Stop the Week 13

Just before I went away at the end of last week, my poor long-suffering wife was charged – and I mean charged: under pain of the most extraordinary punishment – with recording the first of BBC Four’s ‘Reggae Week’ programmes. She didn’t forget.

The golden age of Jamaican reggae is over now. Nay more the likes, in one era, of Bob Marley, Toots Hibbert, Gregory Isaacs, Burning Spear and all those glorious vocal harmony groups like Culture, The Mighty Diamonds, The Heptones, The Gladiators and The Wailing Souls. A superabundance of wonderful one-drop, melodic, riddimic music has given way to the macho (not to mention misogynistic and homophobic) posturing of dancehall toasters.

But Jamaica’s extraordinary musical legacy has spread all over the world and that peculiar, compelling beat is still pulsating in places like the UK, West Africa, Brazil, Eritrea (c/o the superb Asmara All Stars) and, for heaven’s sake, in… New Zealand.

Redgie has been an important part of my musical life on earth ever since the day I bought The Wailers’ Catch a Fire in a sleeve artfully disguised as a Zippo lighter. As a ‘yoot’, I saw Bob Marley and the Wailers with the I-Threes at Exeter University’s summer ball. I can only imagine that our social secretary must have promised egregious quantities of ganja, as it was their only gig outside London during that particular visit of Mr. Marley to these shores. Little did I appreciate at the time that my presence among the skanking crowd of students would give me so much kudos with today’s ‘yoot’. ‘You saw Bob Marley???’ (Yes, but I never saw the Beatles…)

Toots sings soul classics and makes them his own!

I did, however, see Toots Hibbert, just a couple of years ago in Tulle – of all places on earth: the departmental seat of the Corrèze, but in all honesty a one-horse town with a declining population. Debs and I took our German friends, Achim and Martina, as a thank you for various acts of kindness – including a trailer-load of horseshit for the embryonic garden. They thought we were taking them to see the bluegrass band of our friend from South Carolinaah.

It turned out that they’d never even heard of Toots, the man who coined the word ‘reggae’, the king of Jamaican music at a time when Bob and his fellow Wailers were still covering American soul. But it didn’t stop them enjoying the diminutive leather-clad bundle of energy with the voice like Otis Redding as much as the rest of a very curious mixed crowd.

So the highlight of Reggae Week was the affectionate profile of Toots. A close second, though, was Rise Up Reggae Star, a documentary built around the ambitions of three very different would be stars: a shy girl from the country with a great voice, who – with infuriating inevitability – got pregnant and, after a session with Sly and Robbie, had to put her career on hold; a reformed rude boy from a Trenchtown yard, who found Jah and reinvented himself as the (rather good) Turbulence; and a most poisonous little spoilt poseur from Uptown Kingston, who called himself Ice Anastacia. I was delighted that his first public appearance with his fellow would-be ‘thugs’ was an unmitigated embarrassment. It wasn’t that he was booed off stage, but the silence was deafening.

While on the subject of ska (well, it’s only a little historical step backwards), I’ve been listening this week to a CD by Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra. There are a few crackers, but much of it is what I would classify as knees-up ska of the kind that Madness might have perpetrated. Great to listen to in a public place, but not necessarily in the privacy of my own living room. Retro ska will never be as rough and ready as the original variety. To hit my play button, it needs to be mellow and languid like England’s own Jazz Jamaica or as demented as Ska Cubano’s mix of ska and salsa. Besides – and I’ve got nothing against the Japanese, who press the best vinyl jazz records in Christendom – there’s something about ska from the Land of the Rising Sun that’s… well, it’s just not quite right. (‘Like wallin’ up kayatz: people jess don’t do that kinda thang these days’ – and anyone who’s ever seen John Huston’s minor masterpiece, Wise Blood, will know exactly what I mean.)

Reggae Week I think is now officially over, so I’m going to burn these various programmes onto a disc and dig it out again if and when I’m lucky enough to reach 80 to see whether the music still moves my geriatric limbs. I suspect it still will. Sly Dunbar wears glasses now, but he still drums some of the most alluring riddims known to I and I.

‘Jah, Rasta-fari!!!’