:

  ‘If you look back to the sixties and early seventies, black kids in London just liked black music – it could be James Brown or Otis Redding or Nicky Thomas or the Pioneers or Kool & The Gang or Betty Wright or the Equals … The old-time soundmen wouldn’t dare to play out without a few soul tunes in their record boxes, just like the soul clubs all played a bit of reggae during the evening. My sound, Sufferah, used to play a regular Sunday-night dance at the Lansdowne Youth Club in Stockwell and we’d be in the hall with TWJ, a soul sound, playing half the dance each. That would be unheard of today, soul and reggae setting up in the same dance, but the place was rammed – the doors opened at seven and if you weren’t there by seven forty-five, you weren’t getting in. That was how the black youth in London used to go raving, there was always a mix-up, but as we got into 1973 and 1974 clubs and sound systems started getting separatist:

  ‘With soul it was all about American influence – Motown, Philly, disco, funk … America was flexing its muscles over here, reminding us that they’d given us the Jackson 5 and they were coming back to claim this territory! The disco stuff was coming back, with their hairstyles and their hair products, and the girls were wanting to be Americanised. And America was ahead of everybody in the video race too – people over here were seeing black people in American music and it was glamorous, they weren’t seeing reggae people up there, so of course it drifted and ended up getting navigated towards America and the soul sound.

  ‘Then at the same time reggae had become hard – it was all Rastafari and dread and I and I, which is all right, but with that it had become introverted and was all about Jamaica and all about men. The whole vibe at reggae dances in London was changing, it got darker and oppressive, and as the music became more about roots and rockers it became very macho and male-dominated. Women used to talk about “Rasta-for-him, not Rasta-for-I”, and dances used to be full of a whole heap of man and jus’ two gal. But then I could understand that, what woman wants to spend two hours in front of a mirror getting ready to go and stand in some dark sweaty basement? Also the style of dancing changed so it didn’t include the ladies any more. That rockers style had come in so the guys were dancing by themselves and inventing their own elaborate styles of dancing solo, running backwards and forwards and flinging their arms about in an outlandish way. This could cause fights when they accidentally hit somebody who might not take kindly to it.

  ‘There always used to be a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between the styles, because reggae and R&B are long-time brothers that have borrowed stuff from each other. By the time lovers’ rock was ready to start hitting the sound systems, though, the reggae world over here seemed to have closed its eyes to what was going on in disco and soul – by then it was only Sly [Dunbar] who seemed to be actually listening to disco. Us sound-system operators, or the older guys, at least, like Sir George, Fat Man and Lloydie Coxsone, wanted to bring back people to the dance the way it used to be, so by this time we were looking for several things. How to get the women back to sound systems, because if you get the women the men will follow, and then there’s always less chance of fights if it’s not all men. Then once we got the women to come back, we had to get the men and women dancing with each other again, up close, because, ultimately, that’s what you go to the dance for – grab a gal and rub off some wallpaper! And, importantly, we wanted to do reggae for people who liked reggae but weren’t Jamaican.

  Dennis Bovell’s Matumbi were more or less the lovers’ rock house band. Dennis stands in the centre, in the cap.

  ‘That was what I wanted to achieve as a soundman. As a musician in a band, I wanted to write proper pop songs with verses and choruses – which traditional reggae riddims didn’t have – make music that would get us on Top of the Pops. Lovers’ rock, when it burst with “Caught You In A Lie”, ticked all those boxes.’

  Artistically, Dennis was not alone. Nearly all British reggae of the 1970s was put together in that more conventional pop-song type of way, which was a major factor in the wider success of Matumbi and other groups like Misty in Roots and Aswad. Birmingham’s Steel Pulse actually went so far as to create an album, Handsworth Revolution, with a central narrative thread – even Bob Marley’s reggae didn’t do that.

  While the music being created for lovers’ rock may have been influenced by the UK mainstream, however, every other aspect of the business was straight outta Kingston.

  THE HARDEST-WORKING WORD in the history of reggae is ‘opportunism’. So much of its development was the result of some sharp-witted operator taking advantage of a situation that had happened as much by accident as by design. Jamaicans must be among the most resourceful people in the world, and sound-system operators were among the most resourceful Jamaicans. In London it was no different. Sound systems like Sufferah and Coxsone Outernational used their crowds as focus groups, and the reactions to those first lovers’ rock records was enough to convince those involved that this would be massive.

