‘I wasn't thinking about no international hit. As far as I know Ansell [Collins] made both riddim tracks, for “Double Barrel” and “Monkey Spanner”, long before Winston Riley got hold of them. I heard Ansell sold them to Winston – either to him or his brother, Buster Riley – then both Winston and Buster came to me, and asked me if I could put a talking voice on the “Double Barrel” track. To which I agreed, and the three of us went to Joe Gibbs’ recording studio in North Parade – me, Winston Riley and his brother. When Winston asked the engineer to start play the tape, I wasn't too keen on the track because to me it sounded like some kind of Mickey Mouse stuff – you know, sorta lightweight. So the vibes couldn't really come and flow from me as easily as it normally comes, so his brother help to encourage me: “Look, Dave man, t'ink big… like some big giant man. Like Hercules or James Bond, Double-O-Seven, or somet'ing.” So I said OK and went right into it. I… am the magnificent… double o – o… and from there we just went straight through.’
To hear Dave Barker toast his famous opening to ‘Double Barrel’, complete with echoes and accents, from about three feet away is little short of, well, magnificent. It doesn't really matter that we're sitting on some disused speaker boxes in the upstairs stock room of a record shop in London's Harlesden High Street, and it's mid-January. When Dave goes into that line instantly you're somewhere else. From the look in his eyes, he's just touched down at the Norman Manley Airport, but it's almost as special to be taken back thirty years to be sitting on your living-room floor with your dad doing his dance, Top of the Pops on the television and Dave whooping out I… am the magnificent… double o – o… From the number 1 spot.
We're talking about Dave & Ansell Collins's ‘Double Barrel’, which, in May 1971, at the top of the UK pop charts, represented a pinnacle of Jamaican music as a force within mainstream British pop. Released in the previous August, it was played just thirty-three times on the radio before it got into the Top 40 in April, when it shifted almost 300,000 copies to hit the top spot in only four weeks. It came as part of a trend which had seen, during the previous couple of years, an increasing number of reggae records cropping up in pop buyers’ collections. While the number of copies ‘Double Barrel’ shifted makes it one of the UK's best-selling reggae singles ever, what really put Dave & Ansell ahead of the pack was when their follow-up, ‘Monkey Spanner’, spent four weeks in the Top 10 some two months later. Combined sales were enough to see them as the sixth best-selling singles group in the UK that year, tucked in between the Sweet and Curved Air, leaving Atomic Rooster flapping in their wake.
Dave goes on to explain how the duo became part of the British pop business:
‘I had no idea that “Double Barrel” would be so big. We did it late 1969, maybe early 1970, and it was a few months after that I went back into Dynamic's, with the same people and voiced “Monkey Spanner”, which was the same sort of thing. After that I forget about them both and I was even so surprised after I hear that it was selling quite well. Then, it was in later part of 1970 – almost a full year after I voice the track – that we heard the news it was doing quite well here, in England. Which took me completely by surprise. But while I'm saying “No, man, how can that be?” the next thing I know we get a phone call from Trojan, which was run by a guy named Lee Gopthal. The man was telling us that the record gone Top 10 and could go all the way to number 1 if we are there. That we should jump on a plane and come to England, where we would tour for six to eight months, with “Monkey Spanner” coming out while we were there.
‘We jus’ pick up and gone. We went practically straight from the airport in London to the Top of the Pops studio, and the next week there it was… “Double Barrel” the Number One tune in England. If I hadn't been there and you just telling me about it I wouldn't have believed it.’
Just because the UK's early-1960s flirtation with ska had cooled off, it didn't mean Jamaican music had gone away. At the end of that decade there was a shameful shortage of honest, uncomplicatedly danceable homegrown British pop music: the Beatles, the Who and the Rolling Stones had moved on from cod-R&B to much loftier concerns; the likes of Herman's Hermits, the Hollies or Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky and so on were sounding increasingly tired; and it wasn't in any way unusual to find the Top 20 clogged up with singers like Tom Jones (this was waaaay before he regained his cool), Engelbert Humperdinck, Des O'Connor and Andy Williams. UK dancehalls’ hipper Saturday night soundtrack was almost exclusively American – Motown, Stax, Atlantic, James Brown – shaded with ska's hardy perennials and a helping of rocksteady. The first flowerings of reggae, with its jerkily syncopated, almost dance-by-numbers beat was never going to be more than a two-step away.
Reggae was in a strong position to meet, or perhaps create, a demand for danceable music. Yet the irony was that it mushroomed into a big business without initially attracting any attention from the mainstream.
*
Jamaica's record producers had long been aware of the existence of a large, expatriate market and, as it began to put itself on a more formal footing than Vego's and Peckings's door-to-door dubstyle, were realizing its potential. Which was considerable. After all, this was Britain in the ‘you've never had it so good’ 1960s. Employment was fairly full and Caribbean immigrants were settling into life in the UK with far greater purchasing power than they had had ten years previously.
During the first part of the decade, Sonny Roberts's Orbitone shop was the exception rather than the rule when, just as the record-retail business had got itself going in Jamaica, records were sold as a sideline to another enterprise. Hairdressers, barbers and wig/hair product and cosmetic shops were a favourite, as they had an exclusively black, usefully captive, clientele – Nat's Afro Wigs in Brixton did such a brisk trade in records that Nat actually turned producer at one point, while Dyke & Dryden, who began flogging imported records and black makeup in Dalston, east London, are now the multi-million pound market leaders in black haircare product distribution. General stores, food importers, black-owned Caribbean-specialist travel agents and electrical outlets figured high on the list, some because of an obvious synergy, others because they regularly dealt with, took delivery of goods from, or journeyed to Jamaica, and fellow countrymen would patronize the business without hesitation. Maybe with much cussing or kissing of teeth, but seldom with reluctance.
It was from these beginnings that, in the middle sixties, a new wave of dedicated shops began to establish themselves. Joe Mansano was one of the very earliest retailers, and the first in the Jamaican stronghold of Brixton, South London. He started with a stall-cum-kiosk in the Granville Arcade, the area's famous covered market, and by this time had progressed to a shop, Joe's Record Shack, where his advertisements boasted ‘The latest and the best from Jamaica’. Desmond's Hip City, just around the corner in Atlantic Road, was an early competitor; staying in South London, there was Record Corner in Balham Underground station, Beverley's in Lewisham and Reading's in Clapham Junction. North of the river there was Webster's in Shepherd's Bush Market, Derek's in Turnpike Lane and Paul's in Finsbury Park.
