Indie guitar legend Johnny Marr (b. 1963) was born John Maher in Manchester, England to Irish Catholic parents. He grew up in a household where music was a constant fixture, and he recalled, ‘I always had guitars, for as long as I could remember.’ Guitar technique came easily to young Johnny, and he quickly mastered ...
On 1 February 1964, The Beatles’ ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ topped America’s Cashbox singles chart. Six days later, they arrived in New York for their first US visit, and on 9 February an audience of around 73 million people tuned in to see them on The Ed Sullivan Show, which had been booked the previous ...
Punk exploded on to the stagnant British music scene in the mid-1970s with short, fast songs, played with maximum energy and often fuelled by angry lyrics. A musical and social phenomenon, punk was a reaction to the indulgence of glam rock bands, and the perceived elitism of the often highly musically proficient musicians who played in the ...
British blues was born when British musicians attempted to emulate Mississippi and Chicago bluesmen during the 1960s. Led by Eric Clapton and The Rolling Stones, these musicians copied the styles of Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and B.B. King, and, aided by powerful amplifiers, developed a sound of their own. In the ...
It is a common enough opinion that the words ‘British’ and ‘rap’ are contradictions in terms. Unfortunately, this is indeed the case and it is solely because of the language barrier: rap delivered in any form of English other than American does not sound authentic. To attempt rap in the Queen’s English became known as the ‘Derek B Syndrome’, after ...
Reggae is unique. No other style has made so much out of its original musical resources to present itself in so many different guises with only a couple of structural changes in over 40 years. No other style has so accurately reflected the people that create and consume it. Jamaican music’s relationship with its people is such that it is not ...
Ska represents the birth of modern popular Jamaican music, and it does so with the accent on ‘Jamaican’. While this raucous, uptempo, good-times music may have had its roots in American big-band jazz and R&B, it was conceived as a celebration of Jamaican independence. Ska is the link between the virtuoso playing of Kingston’s sophisticated nightclub musicians ...
Seldom has a style of music been named with greater accuracy than rock steady. Like so many other Jamaican genres, it took its name from a dance, in which participants planted their feet and ‘rocked steady’. When rock steady began to dominate the dancehalls in the mid-1960s, it was the antithesis to ska’s rollicking, big-band, jazz-based ...
Roots reggae is probably the best-known genre of Jamaican music. Thanks to artists such as Bob Marley and Burning Spear, it achieved genuine worldwide success. Through these artists and their carefully articulated political dissent, social commentaries and praises to Jah Rastafari, it has been accepted across the world as one of the most potent protest musics. Roots reggae ...
In Jamaica, nothing gets thrown away. Oil drums, floorboards … more or less everything has to be used again at least once, including music. Why throw a tune away just because it’s been a hit, when the same rhythm can be redressed with new lyrics or radically altered instrumentation to liven up the dancehalls again ? And ...
Britain has had a thriving reggae scene for as long as there’s been reggae. There were sound systems in London in the 1950s, importing the same American R&B records as their Kingstonian counterparts, and ska was recorded in the UK from the early 1960s. But while the British sound systems were a carbon copy of Jamaican rigs, the ...
Jamaican music has never been that far away from mainstream British music since Millie Small stormed the charts in 1964 with the galloping ska of ‘My Boy Lollipop’, but it was not until the end of that decade that reggae became a bona fide part of pop. Heralded by Desmond Dekker’s incredible success in 1969 with ‘It Mek’ and ‘The Israelites’, ...
Ragga (short for ‘ragamuffin’) is the term for later-model dancehall reggae adopted by the sound system crowds to highlight their existence somewhere outside polite Jamaican society. Ragga is the all-digital style that came about in the mid-1980s, which took computerization to such a degree that, for the first time, reggae rhythms were made with no bass line. Ragga ...
Dancehall reggae is a vivid example of how the music perpetually reinvents itself to refresh its rebel spirit and to keep itself relevant to its primary audience: downtown Kingston (both spiritually as well as geographically). it began to appear on the sound systems at the beginning of the 1980s, when roots reggae had reached a world stage through the likes ...
The Bobo Ashanti is Rasta for the twenty-first century: more militant and less tolerant. With their ideological attacks on Rome, social demotion of women and condemnation of homosexuality, deejays like Capleton and Anthony B may seem world’s apart from the hippy-ish notions of dreadlocks that was Bob Marley’s legacy. There’s actually not much difference. Unlike roots reggae, which ...
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An extensive music information resource, bringing together the talents and expertise of a wide range of editors and musicologists, including Stanley Sadie, Charles Wilson, Paul Du Noyer, Tony Byworth, Bob Allen, Howard Mandel, Cliff Douse, William Schafer, John Wilson...
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