Dazzlingly brilliant, pioneering dub from 1975, laden with genius, fresh air, good humour, and strangeness.
Woman’s Dub is astounding, still — a dub of Jimmy Riley doing Bobby Womack’s Woman’s Gotta Have It. ‘She’s gotta know she’s not walking on shaky ground,’ run the lyrics — amidst an awesome musical evocation of the far end of the Richter scale.
Hotly recommended here at HJ for decades.

Vintage Tikiman. Instrumentalist, singer and producer; laying back in both analogue and digital settings.

Superb, under-the-radar, late-seventies roots. Beautifully sung, punchy, serious-minded; but under-stated and natural.
‘The world is getting dread… dreader dread… so stand up, and look up… for the time is so hard… harder times to come.’
Crucial bunny.

Total murder.
Bernard Brown, Carlton Gregory, and Noel ‘Bunny’ Brown (from the Chosen Few), originally on the April imprint out of NYC in 1978.
Steppers paranoia par excellence.

Ravishing black harmony roots; cheerfully apocalyptic, rhythmically swinging and buoyant, with bubbling horns and stripped dub. It’s a must.

Clement ‘Minkie’ Moore at Harry J’s in 1980, revisiting the tough Wickedness rhythm — also favoured by Yabby You and Alric Forbes — this time to sing. Babs Gonzales died in 1980 but his genius flourishes in the insouciant exchange between a scatting, I-Do-My-Thing Minkie and some fat, newly-added trombone.

Totally knockout. Sublime, implacably defiant, 100% roots reggae.
This previously unreleased, uncluttered mix homes in on the crushingly sweet singing, and its profound, crystal-clear message, straight to the head of the shitshow of wannabe dictators and mass murderers over-running the news.
‘Soul and power for the military hour,’ as Wailing Souls put it around the same time.
Hard-core loveliness.

Three edgy, hard-nosed Wackies steppers.
The propulsive version of Home To Africa here is new to the world, from the original session tapes; and twinned with a nuggety version dusted down and polished especially for this release by Lloyd Barnes himself.

In the mid-seventies, Minkie’s friend U-Roy would sometimes pass him the mic during a Tubbys soundsystem set. Later, another friend, Sydney Wilson gave him a cut of the rhythm here, which he took to King Tubbys studio, to voice over. It’s tough, cavernous and concussive; the deejaying is relaxed and rough. King Tubby is no-messing at the controls. It’s in the same neck of the woods as classic Glen Brown. Ace!

One of the top, top Barringtons on Jah Life. Heavy Channel One rhythms, each quite different; with banging dubs.
Barrington has a rather general go at his dad, mister One-Foot. ‘You are my father, so give me tings, give me tings.’ ‘You don’t buy me no shoes so I can do the boogaloo.’