In fact, by this time every black area in the country had its own specialist record shops, and they were becoming the place to hang out on a Friday evening or a Saturday afternoon – most shops would take delivery of import tunes around lunchtime on a Friday. Whereas your dad's generation would treat the barber's on a Saturday as some sort of gentleman's club complete with drinking, dominoes and any amount of escalatingly loud ‘back home’ chat, their youngsters would take root in the record shop. And, just as it didn't matter that your dad didn't have but three grains of hair on his head yet still took his turn in the chair, you didn't actually have to be buying records to be there. First off, you'd always hear some good, straight-from-Jamaica sounds, few of which would even be on pirate radio. Then you'd get to find out about dances and parties and know whose was going to be good as you'd see what the sound men were buying – this was, of course, the local sound systems, the second division, as the big guys would never be caught in a record shop. But most importantly, as the record shops were the place in which to finish up on a Saturday afternoon or start off on a Friday evening (the good ones stayed open until about 9 p.m. or so), you could meet your spars and reaffirm your standing in your own community after a week at work, and you'd learn about much more than music-related events and transactions. Most shop owners at least attempted to discourage such hanging out, and signs reading ‘No loitering’ and ‘Please don't lean on the record racks’ were commonplace, a particularly grandiose favourite being ‘Selling records is our business. If buying records isn't yours then you have no business here.’
There was a noticeable hierarchy that decided, quite literally, your standing in the shop. The sound men and extreme purchasers leaned on the counter and didn't say anything – not even to each other; whoever was staffing the place played records on the shop system and then looked around to see who would almost imperceptibly nod, a copy of that tune going on to their ‘pile’ held underneath the counter. When somebody had had enough they'd subtly motion towards the counter, the shop-keeper would total it up, say how much and the chap would pay in silence then, with a brief salutation, leave. Such furtive behaviour originated as sound men didn't want each other to know what they were buying, but it quickly evolved into standard reggae-shop etiquette for just about anybody who felt serious enough not to ask for tunes by name. Like the next rank on the floorspace pecking order. If you wanted to buy a particular tune, you came in, walked straight up to the counter and either jostled for space among the sound men or tried to make yourself heard over their heads. This could take some time, and if what you were asking for was considered rubbish you could expect some sort of reaction in the form of rolled eyes or other unspoken indications of contempt. As likely as not from the guy who was serving you. Then, behind these occasional buyers and as far away from the counter as possible, were the idlers who literally just hung about, nipping in and out, greeting new arrivals, busting the odd dance move and generally enjoying life. It's a good thing shop hi-fis were of sound-system proportions, for little else would be audible over the chatter and raucous laughter coming from these loafers.
Again like the barbers, the record shop on a Saturday was a male enclave. Indeed, although it wasn't unusual for women to shout from the doorway or get one of the idlers to attract somebody's attention for them, they'd rarely come in. Understandably so, as young men pumped up by the best reggae and encouraged by each other to escalating heights of bullshit, can produce an intimidating amount of testosterone. Well brought-up West Indian girls would have been warned by their mothers about record shops and the types who could be found in them, and thus would sniffily tell you ‘I don't go in record shops’. (Oddly though, females always bought more UK-released reggae records, so what they really meant was that they didn't go in certain records shops, and definitely not on a Friday or a Saturday.)
That this growing number of specialist record shops could support themselves, combined with the few big crossover hits of the past few years, was enough to demonstrate the music's much broader potential. But to exploit the UK to the full would need a man who could make sense out of the Jamaican music business's methods, its proliferation of labels and release ‘schedules’; then he would have to understand exactly how the reggae scene – ex-pat and otherwise – worked in Great Britain and be able to put some real effort into marketing it. Remember, reggae was going to have to come out of the specialist shops and on to BBC radio, where it would compete with the likes of Lulu, the Bee Gees and the 1910 Fruitgum Company as bona-fide pop music. To pull off such a stunt would take a man who fully understood the Jamaican psyche, commanded respect from the island's producers and label bosses, yet was immersed in the British record business to such a degree that he knew how to get his records heard by the public and into the shops. Or maybe it would take two men. Two men such as Lee Gopthal and Chris Blackwell.
Lee Gopthal was originally Chris Blackwell's commercial landlord but had become so enthralled with the black music industry that he'd made it his business, too. With admirable opportunism he'd recognized the need for a certain formalization, and his distribution company, Beat & Commercial – an apt name given his priorities – specialized in Jamaican product. It meant far greater focus than mainstream operators like Lugtons or EMI could give it and the results, almost entirely from the West Indian market, were such that he began opening retail outlets. Starting off with a stall in Portobello Road Market in Notting Hill, by 1967 he had the Musik City chain, a series of specialist reggae (plus a bit of soul and gospel) shops in London's ‘black high streets’: Ridley Road in Dalston, Gold-hawk Road in Shepherd's Bush, Atlantic Road in Brixton… All of the Musik City stores were considered the best for both pre- and already-released reggae in the broad sense that you would always have a huge choice there, even if you might miss out on some of the quirkier, small-label imports. Gopthal opened half a dozen such establishments, plus the more mainstream Musicland chain, whose outlets were never situated in quite such black areas and which carried the pop music of the day as well.
In Jamaica it would have been an entirely natural progression for such a successful retailer to start releasing his own records, and Lee Gopthal saw no reason to buck such a tried and tested trend. Entering into partnership with Chris Blackwell, B&C/ Island launched a series of record labels by doing things in a very back-a-yard manner and dedicating labels to different producers. Treasure Isle was Duke Reid's, which kicked off with the Techniques’ ‘You Don't Care’; Studio One and Coxsone were dedicated Dodd; Amalgamated catered for Joe Gibbs; Dandy for Dandy Livingstone's UK productions; High Note handled Sonia Pottinger; while Blue Cat, Big Shot and Duke featured a number of different producers (the latter being originally strictly Duke Reid, but soon branching out).