  Where Coxsone saw his business primarily as a sound system, and only sporadically recorded music for release, a plethora of tiny London reggae labels, some formed right there and then, began cutting lovers’ rock records with local musicians and the girl singers who were beating a path to their doors. Small-scale operations like Third World, Safari (Louisa Mark’s label), Lucky, Charm and Morpheus put records out on a strictly parochial level. Then Dennis Harris, a Jamaican-born entrepreneur got involved. He owned property and supermarkets in south London as well as the reggae labels DIP International and Eve, which he ran in conjunction with his wife Yvonne. In early 1975, in the wake of Lousia Mark’s success, they licensed Susan Cadogan’s Lee Perry-produced, Jamaica-recorded cover of the Millie Jackson hit “Hurt So Good”. Textbook lovers’ rock, it topped the reggae charts for several weeks. From there the song was picked up by long-term reggae fan and future Stock-Aitken-Waterman founder Pete Waterman, who knew Lee Perry from his frequent trips to Jamaica. Now, as A&R for the pop label Magnet Records, he licensed the track from DIP and gave it a bit of a pop-music polish. While Louisa Mark was rocking the sound systems, Susan Cadogan’s breezy tones got to number four in the national charts
.

  The Harrises never repeated that degree of pop success, but that record, and other sound-system hits including the huge “Last Date” by TT Ross – unique at the time as a white lovers’ rock singer – convinced Dennis Harris to sell one of his supermarkets and invest heavily in this new reggae style. He had an eight-track studio built in southeast London, and employed Dennis Bovell as in-house producer, sound engineer and musical director, responsible for bringing in the musicians, who as a rule would be Matumbi or his other group, the Dub Band. The idea was to build a lovers’ rock production line that wouldn’t leave too much to chance. Bovell remembers:

  ‘Lovers’ rock was going down well in the dancehalls that had a reputation for playing it. So producers knew there was a demand, but they hadn’t narrowed it down any more than that – in the dance everybody reacts to a nice tune. But because Dennis Harris didn’t have a sound system, all he wanted to do was sell records, and to do that he had to know who was buying them, not just dancing to them. Dennis and I did actual market research and went round record shops looking at who was buying what. We’d talk to the customers and the guys behind the counter to find out was it men or women, how old were they, what sort of things were each group looking for in a record …

  ‘Initially, what we discovered surprised us because it was quite a lot more girls than boys buying singles. Then when we thought about it we realised that although the young guys would get off on the riddim of a record at a blues dance and enjoy dancing with a woman to it, he wouldn’t want to own it. The girls, however, would listen to the lyrics and they would want to take it home because it would mean something to them. And they preferred songs sung by other girls because they felt like they were talking to them, and there was hardly any women in reggae at that time. Or blokes would buy these type of records to give as presents to their girlfriends, but that was practically the same as the girls themselves buying them. What we needed on top of our easy reggae beat was nice sweet melodies, with lyrics about being young and in love – either if it turns out well or badly, ‘cos they all go through both – sung by girls. It didn’t actually matter even if it wasn’t sung too well or the sentiments seemed naive, in fact that all helped as it brought it even closer to the audience.

  ‘Also we knew we needed a lot of it. A whole heap! Because in order to get the bigger shops or distributors to take you seriously you have to have a catalogue with clout. And for that you need to be putting out about half a dozen singles a week. If it’s just two or three a month, nobody will take any notice of you. But we had this studio ready to go, so we thought “Right, let’s start pumping it out”.’

  Spreading the word that they were looking for girl singers, they used the standard Jamaican studio strategy of open auditions every Sunday morning. Young hopefuls would line up for the chance to sing a cappella for the two Dennises, with the successful entrants invited to hang around and go again with a dubplate or live music accompaniment – and you thought Simon Cowell thought it up. The best of those were put in the studio to record a single, which, if it did well, could lead to a follow-up. There were no contracts beyond the recording being done at the time. Although the music was done and dusted before any singer got near a microphone, Dennis varied this operation from what was becoming the norm in Jamaica by getting his singers to sing over live musicians rather than a pre-recorded backing track. He believed that to establish themselves as the London reggae production house, it was important to create as much original music as possible, rather than recycle riddims – dub versions aside, obviously. Their south London set-up further likened itself to Motown’s production line, as opposed, say, to Jamaica’s Studio One, by deciding who should sing what by focussing on the artists rather than the song or the producer. Dennis would frequently stop a session because he realised an artist would do better with a different song, or the song being recorded would sound better sung by somebody else.

  Sound systems were vital to the success of lovers’ rock – even the record shops needed serious set-ups.

  This was vividly illustrated by the hit group Brown Sugar. After trying to record each member solo, he put three girls together who barely knew each other, and formed one of the most successful acts in lovers’ rock. As the first girl group in a genre designed to appeal to Motown fans, the trio quickly assumed iconic status. They have since passed into legend, because one of them was Caron Wheeler, who went on to became the voice of the Soul II Soul hits “Keep On Moving” and “Back To Life”. Back then, though, they were the first to release on Dennis Harris’s new label, which was so embryonic it didn’t even have a name. Dennis explains how in thinking one up, they came to identify the genre:

  ‘We knew we had to have this on a label by itself, removed from any of Dennis’s other stuff, and it would need to have an identity people would recognise straight away, something iconic. Dennis Harris came up with the name Lover’s Rock, which was the title of an Augustus Pablo record we all liked. We thought the two words sat well together, but really it summed up exactly what we were doing. Then Dennis came up with the logo, the pink heart with the arrow through it, and although that was a bit obvious it was probably all the better for it. Which is when the guitarist, John Kpiaye, had this song called “I’m In Love With A Dreadlocks”, which said it all, and the trio I put together, Brown Sugar, sang it.

