Booted and Suited by Chris Brown

Author:Chris Brown [Chris Brown]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843586852
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2011-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

The general election the following month brought about a Labour victory, which ensured that the lights came back on, but they were soon dimmed for me again when I heard my favourite record label, Trojan, had gone into liquidation. Along with Pama, Trojan, which itself was a subsidiary of Chris Blackwell’s innovatory Island record label, had been the label responsible for introducing most white working-class kids to reggae. Its decline and eventual disintegration in 1974 paralleled the decline of skinheads, an inevitable conclusion to the transformation in reggae music that had taken place in the previous few years.

When Bob Marley’s Wailers signed to Island records in 1972, it signalled the beginning of world recognition for ‘roots’ music. It was the birth of a new, internationally oriented form of reggae that had moved far away from the dancehalls, which themselves were in a serious slump due to the emergence of the discos.

The Wailers’ debut album on Island, the stunning Catch A Fire and the soundtrack to the classic Jamaican rude boy film The Harder They Come starring Jimmy Cliff, turned white, middle-class kids on to reggae for the first time in their dreary lives. Hippy types from Redland and Clifton, who had been previously weaned on Island’s Fairport Convention, Traffic and Free, were now buying reggae. Up until the early Seventies, black harmony groups were almost entirely associated in the rock world with soul, which by this time couldn’t have been more unfashionable. Rock critics deemed that any music deserving to be taken seriously had to be made by self-contained bands featuring a lead guitarist and ‘meaningful’ lyrics. What’s more, ‘progressive’ music appeared on albums that had taken years to be conceived and produced, and certainly not on 45s that had been churned out overnight in some backstreet studio in Kingston, Jamaica.

The demise of the label that had meant so much to a generation of British youths passed by without so much as a one-line obituary in the papers. Its final, defiant parting shot was a huge number 1 for Ken Boothe, a reworking of Bread’s vintage hit ‘Everything I Own’. But to me it was an archetypal ‘pop’ record that had typified the insipid and vapid Trojan releases of the previous couple of years – it couldn’t have got further away from ‘Skinhead Moonstomp’ if it had tried.

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