by Suggs
Prince Buster was originally employed by The Duke as a bit of muscle, as the Prince was an accomplished boxer. He then went on to work for Sir Coxsone before starting his own ‘Voice of the People System’ in 1960. No one was more ‘from the people, for the people’ than Buster, born and bred in the ghetto. He took pride in his impoverished roots.
Clement Seymour Dodd, like a lot of young Jamaican men of the day, had been taking seasonal work in the USA cutting cane, and supplemented his meagre cane-cutting wages by bringing back a huge pile of the latest R & B 78s. And in 1954 Clement Dodd launched his own sound, ‘Sir Coxsone the Downbeat’.
I turned up at Coxsone’s Studio One complex, known as the Jamaican Motown, just as the heat of the day was rising. It was an intimidating-looking place surrounded by a huge barbed-wire fence. Our presence was noted by a fella at the gates and we were told he would inform Sir Coxsone of our presence. Half an hour later, with us standing in the baking heat of the day, we were informed that the interview could not take place. Coxsone was worried, we were told by an American attorney who looked like Cab Calloway, that we were in some way involved with an American label that Coxsone was in litigation with. We made assurances that we were from the BBC in England, and following confirmation from a couple of experts that our accents were indeed British, oh, and 200 American dollars in cash, an audience was granted.
Who exactly invented ska music is still a matter of debate. That Coxsone Dodd was there, or thereabouts, is in no doubt. We sat in his office and it was dark, the only light coming through a crack in the office door. He poured me a glass of rum with a splash of fresh lime, and put his feet on a desk that was piled with twelve-inch records, with that unmistakable Studio One label. He took a big draw.
‘Coxsone, what do you remember of the early days of ska music?’
He exhaled, and a huge plume of blue smoke whirled in the beam of sunlight coming through the door. ‘The sound system days was the great days, it started from the playing of American music. Then came along the rock and roll, but the rock and roll wasn’t steady. It had too much rock in it, y’know, and not enough roll,’ he said with a laugh.
‘So we decided to record songs within the feel of what we would dance to, and it came over good. Well, after being in the business for a number of years, until somewhere around 1959 we came up with a very strong danceable beat. To really get the riff going strong, the band are playing and I’m saying yeah, keep the ska going strong, ska-ska-ska, yeah, that’s it!’ Ernest Ranglin, the great Jamaican jazz guitarist, who also played with the Wailers amongst many others, said the word ‘ska’ came from the ‘Skat! Skat!’ sound of the chopped guitar on those early recordings.
‘It was real fun because that night in the local bar, all the guys in there were already going, yes, ska, ska, ska-groovy. With the sound system, at that time, that was the only means of promoting the local recorded stuff. The radio station was still playing Patti and Pete’s “Doggie in the Window” and stuff like that. They didn’t want to know about our stuff. Until when the music broke in Europe, then they realise that they are sitting on a monster.’
‘How many people might turn up at your sound system in those times?’
‘Maybe about five, six hundred at a small dance, but when we have a big party it would be a lot you know, thousands. What made it so interesting and for you as a sound system owner, we were treated like the Prime Minister at that time. As a matter of fact when I went away to seek American records to play locally, I think I was the first person who ever had a motorcade to meet me at the airport. Me standing in the back of the open-top car, hands in the air. Timely playing music and the occasional gunshot, and the people on that side as we drove past would realise there was going to be a big, big dance that night and the attendance would boom!’
Chris Blackwell was a young man living in Jamaica at the time, and would go on to be one of the greatest promoters of the music through his Island Records.
‘I first remember the checking sound systems from about the late fifties, so I’m sure they were running from before that. It was really a street world, it wasn’t a world where some white Jamaican would be hanging out. So I was a bit of an oddity there.’
I asked him whether he could remember the atmosphere of those early dances.
