One of the best music tips I ever got came from a friend's dad.
It's the early 80s. He's heard some of the hip hop I'm listening to, and he reckons I'll like this too. He lends me a tape of Yellowman live at Sunsplash in 1982. Sunsplash was the big annual reggae festival in Montego Bay, Jamaica.
I'm hooked. For years afterwards, if I come across a Yellowman record I don't have, I buy it. Almost without fail.
In February 2008, on an old blog of mine, I spent a week digging through my reggae crates and sharing one record a day. Here are the four I picked, and why.
Yellowman, Eventide Fire
Yellowman grew up in an orphanage in Jamaica, treated as an outcast because he was albino. Somehow he turned the thing people mocked him for into his calling card, and became one of the biggest dancehall stars of the 80s.
Most of his records are fun. Songs about how all the girls are mad over him. Eventide Fire is different. It tells the story of the fire at the Eventide Home for the aged in Kingston on 20 May 1980, when 153 women died.
It's on the 10-inch LP Operation Radication, from 1982. A sound system DJ using his voice so people wouldn't forget.
Max Romeo, She's But A Little Girl
Max Romeo had a hit in 1968 called Wet Dream. The BBC banned it from the radio, which probably helped it into the UK top ten the following year.
I didn't pick Wet Dream. I picked the B-side on the Unity 45, She's But A Little Girl. A fantastic, long forgotten track, and the kind of thing you only find when you flip the record over.
You probably know Max Romeo's voice even if you don't know his name. The Prodigy sampled his 1976 track Chase The Devil for Out Of Space in 1992, and plenty of ravers sang along to him without realising.
Spotify doesn't have She's But A Little Girl, so here is the A-side of that single instead.
Prince Buster, One Step Beyond
If you grew up in England in the late 70s and early 80s, like me, it was pretty much impossible to miss the ska revival. The Specials, The Beat, The Selecter, Bad Manners, Madness.
"Hey you, don't watch that, watch this.
This is the heavy heavy monster sound."
What most of us kids didn't know was that much of what those bands recorded were covers of old Jamaican ska. One of the kings of the original 1960s scene was Prince Buster, born Cecil Bustamente Campbell in Kingston in May 1938. He wrote and produced hundreds of songs in the 60s, many of them on the Blue Beat label.
One Step Beyond was his before it was Madness's. Have you ever found out that a song you grew up loving was somebody else's first?
Jah Lion, Soldier and Police War
The last one is a Lee "Scratch" Perry production from 1976. Jah Lion chats his own lyric over the rhythm of Junior Murvin's Police and Thieves. Junior Murvin sings in that high falsetto of his. Jah Lion talks over the top. Same backing, completely different record. Back then I kept it short and let the music speak for itself, and I'll do the same here. Go and find it.
Back to where this started. My friend's dad heard the hip hop I was playing and thought of Yellowman. He could hear a link that I couldn't yet. DJs toasting over records in Jamaica, MCs rhyming over breaks in New York. One of hip hop's founding DJs, Kool Herc, was born in Kingston.
Reggae kept turning up in what I played after that. Boogie Down Productions, who were credited with mixing dancehall into hip hop. A Lee "Scratch" Perry remix of mine in a 2011 radio mix, sitting next to Sly & Robbie and Shabba Ranks with KRS-One.
All of that goes back to one grown-up who listened to what a kid was into and thought he'd like something else too.
Maybe it's time you passed a tape on. Who do you know who'd love something they'd never pick for themselves?