  ‘That was the first record on the Lover’s Rock label, and we were away. Because we were putting out so much stuff, and it was all of the same vibe and high quality, girls would go into record shops and ask for the new Lover’s Rock single or ask a deejay if he had any Lover’s Rock. Pretty soon that was what everybody was calling the music.’

  ONCE THE GENRE HAD DEFINED ITSELF, and enough of it was out there to give it a presence, lovers’ rock boomed. Within months of “Caught You In A Lie” being recorded, this new style had turned London’s dancehall scene on its head. Sound-system operators and club owners swiftly came to terms with the potential spending power of a smartly turned out crowd for whom Saturday night was all about impressing the opposite sex. The single-red-bulb-over-the-control-tower blues parties gave way to brighter, less daunting environments, while the systems themselves rebalanced their sound away from the extremes of weight (bass) and treble to incorporate the entire sonic spectrum. And although it would be ridiculous to imagine that roots reggae sound systems became an endangered species, by the end of 1976 they were vastly outnumbered by set-ups touting themselves as ‘Strictly Lovers’ or ‘For Lovers Only’, while more than a few kept their options open with the billing ‘Roots & Lovers’. It was around this time that dancehall flyers started to feature silhouette drawings of couples dancing close, instead of the almost regulation rootsmen skanking.

  All of which had a knock-on effect on record sales. Lovers’ rock singles would routinely sell tens of thousands, while the big hits like “Six Sixth Street”, “Tenderness”, “Let Me Be Your Angel”, “Love Won’t Let Me Wait”, “Last Date”, “Fallin’ In Love” and “It’s True” nudged into six figures. There were, relatively speaking, only a very small number of lovers’ rock albums, but sets like Carroll Thompson’s Hopelessly In Love, Louisa Mark’s Breakout and the Investigators’ First Case all shifted the sort of numbers that under different circumstances would have got them into the lower reaches of the charts. Meanwhile, the reggae charts compiled by the newly launched weekly newspaper Black Echoes were so overrun with lovers’ rock singles that other more roots-centric reggae labels successfully lobbied to have them confined to their own separate listings. Ironically, though, it was precisely what made lovers’ rock such a huge parochial triumph that held it back from more general success.

  The music had been created within and shaped by an enclosed world, and devotedly serviced the needs of that demographic. As a result, it enjoyed all the benefits of that environment. The sound systems did more than just invent lovers’ rock, they sustained it by serving as its primary marketing tool. It was in the dance that these new sounds reached their pr
ospective buyers directly, and as it flourished it found its own world was big enough. Sure, as Dennis stated, everybody wanted to get on Top of the Pops, but not at any price.

  When Janet Kay’s “Silly Games” – a tune that Dennis wrote and produced – made it into the national charts, it did so entirely on its own terms, with no remixing or watering down. In fact Dennis was astonished that particular vocal had been used, because he wasn’t entirely happy with it and wanted to re-record it. When Janet went on TV, she genuinely represented a culture that had reached a point at which it had no need for the mainstream.

  Victor Romero Evans, who was a sound-system regular long before he got into the business, remembers these promotional methods as being perfect for the situation, but never really being through choice:

  ‘Reggae was still being treated as a novelty music by the BBC radio. There might have been one or two reggae hits a year, usually in the summer, but they were never taken as being part of anything bigger. This was before Rodigan, and there wasn’t any black pirate radio back then, so the only reggae you got on the radio was an hour on Sunday afternoon, Reggae Time with Steve Barnard, then Tony Williams took it over. There wasn’t any press for us either, except Black Echoes. The regular music press didn’t like lovers’ rock, and by then the other black magazine, Black Music, went for the stuff that was on regular release, like Bob Marley or Burning Spear. So it was pure sound systems playing lovers’ – Sir George, Fat Man, Admiral Ken, Sufferah, Neville the Enchanter, Chicken, Sir Biggs, Lloydie Coxsone, Soferno B, Santic Romantic, how can you go wrong with a name like that?

  ‘That worked too. Made it seem like ours, because there wasn’t an outside influence. Kids would hear a tune at a dance and get excited by it and ask for it in the shops the next day. They might have to quote the lyric or just recognise the artist, but the guy behind the counter would know – maybe he was at the same dance! Then the producers that had sound systems could whip up the demand for a tune by keeping spinning it and having the crowd loving it, but not releasing it. Just let the demand for it in the shops build up, then they know they’ve got a hit on their hands.