‘The best thing about this was that the crowds made the hits. They could hear the tunes in the dance and then react to them, and only the very best would get through. It wasn’t like in the mainstream, where it seems like you can be force-fed a tune and find yourself liking something you know is rubbish because it’s everywhere all day. A lovers’ tune was something you heard once a week when you were raving, so if you like it then you knew that tune was wicked. As an artist it was good to get feedback by going to sound systems, and, really, although we might not have had Top of the Pops or radio play, when you were raving in the club and your tune came on and people jump up, bo! and you can see they really like it, boy, that was the best feeling in the world.’
The manufacturing process of lovers’ rock was similarly DIY. As well as the proliferation of tiny recording studios around the capital, there was also a multitude of disc-cutting houses. Disc cutting is a vital stage in the analogue recording process, during which the sounds on the tape are grooved on to metal disc to make the stamper that actually presses out the vinyl. Dub maestro King Tubby began his musical career as a disc cutter for Duke Reid, and skilful disc cutting is vital for clear and faithful reproduction. The cutting house favoured by London soundmen was Hessle’s, a remarkable business in which the cutting lathe was set up in a corner of operator John Hessle’s front room at his house in Barnes. On Fridays and Saturdays, neighbours in this quiet semi-detached street would be treated to queues of black guys bearing tapes of music they wanted for that night’s dance. Frequently he would shut up shop at about nine, curtly telling them “That’s it for tonight. No more! This is my home!”
London also had a cottage-industry network of pressing plants, usually manually operated and ready to produce small runs of seven-inch 45s on a quick turnaround. Although the prices at the big factories were lower, London’s reggae labels would routinely complain that their relatively tiny orders were sidelined every time a big one came in from a major label. The reggae industry’s more imaginative executives did manage to save a few quid, however, by driving their vans over to the Republic of Ireland, where record pressing was much less expensive. Getting several titles done at once would make the journey worthwhile.
As the bigger London sound systems travelled to play dances outside London, they formed alliances with clubs and other sounds in cities such as Leeds, Bradford, Bristol, Birmingham and Coventry. Lovers’ rock thus went nationwide pretty quickly. Distribution was vital, but before independent distributors Jet Star or Rough Trade came along, no mainstream operation would touch it. The industry’s answer was typically pragmatic: to get lovers’ rock to the customers, you had to go to where those customers were, and take the records with you. Dennis remembers a day-trip he took with Buster Pearson, father of the eighties pop-soul siblings Five Star, which had all the hallmarks of the operations of Emil Shallit some twenty years previously, or of the Oti brothers described in chapter four:
‘We had to be responsible for distribution, because it was all about little outlets that were either record shops or else they were where records were being sold as part of another business. They were all black owned, and they were places where black people went, that’s what you had to know about.
‘One Saturday morning I had nothing else to do and went on a ride with Buster Pearson, because he had a record label called KB – K was for Kay, his wife, and B was for Buster – and I’d made a record for it called “Run Rasta Run”, on which I called myself African Stone. He had a Hillman Hunter, and this Saturday he loaded up with records and we drove from London to Leeds, via north London and all these towns in the Midlands. We stopped off at positively seventy-five shops, leaving records and collecting cash for the tunes he’d dropped off the previous week. It was all cash. None of those record shops was an Our Price or HMV – some of them weren’t even record shops, they were grocery stores or barbers or travel agents, anywhere black people came – but we still offloaded about twelve hundred records, he kept all the cash in this satchel thing. And that was just that trip, on other days he’d go through south London and down to Bristol, or west London and on to Liverpool and Manchester.