‘Yes, it was not unlike they are today. If you drive through a town and there’s a sound system dance the whole street is alive, the whole town is alive. But of course in the early days the excitement was electric, as this was the first time the people had heard Jamaican music amplified. These records were Jamaica. Ska in Jamaica. Remember that this is probably the only music that emerged from a studio. Most music emerges from clubs or coffee bars, but this music all rose out of the studio. The reason, I think, was because people didn’t have money for instruments, so the musicians that would play on all these records were all jazz musicians and some of them were really great jazz musicians, like Ernest Ranglin, Don Drummond, Roland Alphonso.
‘I would go to New York to buy the latest tracks from New Orleans, people like Smiley Lewis, Fats Domino, music with a shuffle that went down well with a Jamaican audience, music that already had some of that off beat that Jamaican artists would eventually accentuate and turn into ska. I would come back and scratch the label off so no one knew what the track was to find another copy and sell it to the sound systems. The ska sound was onomatopoeic, it was literally the sound of the guitar and the right hand of the piano emphasising that off beat, ska, ska, ska. Coxsone was the first I really remember getting that groove. I was trying to make records that sounded like the Americans, clean and smooth, Coxsone was making records for the market that he knew. Really raw and exciting, that really jumped off the turntable.’
Trumpeter Johnny ‘Dizzy’ Moore is one of the few surviving members of the original Skatalites, the central band of the era. They formed in 1964 and recorded a staggering 200 songs in under a year. An old Alpha boy who was still working with Coxsone Dodd, he remembered all too clearly those tight and pressurised recording sessions.
‘In those times musicians used to keep playing eight, nine hours a day. Maybe more, you know. Sometimes in the studio all day, sometimes all day and all night. We’d come in in the morning and learn up the tunes and when we come to the studio it was easy in a sense, everyone came with a line ready, everyone that came in knew what they had to do. And just round one mike, so no mistakes. If one make a mistake then we all have to go over the stuff again. One song could probably take fifteen, twenty minutes, thirty minutes the most, ’cause like we didn’t have time to waste.’
Johnny was a product of the Alpha School for Wayward Boys. As were most of the leading lights of The Skatalites. The school is a series of white low-slung buildings on the outskirts of Kingston, run by Sister Ignatius. At eighty years old she is the only nun in the world with her own sound system! She was there at the very firmament of what we now think of as Jamaican music.
Legend has it that although the school had its fair share of real tearaways, boys with musical ability would be inclined to get into trouble, in order to get themselves sent to Alpha, where the boys’ military band would give you access to otherwise unattainable musical instruments. Sister Ignatius talked about the Skatalite generation with a real twinkle in her eye.
‘Lester Stirling, Don Drummond, Tommy McCook, Johnny Moore, all great musicians. I was into jazz,’ she said. ‘Bebop, I liked Satchmo, Charlie Parker, I think they called him the Bird. I played the boys the records and they loved them. By day they would have to play the military stuff, but by night I would hear strange noises coming from underneath the dormitories as they tried to remember the jazz stuff.’
She described the trombonist Don Drummond as the best on the island when he was at school, but also ‘a little bit off his head’. She went on: ‘But as they say, great artists are sometimes a “little off”.’ After a glittering career playing on countless iconic records, Don tragically went completely ‘off’, and ended up imprison
ed in an asylum, having murdered his wife.
Sparrow, the current band leader, kindly got some ancient-looking instruments down off the wall – Tommy McCook and Roland Alphonso’s saxes, and Don Drummond’s dusty trombone. Instruments that had been returned to the school after the deaths of their owners, as a mark of respect for the chance the Alpha school had given them. They’d become a great source of inspiration for the current crop. Boys who were showing the most effort would sometimes be allowed to get their hands on these hallowed instruments and blow themselves a part of history.
Astonishingly, The Skatalites were only around for less than a year before internal wrangling amongst a highly volatile group of musicians pulled them apart. Their jazz tutorage from Sister Ignatius had stood them in good stead to turn out some extra ordinary arrangements of some classic tunes. ‘Guns of Navarone’, one of my favourites, still bursts with energy and excitement.