But the big deal was Trojan, the orange and white record label that was B & C's flagship and came to enjoy iconic status as the purveyors of reggae to the Great British Public. Established in 1967, it wasn't B & C/Island's first reggae label but was pretty near the front and originally came about as another Duke Reid imprint, hence the fact that its first ten releases were Duke Reid productions. The first release, TR-001A, even went so far as to give the Duke an artist credit with a label simply reading ‘Judge Sympathy by Duke Reid’, although a vocal group called the Freedom Singers did the hard work. Significantly, when Gopthal and Blackwell split in the summer of 1968 – an operational separation, as Blackwell was concentrating on his rock music successes yet kept a financial interest in the partnership – and Gopthal was in sole control, he swiftly turned Trojan into a company in its own right, Trojan/B&C, with the other reggae labels as subsidiaries of it. He was determined to centre on this one as his way into the mainstream, and while his other labels could dedicate themselves to specific producers, Trojan was going to cherry-pick the most obviously commercial stuff from either side of the Atlantic.
Lee Gopthal wasn't, of course, alone in wanting to make the most of the UK's newly established riddim opportunities, and elsewhere were other characters with the same outlook and the same ‘exclusive’ deals with Jamaican producers. There was Graeme Goodhall's Doctor Bird group, which had been around since the early 1960s and was now moving into rocksteady and reggae with the J J, Doctor Bird, Pyramid and Attack labels. The Palmer brothers, three Jamaican expatriates involved in the property business in Harlesden, promoted local reggae talent as a sideline,- owned Club West Indies, a nightclub in the area, and launched the Pama label in 1967. Its initial releases were licensed American soul singles, but the demand for reggae was so obvious that they soon switched Pama's output and opened the company up with a host of reggae-devoted labels: Nu-Beat was the first, starting with their own UK production of the Rudies’ ‘Train to Vietnam‘/‘Skaville for Rainbow City’, and it was swiftly followed by Unity (mostly Bunny Lee), Gas, Bullet, Escort (largely Harry J), Camel and Success (solely Rupie Edwards).
There were also a number of small companies operating in this big three's wake, some less successful and longer lasting than others, but the only one of significance was Bamboo, a label established in 1969 by Clement Dodd as he was apparently dissatisfied with the way in which his productions were being handled elsewhere. This was the first instance of a Jamaican record man actually setting up his own label for his own productions in Great Britain (Chris Blackwell was never a Jamaican record man in the sense that Dodd was). Coxsone employed UK sound-system operator Junior Lincoln to run things for him, and although it only lasted three years Bamboo did well enough to support two subsidiaries (Banana and Ackee). If for no other reason, the enterprise ought to be remembered for releasing Burning Spear's ‘Door Peep’ in the UK years before most young British reggae buyers, black or white, had the remotest idea what a dreadlock was.
What set Trojan apart from the pack, though, was Gopthal's determination to woo a mainstream pop crowd. Once he was in charge of the company there was never any confusion as to which market he ought to be servicing with it, although it took him a while to work out how to do it. In fact, it took three tunes to show him exactly the way to go, and while each was a huge pop hit during 1969 the nearest they came to being Trojan records was that one was on an affiliated label. They were Johnny Nash's smooove rocksteady reading of ‘You Got Soul’ (Top 10 in February); Desmond Dekker's ‘Israelites’, the first reggae number 1; and Harry J All-Stars’ syncopated Winston Wright-organ workout ‘The Liquidator’ (Top 10 in November), on the Trojan/B&C exclusively Harry Johnson label Harry J. Each proved the value of tailoring releases to fit prospective audiences rather than expecting the crowd to come to you: in other words, while reggae's primary black market expected a genuine Jamaican experience, if a company was looking beyond that then some effort had to be put in, and it wasn't nearly enough just to whack out UK pressings of JA masters. The Johnny Nash song was built on a solid rocksteady core yet was pure pop in its instrumentation and arrangements, thus providing astonishing ease of access for anybody who ‘don't like reggee’. Graeme Goodhall at Pyramid had learned about accessibility the hard way when, even after the success of ‘007 (Shanty Town)’ in 1967, the BBC had rejected Desmond Dekker's ‘Israelites’ on the ground that its poor production quality made airplay impossible. He remixed the song specifically for the radio, but it was a hit only in the clubs until the radio belatedly picked up on it. It shot to the top a mere eight months after it was released. Then, with ‘Liquidator’, an underground strand of British reggae, skinhead reggae, bubbled to the surface. It had been around for a while, as skinhead clubs and dances took to rocksteady and reggae in the same way in which mod establishments had embraced ska, and had evolved from the smoother sounds of the Techniques and the Paragons into the jerky, quirky quick-stepping rhythms to accompany what's best described as early line-dancing.
Lee Gopthal was far too sharp an individual to miss what was shaping up to become a bona-fide trend. Between them these three records handed him a template – his records needed to be produced/mastered to UK standards; either slickly pop-friendly or of the popping, snapping skinhead variety – and ushered in what would be known as the Trojan explosion; a big bang made official by the British pop chart of 15 November 1969, which featured three Trojan/B&C singles in its Top 20: the Upsetters’ ‘Return of Django’ (number 5), ‘Wonderful World, Beautiful People’ by Jimmy Cliff (number 7) and ‘Liquidator’ still hanging in there at number 17. This was the first time reggae had so great a presence in the national listings.