‘It was so successful that when we had the Lover’s Rock label we got one of those Volkswagen camper vans and decked it out inside with shelves for records – it was a record bus. A friend of mine, Vivian Allen, would drive that van all over the British isles from Sunday night to Friday night, distributing records and collecting cash. He’d be back at the depot on Friday night, pay the cash in, have Saturday off, get a new stock and go back out again on Sunday. He’d sell thousands of records. That was how Susan Cadogan got her hit, “Hurt So Good”, because it was first distributed like that. It became mega when Dennis [Harris] took it to Magnet because they had access to the chart shops, but it was always a big record before then – no matter what Pete Waterman says.’
While this sound-system exposure elevated acts like Janet and Victor, Jean Adebambo, Sandra Cross, Peter Hunnigale, Winsome, Brown Sugar and Deborahe Glasgow to cult status, lovers’ rock existed almost exclusively on recordings, with very few live performances. As the records were largely singles with no pictures on the sleeves, and there was no conventional media publicity, the singers remained virtually unrecognisable, even to their fans. That explains why Victor was able to hang out at dances and listen out for his records, and how so many lovers’ stars still lived normal lives: Janet worked at Rank Xerox; Carroll Thompson was studying pharmacy; Jean Adebambo worked in health care; Louisa Mark was still at school; and so too were 15, 16, 17, a trio whose name was decided by their ages. Astonishingly, many stars of lovers’ rock didn’t get to meet their audiences until twenty years later, as Janet explains:
‘I didn’t do hardly any live work, the whole lovers’ rock industry wasn’t geared up for that so none of the singers did. I didn’t go out to clubs either, my parents wouldn’t let me go to anything that wasn’t connected with the church – that was the same for a lot of the girl singers because they were so young. But we knew there was a big scene out there, because when we did do performances the people would turn up in droves. Because there was so little chance to see the people they’d been buying records by, they’d be so enthusiastic.
‘Victor used to go to sound systems, and he’s told me about clubs like Phebes and Cubies getting so packed when they had a lovers’ rock sound system on that girls would faint and have to be carried out. But I don’t think most of us were really aware of how deep an impact it was having, because we never saw any of that week in and week out. It just became something you didn’t really worry about.’
At the age of 15, as half of the girl duo Love & Unity, Sandra Cross spent four weeks at number one in the British reggae charts with a song she wrote, “I Adore You”.
LOVERS’ ROCK MAY HAVE STRUCK a resonant chord with young black Londoners, but it found itself at odds with the roots reggae that was then enjoying such a high profile. In Bob Marley’s slipstream, record labels like Island and Virgin were marketing acts like Burning Spear, Max Romeo, Lee Perry, Big Youth and Culture to rock fans, and shifting serious amounts of albums. The music media gave unprecedented space to reggae, as large sections paired it up with punk to promote an apparent alliance of the oppressed. While Jamaica had imposed itself squarely on the map, however, what was happening just down the road was all but ignored. Janet believes this new roots reggae crowd simply ‘refused to acknowledge the lovers’ rock scene, it wasn’t even like real music to them’.
But it wasn’t really a musical thing. It was more about the changing perception of black music within the British music media: post-Motown, black music wasn’t supposed to be frivolous. To be taken seriously in the 1970s, it needed to have a purpose, which usually meant being an expression of pain and suffering or a protest against injustice. That kind of patronising, enforced street credibility reflected an emerging attitude to black people in general – while struggling against obvious disadvantages, there was somehow honour and glamour i
n being life’s perpetual victims. Around this time the first two British-made feature films by black directors – Horace Ové’s Pressure (1975), and Burning An Illusion by Menelik Shabazz (1981) – were released. Both were artistically superb and technically excellent, but they were produced by the very establishment British Film Institute, and consequently toed the sufferation line. The former was enthusiastically described as ‘… the black experience in Britain today, including the cycle of educational deprivation, poverty, unemployment and antisocial behaviour’; the latter, a poignant story of love and ambition starring Victor Romero Evans, looked to be taking a different direction, but spent its final half-hour wallowing in how the system was holding us down.
In 2011, lovers’ rock reggae became a feature film, selling out cinemas in London and Britain’s major cities.