‘Yes, I like music,’ Sister Ignatius was saying as I left. ‘If I tell you what I like, you’ll think me strange. “One scotch, one bourbon, one beer”.’ She laughed. She was anything but strange, she was a marvel. Unfortunately now passed on.
*
Oliver Foot was my guide for my tour of Jamaica, a member of the Foot family, whose grandad had been the last British High Commissioner of the island. When the country achieved independence he apparently took it upon himself to open the colonial coffers and distribute what was left in them amongst the community. The Foot family are held in high regard. Oliver was a tall rangy chap who’d led a colourful existence, culminating in the formulation of Orbis, the flying eye hospital that travels to remote corners of the world curing eye disease.
Oliver picked us up from the airport and took us to his coffee farm high up in the Blue Mountains. The view was extraordinary, a bit like the Preseli mountains of my youth but covered in dense vegetation. His history meant he knew pretty much everyone, and everyone knew him, and we could go almost anywhere we chose. Like Trench Town, a once affluent neighbourhood which had declined over the years into a bullet-riddled ghetto. Home in its time to Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh, and of course the man who made it a household name, Robert Nesta Marley. Oliver also took us to downtown Kingston, an area I certainly would have felt a bit nervous of exploring on my own. He bowled about with no security, happy as can be. A man whose impermeable good humour preceeded him. A man who loved the island and gave off vibes of ferocious positivity.
Sister Ignatius puts me in the picture
‘Hey Oliver’, ‘Hey Mr Foot’, the people called and waved from either side of the street as the two of us strolled up the main drag past the bustling bars and shops. Shops piled high with all sorts of exotic-looking fruit and veg. Reggae music curled out of every other doorway and there was a crowd of old fellas sitting under the awning of the Good Times rum shack, shouting and playing dominoes, banging them down on a small metal table, whilst kids munched on giant mangoes and mopeds zigzagged in and out of the traffic.
The only white face I passed all afternoon, apart from Oliver’s, was my own reflected in a shop window. Man, the place was alive, truly alive. Oliver was stopping here and there checking, sniffing and buying an assortment of fruit and vegetation, chatting away and slipping easily in and out of thick patois. He’d soon filled two carrier bags. Satisfied with his haul, he invited me to join him for dinner.
We drove down to the sea and along the most beatific beach, small fishing boats were hauling in their nets, and an occasional Rasta would appear seemingly heading nowhere. Oliver explained that there were a number of Rasta communities along this beach, and you could survive just drifting about, as there was always food in the trees and fish in the sea. When I was a kid, if you wandered off in the English countryside you’d be lucky to get a cooking apple or a raw potato, but here it was mangoes, bananas, pineapples, coconuts and all sorts of other weird and wonderful stuff dangling just above your head.
Oliver pulled the car over under a huge banyan tree, standing just off the road on its own and in the middle of nowhere. ‘Here we are,’ he said, looping his lanky legs out of the car. I got out. It was late afternoon and the sun hung heavy in the sky. I looked around and there was nothing but miles of deserted beach, in either direction.
‘Here we are where, Oliver?’ It seemed a long way to come for a picnic. ‘Oliver?’ I looked round but he’d disappeared. ‘Oliver?’
‘Up here.’ I looked up, and sure enough there were his long legs dangling from the nearest branch. ‘Hang on a mo.’ Just then an enormous basket appeared through the tree’s thick canopy above his head. He guided it down, chucked his two carrier bags in and gave the rope it was hanging on a tug, whereupon it started to gently levitate back up the tree, magically disappearing to whence it had come. He jumped down and brushed his trousers. ‘Right, should be ready in about an hour.’
He ran down the beach and jumped in the sea fully clothed. I followed him in, we splashed about for a bit in the waves, and strolled up the coast to a small beach-side shack, drying as we went. Oliver ordered two fresh coconuts, the owner proceeded to chop off their tops with a machete, like they were boiled eggs, and added a drop of rum to their milky interior. We sat on two upturned oil drums and drank our very superior pina coladas, the giant red sun frozen mid-sky. Reggae music blasted from one wall of the bar, which turned out to be an enormous stack of speakers. We strolled through the shallows and soon we were back at the foot of the giant banyan tree. Oliver looked up and whistled, and he was answered by a double whistle before proceeding to climb up some small steps carved in the trunk. I followed.