At the end of 1969 Desmond Dekker's total sales had been sufficiently swollen by ‘Israelites” Top 10 follow-up ‘It Mek’ to have surpassed Cliff Richard's during the year, while Johnny Nash, with ‘I Know You Got Soul’ and ‘Cupid’, was also in the ten best-selling male artists' list. The following couple of years were even better, with an enormous proportion of these tunes being on Trojan/B&C labels: Bob & Marcia's ‘Young, Gifted and Black’ and ‘Pied Piper’; Boris Gardiner's ‘Elizabethan Reggae’; Nicky Thomas's ‘Love of the Common People’; Desmond Dekker's ‘You Can Get It If You Really Want’; Jimmy Cliff's ‘Wild World’; the Pioneers' ‘Long Shot Kick de Bucket’ and ‘Let Your Yeah Be Yeah’; Greyhound's ‘Black and White’, ‘Moon River’ and (as Freddie Notes and the Rudies) ‘Montego Bay’; Horace Faith's ‘Black Pearl’; Max Romeo's ‘Wet Dream’ (his own composition, but turned down by John Holt, Derrick Morgan, Roy Shirley and Slim Smith before producer Bunny Lee talked Max into voicing it himself); and Dave & Ansell Collins's ‘Double Barrel’ and ‘Monkey Spanner’. All were Top 20 pop hits, while the more underground skinhead side was throwing up its own lower-profile big sellers, some of which were obvious to the point of being exploitative, others somewhat unexpected: Dandy's ‘Reggae in Your Jeggae’ and ‘Move Your Mule’; Symarip's ‘Skinhead Moonstomp’; King Stitt's ‘Herbman Shuffle’; Andy Capp's ‘Pop-a-Top’ and ‘The Law’; Derrick Morgan's ‘Moon Hop’, the Ethiopians' ‘The Whip’, ‘Everything Crash’ and ‘Reggae Hit the Town’; the Upsetters' ‘Clint Eastwood’, ‘Dry Acid’ and ‘Live Injection’; the Kingstonians' ‘Sufferah’; the Hot Rod All Stars' ‘Skinhead Speaks His Mind’; King Horror's ‘Cutting Blade’ and ‘Loch Ness Monster’; practically anything recorded in Britain by Laurel Aitken; and all of Lloyd Charmers' rude reggae output – often recorded as Lloydie and the Lowbites.
A lot of the skinhead material was UK recorded by relocated Jamaicans: both Laurel Aitken and the Pioneers' Sidney Crooks had settled in London and got busy in the recording studio, while long-term residents Dandy Livingstone, Joe Mansano and Lambert Briscoe all got into record production from different directions – Dandy had been part of the UK Jamaican music business since he was a kid, Mansano ran a record shop and Briscoe operated the Hot Rod sound system. British-based performers included Dandy and Laurel Aitken, Tony Tribe (‘Red Red Wine’), the Rudies/Greyhound, Rico Rodriguez, Owen Grey, King Horror, Nicky Thomas, the Mohawks and numerous ‘all stars’ and one-hit wonders. The vast majority of the chart successes, though, originated in Jamaica, and became thoroughly Anglicized as remixes and strings knocked off the sharp edges and grafted on a radio-friendly melody. Such practice was something Lee Gopthal had learned very quickly since taking over as chairman, when he realized the whole vibe of mainstream reggae had to maintain a certain exoticism while remaining as un-alien as possible – hence the growing obsession with cover versions of existing or recent pop hits. Artists would frequently comment on how their British releases sounded different, but they couldn't do anything about it because in most cases the licensee bought the right to remaster, remix, or practically re-record. Producers soon got wise to this and would send over the vocals with nothing more than basic rhythm tracks so that the British companies could add all the orchestration they wanted.
And it proved a necessity as far as pop success went because Pama, which at this point rarely ‘stringsed-up’ anything it brought over, had proportionately far less mainstream accomplishment. Of the previous list of reggae chart hits, only one is Pama, the rest are Trojan/B&C. A clear example comes with Harry J's production of Bob & Marcia covering Nina Simone's ‘Young, Gifted and Black’: Harry J leased the same tune to both Pama and Trojan, Pama put it out as Harry supplied it and Trojan added a full orchestra – the latter was a Top 5 hit and hardly anybody, probably not even Bob & Marcia, are so much as aware of the former. The Palmer brothers seemed to compound their apparently dismissive attitude towards the mainstream with the graphic for their Punch label, depicting a black fist punching through a printed pop chart. Such an uncompromising approach tended to be balanced by a lot of the spikier skinhead stuff doing well for Pama and its subsidiary labels, while at the same time the company enjoyed relatively greater success in the black market. After all, Pama may have flopped with ‘Young, Gifted and Black’, but we should be thanking them for ‘The Horse’ by Theo Beckford, Pat Kelly's ‘How Long Will It Take’ and Lester Sterling's ‘Bangarang’. While some say this was a fierce nationalistic pride on the part of the Palmers, an equally forceful argument has it that they were simply too mean to invest in orchestration. And the latter might just hold sway, for when the bottom was dropping out of the white UK reggae market – in 1972 – Pama resorted to stringsing up in a seemingly desperate attempt to boost flagging sales, but by then it was too late to cash in and too wrong for the emerging next phase.
That's a couple of years away yet, though. Between 1968 and 1972, the British reggae scene flourished to the extent that far more of the music was sold in the UK than in Jamaica during that period. During 1970 alone, Trojan/B & C released 500 singles, on over thirty different labels, with total sales of over 2 million, and Pama's dozen or so labels put out 300 selling roughly the same amount. Albums remained strictly collections of singles, with Trojan's now-legendary Tighten Up series being the case in point. They did try with a couple of single-artist albums but after they failed to make any impact, the company spent time and money researching what their market might want, and the response was cut-price recent hit compilations. It's a trend that continues to this day as practically the only way to sell long-playing reggae, but back in 1969 the Tighten Up albums sparked one of the most memorable facets of the era. Following suit by retailing at 14s 6d or 19s 6d (seventy-three and ninety-eight pence, respectively), Club Reggae, This Is Reggae, Reggae Hits, Straighten Up (Pama's answer to Tighten Up, with sleeves tacky enough to make Trojan's lewd efforts look classy), Reggae Jamaica and Reggae Chartbusters all became multi-volume series, cutting across the companies' different labels and producers to deliver the best-value reggae imaginable. Indeed, the first Tighten Up releases proved so popular (volume II went Top 5 in the mainstream listings) that they prompted pop-record companies to complain to the chart compilers about an unfair advantage, and as a result budget-priced albums were excluded from the ‘proper’ LP charts.
Of course, the commercial potential of the British reggae market wasn't going to be ignored in Jamaica for too long, yet it affected the music industry in a number of complicated ways. First, it became yet another bone of contention between the island's musical community and the government. Also, looking a foreign separated the ambitious from the not-so-ambitious, because having to address new demands meant making changes.