While such attitudes may have been overflowing with good intentions, at a time when black people in the UK were starting to take charge of their own destiny, they could come across as almost colonial in their denigration. The hostility to lovers’ rock summed this up, as its middle-class aspirations, happy, sophisticated music and celebration of dressing up and having a good time didn’t display a great deal of obvious disadvantage. Indeed, its self-sufficient success should have been acclaimed, but Dennis isn’t really being flippant when he says ‘as soon as they had to stop feeling sorry for us, they didn’t want to know.’
Given what lovers’ rock had been able to achieve by itself, this shouldn’t have mattered too much, but the lingering sense of missed opportunity still rankles. UK record companies were looking to sign reggae acts at that point, but their perspective was skewed by post-Marley press coverage that centred on dreadlocks, chalices and the sounds of sufferation. Of course this had its plus side, in ensuring major-label releases for the London-based but dedicatedly JA-styled Aswad, and thus allowing such works of genius as “Three Babylon”, “Warrior Charge” and “Back To Africa” to find a bigger audience. (Stories circulated about the group using industrial heaters to warm up tin baths of water in the studio in order to recreate steamy Kingston conditions.) Southall rootsmen Misty in Roots deservedly came to prominence, and were mainstays of Rock Against Racism, while Steel Pulse had a huge hit with the aforementioned Handsworth Revolution, a masterclass in how to marry an English rock-band structure to a set of reggae songs.
The King of lovers’ rock, a vintage Victor Romero Evans, communes with his subjects.
At the same time, there was also a degree of confusion among London’s reggae fraternity as to why such a vital part of its output was being ignored, especially when they couldn’t see what the problem was. There was always a big crossover in the studio between roots and lovers’ players – Aswad’s rhythm section of Tony Robinson and Drummie Zeb were in demand for soul and jazz/funk sessions as well as lovers’ rock. Indeed, it’s Drummie playing on Janet’s “Silly Games”, and Dennis credits him with the pauses in the drum pattern that he believes made the tune so uniquely London.
Victor is more generous than Dennis about the attitude of the mainstream media. With hindsight, he believes that too many people pronounced upon the reggae scene without coming to grips with its entirety – that they were outside observers, who only saw what was put in front of them:
‘There were those that were in on the sound-system scene, who actually went to the dances, and those that weren’t. In the dance everybody liked the intimacy of lovers’ rock at that time, whether it was a lovers’ dance, a soul dance or a roots dance. You wanted to dance with a woman and the women wanted to dance with men, it was like when we used to go to our parents’ parties, and men and women used to dance with each other. Every dance and sound system would have a slow jam session and that would be some slow soul like Al Green, or, more than likely, some lovers’ tunes before you’d be back to the jump up.
‘But you had to be in the dance or part of that scene to know that. It used to make me laugh that people who never went to the dance would say how lovers’ rock wasn’t authentic, I’d be amazed at some of the hostility it would bring out.’
For ‘authentic’, you can often read ‘Jamaican’ – and it wasn’t only the new reggae crowd that made a fuss about this. A vociferous contingent believed that unless reggae was made in Jamaica, it counted for nothing, and if it was made by non-Jamaicans its value was even less than that. To give some idea of the Jamaican tyranny within the UK reggae scene, there was an informal ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy as regards heritage. Janet expands:
‘The thing is, you never knew the people you were working with weren’t Jamaican. We all assumed we were all Jamaicans and nobody bothered to correct anybody. You’d never have known Dennis [Bovell] was Barbadian by the way he spoke, you’d naturally think he was Jamaican. You’d never have known that Drummie or Brinsley from Aswad weren’t Jamaican by the way they spoke. But they’re Grenadian and Guyanese.’
