An excellent introduction — a tip-top, well-paced selection ranging across styles and vintages, with some marvellous photographs of the great man at Kingston airport, Canada-bound.

The absolute bee’s knees in chilled, atmospheric, vibesing reggae.
From the elusive 1980 Studio One LP Showcase, like the terrific flip ‘Oboe’ (presumably a spliffed-up ‘Obeah’).
Beautifully limber, expansive production-work, dubwise from the off, featuring ace percussion, scrubby guitar by Eric Frater, and Mittoo zoning clean out.
Released on its Jack Jones for the first time, and sounding predictably deadly on 12”, though you’ll wish it ran for miles.
Total one-of-a-kind murder.

Party music for sufferers, Count Ossie style: deep, spiritual and hurt, but still up for it.
Plus a sensational nyabinghi version of Miriam Makeba’s massive Pata Pata, with Patsy pon mic.

The LP is from Only Roots.

Excellent dub set originally released in 1988, based around Tetrack’s classic Let’s Get Started LP, from nearly a decade before. Roomy and reverberating, with synths preferred to melodica.

Classy digi dub from 1987 — the living, but chilled and de-populated Pablo sound-world — with killer dillers like Raggamuffin Year and Seven Seals on the desk.

Cutting his teeth at Impact! with Clive Chin.
The Heptones, Dennis, Swing Easy; an unforgettable lesson in dub, over the killer Ordinary Man rhythm.
‘Leave the studio, sah!’ ‘Leggo dat an hold dis.’ Listen everything.’
Crucial crucial crucial crucial.

‘An absolute must,’ as Steve Barker writes in The Wire. ‘The main Attraction is the dubplate mixes of the Jah Shaka power play Jah No Parshall, here retitled Gates Of Zion. One astonishing dub mix features vocals from Prince Mohammed aka George Nooks in his early deejay guise. Chopped from the lyric and dropped into the chasmic dub mix, the phrase ‘heavy as lead’ would have made an apt title.’

Instrumentals in ska, mento and other Caribbean styles recorded in 1966, at the threshold of rocksteady. The only one of his eight Federal albums to feature ska. Super-fine LP from Dub Store.

The best of Ern’s sixties LPs. A lovely bunch of rocksteady instrumentals, featuring a cool and deadly Summertime, bumping versions of Hold Me Tight and Flamingo, a moody Story Book Children, some bluesy honky-tonk, and the far-eastern stylings of Sling Shot, to close.