Derrick Harriott enjoyed a particularly purple patch during this period, with underground UK hits as a performer on Island and as a producer and bandleader on Pama and Trojan, the latter being where he had two labels, Songbird and Explosion, each for some time dedicated to his output. Derrick's spaghetti-western series of Crystalites instrumentals – the Undertaker songs – were skinhead favourites along with Lee Perry's cowboy classics ‘Django’, ‘Clint Eastwood’, ‘Van Cleef’ etc. His own naturally soulful alto was also very well received covering Motown songs, and with the Kingstonians’ ‘Sufferah’, ‘Singer Man’ and ‘Good Ambition’ he produced some of the very few records that were equally revered by both black and white audiences. But it's from an understandably Jamaican point of view that he looks back on that UK reggae boom:
‘There was an enormous value in exporting music. We all knew that, and anybody who could do a deal for their productions in England did. Naturally, the people who travelled there the most – like myself, Prince Buster, Bunny Lee – did best out of it, but it should be said that we, the music people in Jamaica, initiated it. The only reason reggae got anywhere in Britain was because there was a big Jamaican community to give it a start and through little importers and tiny shops the records were getting over there. Even when it started to take off the government never backed the music, which they should've done for such a valuable commodity, but they never came all out and said it was a valuable export. Since Byron Lee at the World's Fair there's been no official backing to get reggae exported. Which meant it was a frustrating time for us because all we could do was hope that something would break big enough to get into the national chart. Quite a few did – Bob & Marcia, Nicky Thomas, particularly – and the way we saw it was that if those few can carry the music out then everybody will benefit from it.
‘It was important to us to start selling in England, and this is without thinking it could get such wide success; this is when the only potential we thinking about is the Jamaican community. You see the market became saturated in Jamaica by the end of the 1960s, in other words there was a lot of artists recording. People was coming from everywhere to get a recording deal, you turn up at the studio or you try to leave your house and here's a queue of guys, “Please Mr Harriott, mi beg you listen to mi tune.” It was more than the audience could really stand, because before, in the rocksteady era, it was possible to sell maybe fifty thousand or over of a recording, then jus' a few years later you found that it drop to about ten or fifteen thousand because there was so much more choice.
‘This affect the radio play, too. We still wasn't getting all that we should've done, but now there were so many recordings going to the radio stations every week that they didn't know where to start. There was no way they could listen to them all to decide which ones should go on the air, so they just ignore so many of them and a lot of good tunes got lost. As strong as the sound systems was, by that time it was airplay that counted because there was now a lot more radios in Jamaica so that was how you'd reach the people who never went to the dance. Also, they'd announce your record properly on the air so if people wanted to buy it they knew what to ask for – sound-system deejays are very reluctant to announce anything that they hadn't release themselves.
‘So naturally people started looking for other places to sell records, and the English market was the biggest. At first it was the same stuff selling over there as was over here, but once it gone wide and we see what the white English people are buying, we can do that for them. We'd push records to companies like Trojan and Pama, which pushed them to getting so big. It opened up the market with all of the labels they had and made sure there is a good supply of releases. It's the way we do it in Jamaica and how we thought that it should be done in England. Otherwise you lose the excitement of new records playing in the dance – everybody loves that. People were either making the more soulful stuff because it would be better accepted there, or the instrumentals that was very popular, or the cover versions of songs that had been English hits could always find another market when they were done as reggae. Then we was sending over tapes for remixing specifically for the English market. Especially for an English release they'd kind of smooth out the bumps from the productions, maybe adjust the tempo a little bit and add strings to give the whole thing an orchestral arrangement. And if you knew that was going to happen, the tapes you sent over were recorded specially to take that in.
‘It made a big difference to how a lot of producers survived, if they could sell records in England or not. It didn't mean we was getting very rich, but it meant you could go on recording more artists in Jamaica or you could upgrade your studio or something. It give the whole industry a boost, which filtered right down to the new artists coming up.
‘Also, once the music have success abroad you get that spread, where certain people at home who didn't used to recognize it started to recognize it. In that era, what they used to say was the uptown people made out they never paid the music any mind but what they were doing was, when they go home at evenings after work, they would lock up in their room and dance the reggae. This was factual, they'd only do it behind lock and key. They figure “Well boy, I wouldn't be seen glorifying that type of music.” They would want you to know they wanted something more sophisticated, but once the English people like it that made it all right. Also, it was that plush, what they call decent, sorta reggae that was doing well in England that got accepted uptown here – the Boris Gardiner, the Byron Lee, which meant you then had the uptown reggae and the downtown reggae. So the English success help to break down some barriers in that way.’
Deliberately aiming tunes at the UK market was nothing new – Prince Buster and Jimmy Cliff, both of whom spent a lot of time in Britain, had been doing it for years – but a far more obvious example came out around this time. Never mind tampering with tempos, mucking about with mixes or stirring in the strings after the event, Nicky Thomas's Top 10 hit ‘Love of the Common People’ blatantly began life with one eye on England. Produced by Joe Gibbs, it was written and recorded in Kingston (it's a cover of an original by the Winstons), yet check the lyrics: trying to keep your hands warm… it's a good thing you don't have bus fare / it would fall through the hole in your pocket and you'd lose it in the snow on the ground… On a Caribbean island? Noticeably, when the Wailers cut their version of Irving Berlin's ‘White Christmas’ for Studio One in the early 1960s with little regard for potential European sales, Peter Tosh altered the lyric to I'm dreaming of a white Christmas / Not like the ones we used to know…
Performers were as keen as producers on the U K connection, too, because a hit over there gave them the chance to tour and do a lot more live work than they might do in Jamaica; which is, after all, what they got into it for – to sing on stage in front of a crowd. Also, the opportunity to earn more money than they were likely to get from just cutting tunes for session rates was never to be sniffed at. And, fairly importantly to guys who had imagined their futures to be confined to Jamaica – or maybe even to Kingston – it was an adventure. Just to go to Britain was to have something to talk about for ages afterwards; it offered the chance to broaden their horizons both musically and socially, and several artists – Desmond Dekker, Nicky Thomas, the Pioneers, Dennis Alcapone among them – were so taken with what they found that they settled in England on the back of their success.