Victor – who was born in St Lucia – saw that as a positive, as it consolidated the notion of a black British music style as opposed to an imported style merely produced in the UK:
‘That is the beauty, to me, of lovers’ rock, the fact that we all came from different backgrounds and different heritages, but we were all youth in London. But with the Jamaican thing, because they had all that bravado they did sort of define black culture, and because there were so many, a lot of your friends were Jamaican, so it was natural to aspire to that. Also, reggae, which was the music we were doing, was Jamaican, and it had that strong tradition, so we just sort of went along with it, because that was what we thought being a reggae singer was all about.’
What made a mockery of the idea that London-produced reggae was somehow less than the genuine article, was that this new sound went down very well in Jamaica. Right from the start. Lloydie Coxsone licensed “Caught You In A Lie” to Gussie Clarke, a top Jamaican producer and label owner, for whom it was a big hit, and, in true Jamaican style, ‘versioned’ numerous times. Ironically, lovers’ rock found favour in Jamaica because, by concentrating on roots reggae, the British record companies had unbalanced the domestic industry.
In response to frenzied chequebook-waving from across the Atlantic, the rock steady and early reggae staple of singers singing love songs had been all but abandoned – but local sound systems still wanted music to which men and women could dance together. Similarly, as the 1980s rolled around, and in Jamaica roots was being replaced by dancehall with its computerised brashness and deejay vocalists, the demand for couples-dancing hadn’t gone away. That left a great deal of room for lovers’ rock reggae. For any Kingstonian crooner looking to maintain a recording career, London suddenly looked very attractive.
DENNIS REMEMBERS THE WAVE OF JAMAICAN singers and players who installed themselves in London, either to record with British musicians or to learn lovers’ rock techniques and take them back home:
‘Lovers’ had been getting attention in Jamaica since the beginning, since “Caught You In A Lie”. There’s a lot of soul music in Jamaica and people liked this soulful sound – Brent Dowe of the Melodians did a version of Matumbi’s “After Tonight”, Harry J did a version of “Caught You In A Lie” … Remember, men and women over there go to the dance for exactly the same reasons we do. Then people started coming over here to grab a bit of what we had, because as we’d changed up the drum patterns and the riddims to create this new reggae sound, we were actually leading Jamaica from over here.
Sugar Minott came from Jamaica to make London – and lovers’ rock – his home.
‘It was not unusual for a singer to arrive in the morning with a set of songs they’d written, I’d get a band together in the afternoon, we’d go into the studio all night, and they’d be on the plane back to Jamaica the next day with a set of master tapes. And they’d have paid in cash, thank you very much. Then there were those who stayed longer.
‘Sly Dunbar was here all the time, he had been for a while, but he is probably the Jamaican reggae musician with the most open mind �
�� he listens to anything and takes his influences from everywhere. Jackie Mittoo, probably the greatest reggae organist ever, came over to learn our playing and shuffles, and his vast knowledge of organ playing was very welcome, of course. He practically lived in East Street Studios, where a lot of lovers’ rock was made – so many of those tracks on the Lover’s Rock label have actually got Jackie Mittoo playing organ on. Max Edwards, drummer with the Soul Syndicate and Zap Pow, was here, Chinna [legendary reggae guitarist Earl ‘Chinna’ Smith] was here for a while doing stuff, so was Lloyd Parks [the Revolutionaries’ founder and bass player].
‘A lot of Jamaican musicians came to learn what we were doing, and some actually put down roots here because there was more opportunity to play more music. Then there was the singers like Dennis Brown, who moved here and set up his own record labels, and Gregory Isaacs who practically lived here, and Johnny Clarke and Johnny Osbourne both recorded here, Sugar Minott found his groove within lovers’ rock here, so did Barrington Levy. It was the only time that reggae in the UK was in charge, and it felt good that they were coming to us and taking what we’d invented back to Jamaica.’
Maxine Stowe, a mover and shaker in the Jamaican and American reggae industries, managed Sugar Minott at the time. In describing his coming to London, she sums up the relationship of lovers’ rock to the rest of the reggae world:
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