Various Artists - Rastafari: The Dreads Enter Babylon 1955-83

Not my album, this – it’s my wife’s.

Not my anecdote – it’s also my wife’s: she was teaching adult education in Birmingham. The class was mainly men from a Caribbean background, including a couple of rastas, and one white lady in her fifties with a west country accent, who's a bit of an odd-one out.

Anyway, one day the woman tells this story to her classmates. As a little girl, she lived in Bath. She used to walk to and from school through a park and would stop and talk to an old gent who used to spend his days sitting in the park. She’d go home and her family would say, “Did you see your friend today?” and she’d tell them about their chat. (It was a different age.) Anyway, that old gent was Emperor Haile Selassie, who was exiled in Bath at that time. Collective jaw-dropping.

My anecdote: our band had given up supporting big name acts. It was almost always an awful experience. Then someone offered us the support for Laurel Aitken at the Market Tavern in Kidderminster and we made an exception.

Aitken, who appears on this album, was making a living playing to the ska/skinhead/scooterist crowd around the UK.

So, we turn up at the venue and there’s Aitken, in a pork pie hat, bomber jacket etc, looking like the full rude boy. I think, rather cynically, that he must be dressing to impress his audience, you know? Anyway, he was really delightful and friendly to us - which he didn't need to be.

Just before he plays, he pops into his dressing room and changes out of his rude boy clobber into his stage gear: a Val Doonican sweater and slacks.

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#Vinyl
#Rastafari
#VariousArtists
#SoulJazzRecords
#Reggae
#HaileSelassie
#LaurelAitken
#Music

Dennis Brown - Money In My Pocket/Joe Gibbs And The Professionals - Running Irie 12"

In 1979 there was a Saturday morning kids’ television show called The Saturday Morning Show. It was presented by an affable-seeming chap called Steve Jones, about whom it’s hard to do any deep internet research due to his Sex Pistols namesake. My favourite part of this show was ‘hit or miss’-type evaluation of some of the week’s new single releases, called ‘Keep or Heap’. This was where I first heard Money In My Pocket. I bought it on 12” that afternoon.

Unfortunately, I later swapped it for a plastic carrier bag full of porno mags with a kid from school, later replacing it via discogs.

This is Brown/Gibbs’ reworking of their 1972 tune, engineered by Errol Thompson and with added toasting by Prince Mohammed, neither of whom even get a credit. Brown’s vocals are as smooth as a real estate agent run through a Nutri-Bullet. The A side is a proper extended version, and the B side, Runnings Irie, finds Joe Gibbs and the Professionals smashing through the instrumental with gay abandon.

In hindsight, lovers rock was charging over the hill like a big sexy bull. But none of us knew it yet.

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#Vinyl
#DennisBrown
#MoneyInMyPocket
#Reggae
#SteveJones
#TheSaturdayMorningShow
#KeepOrHeap
#JoeGibbs
#PrinceMohammed
#ErrolThompson
#Music

Various Artists - Kunta Kinte 2017

Brooklyn sound system/label https://dub-stuy.bandcamp.com/album/kunta-kinte-riddim-2017Dub-Stuy give us four shining, and very varied, examples on this 12” from 2017.

I've mentioned before what a sucker I am for a Kunta Kinte riddim, so I won't repeat myself.

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#Vinyl
#KuntaKinte
#Dancehall
#Reggae
#BurroBanton
#RiderShafique
#ShantiD
#DJMadd
#Dub-Stuy
#Music

John Spithead

2025-02-28 04:19:17

Flash Kunta

The Revolutionaries - Kunta Kinte (Kentaro Remixes)

Tokyo's DJ Kentaro is one hell of a turntablist and, on this 12" from 2009, he throws the Kunta Kinte riddim around like a fucking blindfolded juggler on a unicycle...on a tightrope...over a tank of piranhas. It's all very fancy.

There's nothing at all wrong with that, in my book, but then I'm a complete sucker for the Kunta Kinte riddim however it arrives to me, although this does seem like a lot of hard work at times.

I'm also partial to a lock groove. Saves you having to get up to turn the record over.

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#Vinyl
#DJKentaro
#KuntaKinte

Steel Pulse - Handsworth Revolution

I fucking loved Steel Pulse as a kid. This is one of those LPs from around that time that, even though I didn’t own it, I was familiar with every track. My sister had the 12” of Ku Klux Klan, which got rinsed in our house, and I'd acquired the 7” of Prodigal Son from one of those newsagents cheapo random 7” rotating tower racks they would have at the time. The rest of it I guess I picked up by listening to John Peel, or by osmosis. I picked the actual LP up at a boot sale in Romford in the mid 80s. It has one of those Record & Tape Exchange stickers on the front which show it being reduced in price over time.

When I moved to Brum in my late 20s, I can remember how thrilled I was to be walking across Handsworth Park (going for a free veggie feed at the Sikh festival, which is in itself pretty thrilling) - my equivalent of when people go and walk across that zebra crossing at Abbey Road, I suppose. It didn’t look much like the record sleeve.

This holds up as a fine example of political British reggae, infused with the spirit of Jah and under the expert roots reggae knob-twiddler and exactly the right man for the job, Karl Pitterson. David Hines’s vocal style was ripped off wholesale by Sting, which is so obvious once you know.

The thanks list on the back of the sleeve has amongst its thankees, stalwart of Brummy pub-blues-rock, Steve Gibbons, and The Stranglers, both of which seem like odd mates.

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#Vinyl
#SteelPulse
#HandsworthRevolution
#Reggae
#Birmingham
#Music