Dave Barker was one who came to live in London, and he remembers his first British tour with none of the seen-it-all, done-it-all of many of his countrymen. While it's fairly standard for old-time reggae artists to tell you that because they were stars at home, playing dates in England was no big t'ing, Dave was seriously impressed and somewhat thankful to be playing to crowds other than Kingston's notoriously hard-faced fans. But he's under no illusion about the ‘glamour’ of being on the road overseas; in fact, his tales of what went on come over as one more way for the producers to take advantage of their artists, and provide a chilling example of how some record men perceived the status quo.
‘Winston Riley got us all together, like a general with him troops, draw himself up real important like and told us, “Gentlemen, we are going to England for six to eight months. ‘Double Barrel’ has hit the number one slot, and you guys don't have to worry about anything… food, clothes, lovely place to stay… and anywhere money is concerned, every man will be well off.” Winston promised us the world when we do that tour. Because he badly wants us to do it as it's important to him that the records do well there. When we came here though it was a different matter.
‘As far as being on Top of the Pops and being the British number 1 single, I could not believe all this was happening to me so quick and so fast. It took me totally by surprise, I was happy. You start to think, well, Winston Riley going to treat me fairly, so I can be able to build my family a home and do what any sensible thinking man would do as far as his family is concerned. We toured all over England, we used to do roughly three shows per night and we had to rush directly from one to the next one. At first we didn't have our own band, it was me, Ansell, Bobby Davis from the Sensations who did harmony vocals, and a bass player, Rod Bryant, who played with Jimmy Cliff's band. The rest of the guys we pick up in the UK, some of the guys were from Grenada, the drummer and guitarist and t'ing. It was a rush to do that first Top of the Pops, and as soon as we'd done it Winston went home and brought over Jackie Parris, who was also part of the Sensations' group, as drummer, and also a different bass player, and we became a team because we were here for roughly eight months.
‘The crowds on that tour were amazing. Mostly young kids, teenagers who were wild. I was really surprised coming off stage and dashing to the changing room that once you got there you weren't allowed to change your clothes in peace, because of kids from the audience trying to get to you in there. Of course we had to move fast to dash out in the cold, because mostly we had to go to another show, and these kids is trying to grab your clothing and your skin and trying to get at you and they're screaming.
‘It still make me smile today that it was so many white people into reggae like that. [Dave starts chuckling warmly.] I was amazed. And again to see them get so wild where the music is concerned, it made me have to step back and check what is actually happening. I never believed for one minute that the English people could love the music so much. Because as far as I was concerned, before I came here in England, I have somehow maintained that these people would be sitting here and liking the Beatles and Engelbert Humperdinck and Tom Jones, strictly them sort of stuffs. I was really surprised when I came here to see how the halls and clubs dem packed with so much English people. Everything and everywhere we go the places was just busting with sheer excitement. These people, they pile up backstage and they are telling me about my life. Telling me the producers I recorded for, Harry J, Coxsone, Duke Reid, Lee Scratch Perry, Striker Lee, and I'm saying how come you know so much? It was amazing.
‘Even now, even after all these years, I'm still amazed because when I venture on the Continent – I first went to Germany in about 1996 – and when the MC called me out on stage and I came out and said ‘This iiiiiis, upsetting…’ I couldn't believe it. They went wild. The people them jump on the stage and some of them even start peeling off them clothes… Crazy. And when I came off stage I could feel them trying to grab me and all I could hear was More! More! More! More! It gave me a wonderful feeling. And I'm saying, even though you might have been robbed, at times you feel you haven't achieved anything where this music is concerned, it seems like you haven't really done anything. When that is actually happening it shows you have people that appreciate your works.
‘It was so much better than the crowds in Jamaica. Serious. Down there, the only way you know you've done OK is when they don't actually boo you. Even you get to thinking that the booing by itself isn't too bad, because at times they would boo and they would fling bottle and stone and everything. And sometimes it was nothing you'd done, but down to the promoter or some other such t'ing. I remember, when U-Roy, the great U-Roy, was supposed to do a show up in the country, but he wasn't there, either I think he was fully booked up, or the promoter trying to be slick, because that used to happen all the time, promoters advertising artists they weren't putting on sometimes you have U-Roy being advertised as playing six different shows at the same time. So Lee Perry and his band the Upsetters took that slot, to which I was the vocalist the featured artist. We went on stage in the country and the MC came out and said to the crowd, “Ladies and gentlemen, all the way from Kingston, Lee Perry and the Upsetter band with the famous Dave Barker.” When I came on stage I heard a few o' them country man down in the front kiss dem teeth and seh “Mi don' waan no Dave Barker… U-Roy… where U-Roy?” and believe me, Carlton, and his brother Family Man, the Upsetters band, had to leave the stage, because so much bricks and bottle started to come our way. We actually had to dive off stage. Carlton had to dive behind his drum set when a brick just miss his face. So the booing wasn't too bad.
‘Touring in England then was very exciting, and I enjoyed it very much because it was such an experience to a young man like I was then, who had never left Jamaica. But in the end everything turned out very nasty and sour because I didn't ever think we got what we deserved. Me and Winston Riley even had big arguments because we were touring all over England and it was the same one stage outfit he bought us that we have to keep wearing all over the place in. I can remember one night we were doing our show and I was feeling pretty good so I was putting my utmost into my dancing and singing. There was some one person who followed us from show after show after show and he was in the front and he shout out from in the audience, “Dave be careful now! Don't forget it only the one suit you've got.” And that finish me… I feel so embarrassed, and when I got backstage me and Winston Riley had one big argument. It almost came to blows, because I had to make him know “Look man, I not going back on stage unless you mek me have some decent garb.” Which that is how him give me one thousand pounds – the only reason.
‘The producers were all well aware of the English market and looking towards it. Any sensible producer would want to start thinking that way, then them coming here opened their eyes to how vast this thing could be. Sorry to say, they would come back home to Jamaica and put the artist in the studio or take the music off the artist – who has already paid for his own recording, studio fees, musicians, everything – promise the artist a whole heap of crap, come here, and go to various major companies and totally and completely sell out. They would get quite a nice change and then used to come back home and make the artist feel as if nothing really went on here.
