mon 07/04/2025

reggae

Album: Janelle Monáe - The Age of Pleasure

There’s been a good deal of discussion on “the socials” about how much Janelle Monáe’s sexy image is a new thing or a big deal.Casual viewers, still stuck on the suit-wearing image with which she crashed into public consciousness in 2010, have acted...

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Jah Wobble, Brighton Festival 2023 review - Coronation bank hol Sunday marathon

Jah Jah Jah blah blah blah. We’ll get to that.I meet Everest at Worthing station at 3.20pm. He’s clad in a light brown corduroy jacket and a cap. He looks dapper. Like a Len Deighton spy. We board the train to Brighton. I hand him a chilled bottle...

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Album: Easy Star All Stars - Ziggy Stardub

You’ve got to hand it to New Yorkers Easy Star All Stars: their records do what they say on the tin. This starts with a simple reggae drum rhythm fading in, couple of echo effects, a nifty fill, then in comes David Hinds of Steel Pulse singing,...

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Album: The Selecter - Human Algebra

To music-lovers of the era, The Selecter are known as part of the 2-Tone ska explosion which blew up as the 1970s turned into the 1980s. The Selecter were right in the middle of that, their eponymous song on the B-side of The Specials’ debut single...

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Music Reissues Weekly: Catch-A-Fire - Treasure Isle Ska, Top Ranking DJ Session

Two snapshots of Jamaica’s music, each catching styles associated with specific periods. The two CDs of Catch-A-Fire - Treasure Isle Ska (1963-1965) collects 47 tracks originally issued by Arthur ‘Duke’ Reid’s Duke Reid, Dutchess and Treasure Isle...

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Album: Beyoncé - Renaissance

There’s polarising discourse and there’s polarising discourse, and then there’s Beyoncé discourse. On the one hand, there’s “the Bey Hive”: the very model of a furious modern fandom who will boost her and monster her critics at a microsecond’s...

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Music Reissues Weekly: In A Rocking Mood - Beverley’s Rock Steady 1966-1968

Beverley’s was an ice-cream shop and restaurant on Orange Street in Kingston, Jamaica. Records were on sale too. In 1961, an aspiring singer-songwriter named James Chambers turned up there with a song he’d written called “Dearest Beverley.” If it...

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Rebel Dread review - generous documentary portrait of punk-reggae legend Don Letts

Don Letts, the film director, musician and DJ responsible for so many of the iconic images of punk and reggae artists, executive produced this documentary portrait. The result is a warm and generous chronicle that occasionally veers on the...

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Music Reissues Weekly: U-Roy - Version Galore

The death of U-Roy was announced on 17 February 2021. A year on, the reappearance of his oft-reissued 1971 debut album Version Galore brings the opportunity to celebrate the music which brought him his earliest success; the music which propelled him...

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Music Reissues Weekly: Jon Savage's 1977-1979 - Symbols Clashing Everywhere

The title borrows from the lyrics of Siouxsie and the Banshees’s August 1978 debut single “Hong Kong Garden”: “Harmful elements in the air, Symbols clashing everywhere.” It also refers to Marcus Garvey’s prediction that on 7 July 1977 two sevens...

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Album: Nightmares On Wax - Shout Out! To Freedom...

George Evelyn is one of British music’s more interesting characters. With equal parts Yorkshire bluntness, hip hop swagger and cosmic dreams, he has filled Nightmares On Wax’s beat collages and soul grooves with soundsystem heft and endless...

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Get Up, Stand Up!, Lyric Theatre review - knockout performance, undercooked book

Can we turn off the script and simply leave the music to do its soul-stirring bit?  That's likely to be a not uncommon response to Get Up Stand Up!, which gives Bob Marley much the same biomusical treatment currently on view in Tina across...

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