/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/MUSIC-CARIBBEAN: Briton’s Published Tribute: ‘We Heard it First’

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Howard Campbell

KINGSTON, May 14 2002 (IPS) - After writing books on the lineage of the funk and grunge movements, author Dave Thompson has turned his attention to Caribbean music, which he grew up listening to in England.

“Reggae and Caribbean Music”, released by Backbeat Books, is the third book in five years by the Seattle, USA-based Thompson.

“I’ve always wanted to do a book such as this but I’ve never been able to find the information I’ve wanted,” says Thompson, 42. “The ones that have information never seem to tell the story outside of a U.S. perspective.”

Which is exactly what “Reggae and Caribbean Music” does. The 532-page book gives a breakdown of the impact of this region’s music, pop and indigenous, on the culture of Britain, which opened its doors to Caribbean nationals shortly after World War II.

Thompson, a British national, says he went all out to show that reggae was big in Britain long before U.S. listeners discovered the music in the 1970s.

“I really wanted to get that across, because people here in the U.S. love to say, ‘Oh, I’ve been listening to reggae since Eric Clapton did ‘I Shot The Sheriff’. We’ve been listening to this music since the early sixties,” he says.

Like other books with strong reggae content, Thompson examines the roots of the music: from the sound system days of the early 1950s to the birth of ska and rocksteady in the 1960s. The rise of Bob Marley, as well as key performers and producers, who shaped Jamaican popular music, are documented through dossier-type pieces.

Although Marley was the first pop star out of the Caribbean to have a lasting impression on British youth, he was not the first from the region to catch their attention.

That distinction belongs to one Aldwyn Roberts, better known as Lord Kitchener. The genial Trinidadian calypso legend has never been given his due outside his homeland, but he was making hit records in Britain almost immediately after arriving there in mid-1948.

In 1950, Kitchener’s timeless “Walcott, Weekes and Worrell”, a tribute to the West Indies cricket team’s historic defeat of their English counterparts at the Lords ground, set the tone for social commentary songs that were welcomed by Caribbean migrants living in areas like Brixton and Birmingham.

Thompson covers Kitchener in detail, as he does the Trinidadian’s just-as-popular compatriot The Mighty Sparrow and contemporary artists including Guyana’s Eddie Grant, Trinidad and Tobago’s Billy Ocean, Montserrat’s Arrow, and The Baha Men from the Bahamas.

Like Kitchener, Sparrow never recorded the crossover hit that gave his music international appeal. In contrast, Grant (“Electric Avenue”), Ocean (“Caribbean Queen”), Arrow (“Hot, Hot, Hot”) and The Baha Men (“Who Let The Dogs Out”) have all had massive hits in the U.S. and British markets.

Grant, who migrated with his family to Britain while still in his early teens, finally gets recognition for his contribution to Caribbean music: as a singer/songwriter, producer and archivist with his Ice Records, based in Barbados.

The anecdotes that accompany each dossier make for good reading. Ocean’s Caribbean roots have been understated over the years. A tailor by profession, he was a regular on U.S. charts in the early 1990s but struggled as a performer in British clubs throughout the 1970s.

Arrow, whose real name is Alphonsus Cassell, had his biggest moment in 1986, when his 1982 soca hit, “Hot, Hot, Hot” was used as the theme song for the 1986 soccer World Cup. Eventually, U.S. singer Buster Poindexter covered it.

Inevitably, Jamaican musicians get the lion’s share of coverage with Marley leading the way. But there are extensive biographies of Millie Small and Desmond Dekker, ska vocalists with million sellers in Britain in the 1960s.

Then there are the producers, such as Rupie Edwards and Prince Buster who had songs that made the British charts, also in the 1960s.

“Reggae and Caribbean Music” follows on the heels of “The Encyclopedia of Funk” and a similar book on punk rock and grunge, the latter originating in his adopted home of Seattle during the early 1990s.