‘Of course you had relatives and friends who would be telling you that your record is big in England, but there was nothing you could actually do about it. If you tried to do anything about it, most time it ended up in fist-fights… knife… gun or a whole heapa threats. And we didn't know the runnings, we wasn't used to this copyright thing from back home. I was naïve to performing to Performing Rights, MCPS, and nobody told me about these things. So even if you had a family member here who took your interest at heart and told you about it, there was so much crap you had to go through to attain some sort of recompense. What most of the artist would do at times like this was to go, “Oh eff it”, just leave it and go and record somewhere else. Because they still have the way of thinking that said if you want more money you got to record more song. Also, they don't want to fall out too badly with the bigtime producers who are looking to make a lot of records.’
By the second half of the decade, the British attitude towards black immigrants had both softened and hardened. At surface level, things seemed better than they did ten years previously as the outright hostilities that had sparked the race riots were no longer tolerated across much of the white working class. The word ‘working’ is the key here, because as the country as a whole headed for a boom, black and white guys worked side by side and similarities became at least as apparent as differences. They lived on the same streets, their kids went to the same schools, their wives shopped in the same markets, so a certain camaraderie, and in many cases genuine friendship, was bound to occur. Probably born more out of tolerance than affection, it nonetheless made life a lot more bearable as both sides gained an enormous amount.
Oddly, the skinhead/pop reggae thing is far from a vivid illustration of how this alliance was working. Although, superficially, the fact that large numbers of white kids were into reggae indicates racial harmony, the reality was that the two reggae scenes, though never openly hostile, wouldn't be caught dead in each other's company. While reggae's mainstream success brought some money into West Kingston and increased opportunities both at home and abroad, it also meant more specialist outlets and devoted rack space in regular high-street record shops, allowing a great deal of the music to reach Britain's black population. However, such music didn't over-lap with what the white kids would be grooving to nearly as far as might be imagined. Sure, most Jamaicans would show solidarity with the big specifically crafted pop/reggae hits, as they were infinitely more agreeable to them than what was normally on Top of the Pops, and gave cause for a certain nationalistic chest-swelling. But what was being played on the sound systems and bought by the black crowd was pretty much the same as what was going down across the Atlantic - the sound systems were saturated with original cuts of the Wailers, Pat Kelly, U-Roy, Justin Hinds and the Dominoes, the Heptones; and crossover, as with acts such as the Pioneers, the Melodians or the Upsetters, regardless of remixing, was usually one-way traffic from the sound systems to the mainstream. Clubs and dances enjoyed a large degree of social separation, too, and although there were a few black kids who hung out with skinheads, it was very rare to see a white guy in a blues dance. There was a joke cracked about the Bluesville dancehall in north London's Wood Green – a white guy would have to know a lot of people to get in, but he'd have to know everybody to get out. This was just the way things were – it wasn't a problem for anybody, and it would be doing a great disservice to a lot of white people to imply that the pop reggae boom didn't do its bit for racial harmony.
Yet familiarity had removed a lot of the suspicion and fear that manifested itself as everyday, street-level racism. Also contributing to this more mellow situation was the fact that the Windrush generation were, for the most part, still of the mind they were only in the mother country temporarily and would be going home as soon as they'd stuffed their pockets. Hence the British Way of Life was not perceived as being in permanent jeopardy. As a consequence, there was little politicization of black people: trade-union involvement, other than as a member, was rare, there were few black councillors, mayors or prominent political figures – David Pitt, later Lord Pitt of Hampstead being a notable exception – while black organizations tended to be island-based and more social than anything else.
On the parliamentary political side, things were slightly more complicated. Race had been on both main parties' agendas all decade, with the Labour Party in power and seeking both to be perceived as good socialists when it came to Commonwealth immigrants and to appease what it felt were the fears and prejudices of traditionally working-class Labour voters. So while the Rent Act and the Race Relations Act went some way to easing the discomforts of a decade earlier, the same government also passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, severely restricting right of entry. Remarkably, the Labour Party's whole approach to race was almost totally misguided, because it was based on the previous Conservative government's attitudes. Pity they never bothered to consult their constituents, when they might have discovered that, at the end of the 1960s, the British working people weren't quite as obsessed by race as the politicians. Enoch Powell's so-called ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech exemplifies this. Delivered in 1967, he evoked images of a race war as he melodramatically quoted Ovid – ‘I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood’ – but as a piece of rabble-rousing his words had little effect. Over thirty years later, many politicians (or would-be politicians) still refer to them in some kind of awe, but at the time, while they caused uproar in the House, in the media and in a few TV sitcoms, the biggest examples of ‘popular’ support were marches by a handful of East End dockers, Smithfield porters and Midlands factory workers. Most ordinary white people were actually a bit embarrassed by the speech.
The real downside of this political obsession with race was a dense residue of institutional racism which pervaded the United Kingdom. It was a ticking time bomb for a generation of black kids born and/or educated in the UK. They were supposed to do better than their mums and dads, and were about to put themselves on the white-collar job market, having been advised at school that they should view themselves as British and at home that once they had an education doors would swing smoothly open. We'll see how that went off later in the book, but the plot continues here with a look at the BBC, arguably the most prominent face of institutionalized racism at the time.
In spite of reggae records selling in their hundreds of thousands, and the music being a clear choice of large numbers of British citizens, more white than black, the BBC did its best to pretend it didn't exist. Nothing had improved since the Blue Beat era when Siggy Jackson had to take sales figures to the BBC. ‘Double Barrel’ had received, only thirty-three radio airings before it was a hit, but even that represents something approaching airwave saturation compared with the usual treatment for Trojan and Pama records. One of the important reasons both companies launched so many different record labels was because it was standard practice for reggae records delivered to Broadcasting House to be dumped in a box at reception while regular pop and rock stuff was taken straight through to the producers it was addressed to. The idea then was to sneak a few through that weren't on instantly recognizable labels and hope that somebody in a show's office actually liked them. The standard excuse for any blanket dismissal of reggae was that the demand was too low to warrant consideration – something the major distributors and retailers would have argued with. Another ‘reason’ was that the records were underproduced, or not up to BBC broadcast standard; again this was nonsensical since many of those records were made, or at the least finished off with full orchestration, in the UK. Then there was the ‘doesn't fit in with the playlist’ argument. More nonsense. Tunes like ‘Black Pearl’ or ‘Moon River’ were as swish and as accessible as practically anything on Tamla Motown. Strangely, the lamentable, audibly jarring ‘Johnny Reggae’ by the Piglets (aka English broadcaster and pop record producer Jonathan King) apparently fitted in just fine.