When we arrived at the first big branch a rope ladder uncoiled itself through the foliage and snapped, dangling at our feet. Oliver gave it a couple of firm tugs and started to climb. I followed. We climbed up and up, past branch after branch, until the rope ended and we transferred to a wooden ladder fixed to the trunk. Remarkably small huts, not unlike garden sheds, started to appear, perched among giant knobbly branches. Some with doors open and people inside, one with a chap sitting outside on a stool nailed to the branch.
A Rasta in a hammock lazily waved and blew a plume of smoke from his nostrils. We must have been climbing for twenty minutes through what looked like a small medieval village with people washing in bowls, cats prowling about, and even a goat tethered on a piece of string. We eventually came to a clearing near the top of the tree where the top five or six branches converged to make a big flattish hollow in which sat a long table with a small kitchen attached to one end and bench seats down either side, which stuck out into thin air.
We were literally on top of the world, with the church spires of Kingston and the endless Blue Mountains behind us and the vast ocean in front, sparkling in the late-afternoon sun like gold. ‘Fuck me,’ I breathlessly managed to splutter. Oliver laughed. A Rasta lady appeared from behind a huge steaming pot and motioned for us to sit. Oliver sat and started to shuffle out to where the bench and table stuck out beyond the tree into thin air.
Jesus. I looked down for the first time all afternoon and realised my feet were dangling about 200 feet from the ground. The lady banged a pot lid and a stream of Rastas clambered up the ladder to join us at the table. The lady cook sat opposite us as a young girl started dishing up food at the other end of the table. She was smoking a huge spliff and good-naturedly chatting to Oliver, who took a puff himself. I couldn’t understand a word they were saying. I live in London so I’ve heard patois before, but this was a different language entirely.
Oliver passed me the spliff and a big cloud of sensi rolled up my nose and down my throat. Another big puff and I could feel my whole body uncoiling from the inside out. And then a miracle occurred. I suddenly heard someone say, ‘Where ya from?’
‘I’m from London.’
‘Whereabout in London, me have relation there?’
Shit. The spliff was acting like the babel fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I could suddenly understand everything she was saying. She started qu
oting bits of the Bible, and I found myself remembering biblical snatches from the far-off days of Sunday school in Wales. We got talking about the nature of things and it was all making perfect sense!
A beautiful-looking plate of steamed vegetables and plantain broke the spell. It arrived with a beaker of fresh pineapple juice and was the most delicious meal I have ever tasted. A warm breeze rustled through the leaves and the huge red sun dropped into the sea. An open-back truck full of kids in white shirts and bow ties, singing gospel songs, drove up the windy road below us, headed for a different kind of church.
RADIO-RENTAL
Amongst the many other things I was doing after the band split in the 1980s, I got asked if I’d like to DJ on XFM. I remember my daughter Viva saying ‘Dad! You, a DJ? What do you know about music?’ My first show blasted onto the airwaves with three minutes of silence as I tried to work out which fader to push. I carried on for a few months, and good fun it was too, filled with a right bunch of characters, but they wanted me to be there five days a week, live, and that was getting a bit onerous. To be perfectly honest I was no expert on Indie rock, so I was finding it a bit hard to enthuse about some of the stuff I was playing.
But through doing that I got a call from Virgin Radio, asking me if I’d like to host a show there. A Friday night show, like a big party. So I started doing that and it was really good fun, and it became the most popular show on the station. It was supposed to set off your Friday night, so there were lots of big party tunes, Motown songs and just stuff to get you going. Basically I’d just sit there with a few cans of beer, getting merrier as the evening went on. Only out of pure selflessness – to be at one with my listener. Obviously.