There are stories of Trojan's in-house plugger – whose job it was to convince radio producers to playlist his employer's records – literally having office doors slammed in his face or being forced to wait in reception, then having to intercept producers as they hurried from the lifts out into Portland Place. Apparently, trying to do business with the BBC was such a frustrating experience that he left Broadcasting House in tears on more than one occasion.
Once reggae records were in the charts and presenters had no choice but to play them it was usually an excuse to abuse them. Tony Blackburn – who years later admitted the error of his ways, but never explained why he did it – was the worst offender: he'd lose no opportunity to denounce reggae as not being real music; he'd take records off half-way through because, as he'd theatrically explain, he'd had enough of them; or, if it was a cover, he'd play the pop cut immediately afterwards and glowingly hold it up against the reggae version. In 1970, Nicky Thomas even wrote and recorded a song called ‘BBC’, which took as its subject matter the Corporation's shameful treatment of reggae both on and off the airwaves. And no, it didn't get playlisted.
The press was just as bad, seeming perpetually to rubbish reggae – ‘you can't understand the words’ was standard fare, as were ‘primitive’ and ‘all sounds the same’. Reggae artists on Top of the Pops invariably attracted ‘Top of the Flops’ head-lines, while one paper went so far as to describe it as ‘a brand of music that made many of us wince’. And the music press were usually less than accommodating. Among its derogatory reviews the Melody Maker once went to such lengths as to round up a bunch of progressive rock stars to denounce the music as ‘black music being prostituted’ (the Edgar Broughton Band) and ‘kind of monotonous’ (Deep Purple's Ian Gillan). In 1970, just as the reggae boom was about to peak, the same paper also put together a feature which quoted Desmond Dekker, Jimmy Cliff and Horace Faith as saying, respectively, ‘I sing reggae because people pay to hear it… I want to progress,’ ‘I won't be doing any more reggae… the big reggae boom is over,’ and ‘If ever I did reggae again it would have to be darned good reggae and there's not much of that round. It's such a blank type of music.’
Eventually, Trojan and Pama got round to petitioning the BBC along more official channels, and reminding them that they too were licence-fee payers, as were the multitudes who bought their records. Just as Blue Beat used to, they presented fat files of evidence of how much product they shifted and what large swathes of the public thought about it. It may have helped their cause that the Beat & Commercial empire now stretched as far as the progressive rock label Charisma, but the results were hardly ideal: the BBC created a dedicated reggae slot on its local Radio London station and did its best to confine the music to this ghetto. This did little to help the record companies – and to be fair the BBC had no particular obligation to do so – but neither did it advance reggae as part of the now multi-cultural UK's pop mainstream. It wasn't available to anybody who lived outside the station's small range, and it prevented reggae's record companies or supporters from complaining that they were being ignored as the Corporation could now draw reference to this special spot.
Not that this was as crucial as it might have been at another time, because by the end of 1971 the pop reggae boom was all but over.
By 1972 glam rock was booming in the UK and the platform-soled likes of Slade, Gary Glitter and T-Rex were danceable enough to provide the white working class with a Saturday-night soundtrack. And, unlike reggae, with its skinhead associations, glam rock had no problem going universal. (Slade began life as a skinhead band, but quickly realized on which side their bread was buttered.) Greyhound had a big hit with ‘Moon River’ that year, but that was really nothing more than a death rattle. True, Trojan were back at number 1 for four weeks in 1974 with Ken Boothe's ‘Everything I Own’, a massive sound-system hit from about a year previously, and John Holt's ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night’ was in the Top 20 in January the next year, but by then the company was in dire straits. Musik City shops had been closing since 1973, and by the time of the John Holt hit B&C was just months away from being sold. Likewise, the Palmer brothers pulled in their horns when it came to releasing music, and by 1974 had evolved the company into what it is today: Jet Star Phonographics, the UK's leading reggae distributor.
Reggae in Britain and Jamaica was literally reinventing itself around this time, and neither Lee Gopthal or the Palmers had what it took to get up to speed. They weren't record men, they were salesmen who sold to a particular market and flapped around like fish out of water when that market moved on. They weren't that interested in reggae as an organic, evolving state of affairs.
Once Gopthal's pop/skinhead audience grew tired of reggae – which they were bound to do as it was a fashion item like their braces and half-mast trousers, not a way of life – he had no Plan B. In spite of Trojan dipping a toe into roots – with ‘Screaming Target’, ‘Beat Down Babylon’ and ‘Ital Dub’, for example – its boss had so little understanding of the music that he didn't really know how to market it. There was a new wave of producers and label owners in Jamaica with whom he'd have to open negotiations, and the channels for selling a large amount of reggae to a black audience that he had helped to put in place, in terms of both record labels and retail operations, meant that the new generation no longer needed Trojan. Furthermore, a couple of the major labels had noticed that reggae was now an attractive proposition – Chris Blackwell's Island among them.
Pama seemed even more confused. Not only had the label started stringsing up much too late, it also didn't seem to want to touch roots reggae with a barge pole. This may seem surprising given Pama's apparent attitude towards pop music and the fact that it seemed to be far more aware of the black market, but it isn't at all unlikely when Jamaican snobbery is taken into account. Three made-good-for-themselves Jamaicans, inna Hinglan' no less, dealing with that Jah Jah business? You must be joking.
But whatever the reasons for Pama and Trojan going no further as reggae record companies, they couldn't have stopped at a less-opportune time. They had done all the hard work and set up so much of the UK reggae industry; now they were about to miss out on its most creative, potentially lucrative and exciting phase.