The song is called Tightrope and the band is Steel Pulse.

You can download the song for a mere 99 cents here: Download Tightrope by Steel Pulse

More Dubwise Roots Music

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Messian Dread- A promising new talent in the dub arena.


Maranatha Discomix- Messian Dread I came across this fantastic roots dub video on a recent visit to the Dubroom. I don't know anything about the performer but the Dubroom has been posting some wicked good free downloads on their internet site @ Dubroom Star Selections: Main Page the past few months. Messian Dread is part of the new roots reggae underground that is just beginning to blossom at indie music websites like the Dubroom.

SPYING GLASS: Lloyd Barnes version vs. Massive Attack version

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Horace Andy: "They want to know Rasta's business."

The first embedded video is the orignal version of Spying Glass recorded by Horace Andy with producer Lloyd Barnes for his 1981 album "Dance Hall Style"



In 1994 Horace recorded a second version with UK trip hop heroes Massive Attack which appeared on their groundbreaking album Protection. Horace's Massive Attack version retains a strong rhythm around the bass line, but producer Tricky wholly updates the groove, and adds clattering percussion which intermittently weighed into the song before receding in waves.

Tricky's more dramatic and darker production techniques take Spying Glass to the next level of paranoia. It's the all-seeing eye of big brother police state watching rasta through the spying glass, awaiting the opportunity to kick down the front door with a search warrant for the herbs.

Dub Reggae- The French Connection

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Fred the Dub Machinist is part of the Bordeaux based Control Tower posse.

Don't Give Up the Riddim- Dub Machinist Just as everyone thought reggae was dead there suddenly springs forth a 3rd genration of outernational dub artists and an expanding network of roots conscious musicians.

I haven't been this excited about reggae music since the early 80s. The reggae music dub artists of the French undergound have developed a decentralized business development model that may cause the music industry's monolithic Tower of Babel to come crashing down. The French always had a flair for crashing down top-heavy social institutions.

The primary vehicle for this new generation of musicians is the internet that serves as the primary point of music distribution for these artist owned microlabels. There is a do-it-yourself aesthetic among the the digital generation outernational music that resembles the early years of punk music.

Most of the artists the supervise all of the production and distribution aspects of their compact discs. The retail music store may carry the music but most of the sales are via internet download or mail order. There's a growing sense that the mega music labels have become superfluous to the recording, production and distribution of music. Dub Mechanic's label Control Tower Records even owns a few boutique retail stores in France that specialize in sales of reggae, dub and outernational music.

That's music to my ears. Every since Shawn Fanning launched Napster, the first digital file sharing service in June 1999, observers of the music business have predicted the days of the conventional music buisness model were numbered. I thought it would take 10 years to crash the towering monolith but I was optimistic.... We're probably talking about 15 years until mega music's hour of Armageddeon

Dub artists like Dubmatrix, the Vibronics and Dub Mechanic no longer need radio or television airplay because they find their own audiences via video websites like YouTube, Yahoo and Daily Motion. There was never room on the radio or broadcast television for an artist like Dub Mechanic anyway. The Dub Mechanic'c musical stylings share a close kinship with Augustus Pablo and King Tubby's Firehouse Rockers.

The coke snorting twits at Geffen Infotainment aren't about to give any kind of reggae music a fair hearing. In the early 70's, a tone deaf David Geffen took a pass on Marley as talentless while he was busy promoting the career of Cher. Maybe that's why the Geffen "dream team" is on the brink of finanical collapse. Four decades later, the licensing rights to Marley's back catalog of recorded music ten times the value of any the megastars in Geffen's stable of artists. Bob got the last laugh because his family label Tuff Gong owns the rights to his catalog of music which is about the 4th or 5th most valuable songwritter's book in the music business.

Roots reggae, dubwise and dancehall music never went away, it was simply pushed off the stage by music industry opinion makers who were eager to milk the next musical trend on the horizon. The Dub Mechanic and his musical colleagues present compelling evidence that reggae music be around a lot longer than Geffen Records.




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A Cautionary Tale From Gregory

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My wife took this picture of Gregory perched on a scooter outside a dancehall in the late Seventies. It's the perfect Jamaican rude boy photo. Gregory said he was "guarding" that massive sound system speaker behind him, at the request of Prince Jammy, the headliner for the dancehall event.

Hard Drugs- Gregory Isaacs Gregory Isaacs' fondness of cocaine got him into a lot of trouble with the law which hobbled his career as a performer. He spent a lot of his prime years behind bars at Kingston's General Penitentiary on a series of drugs and weapons charges and was unable to tour the United States and Europe just as he was breaking out as an international star. When Gregory finally was released from GP in the mid 80s, his criminal record made it nearly impossible for him to get a visa to tour.

Hard Drugs is a cautionary tale to the rude boy on the street about the dangers of hard drug use based his own career setbacks from his own use of coke.

Reggae Classic Available for the First Time In CD and MP3 Format

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Pablo Moses' roots reggae classic A Song has finally been reissued after 20 years.

Each Is A Servant- Pablo Moses Each Is A Servant is from the groundbreaking 1980 reggae album A Song by Pablo Moses. When A Song was first released there was a wave of hope in the international reggae community that Pablo Moses would fill the shoes of Bob Marley. For a lot of reasons Pablo never became the "next Bob Marley" and it took several years for folks to realize that Bob was simply an irreplaceable leader. A Song is one of about 5 reggae albums I couldn't live without and finally, after being out of issue 20 years, A Song is available in both cd and mp3 formats for the first time. I can finally give my well worn vinyl copy of A Song a rest.

The Neville Brothers Sing an Old Reggae Classic

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The Nevilles sing a beautiful version of By the Rivers of Babylon

By the Rivers of Babylon- The Neville Brothers By the Rivers of Babylon is one of the earliest reggae songs and the lyrics are based of one of the biblical pslams of David. The most beautiful version of this oft recorded song is sung by the Neville Brothers. The New Orleans 2nd line riddim used by the Nevilles in a lot of their songs is strikingly similar to the one drop riddim of reggae. The brothers have enough reggae songs in their repetoire to record an full album of reggae music. I'm hoping they will someday.

The Dubwise Beat
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The Beat's I Just Can't Stop It reaches a landmark age of 30

Stand Down Dub- The Beat 2010 marks the 30th anniversary of the release of the (English) Beat's release of their first album I Just Can't Stop It in the USA. From my perspective, I Just Can't Stop It was the most significant pop music release of the 80s decade and still remains one of the five greatest releases from the post punk generation.

The Beat was the last of the celebrated 2Tone bands to release an album. The Beat had formed in 1978 and released a single on the Special's 2Tone label but went on to form their own label, Go Feet, to record, produce and distribute their first album. The Specials, The Selector and Madness had all released well received but slow selling albums in the USA and the Beat's release of their first stateside album was delayed because of legal wrangling over their use of the name "The Beat" because an American band held the copyright to the name "The Beat." Hence the use of "English Beat" by the band as their name on all their American releases.

The Beat were the most musically accomplished of the 2Tone ska bands with three frontline vocalists capable of leading their own band. Their songwriting contained sophisticated political and social commentary on the rise of Thatcherism in the UK, the racist attitudes of the National Front, unemployment and class resentment in Great Britain. The Beat also came up with imaginative arragements for cover songs like Smokey Robinson's Tears of a Clown and an unlikely version of the Andy Williams 60s hit, Can't Get Used to Lonsing You. The Beat's biggest strength their own pop sensibilities which went beyond the confines of the ska revival movement.

The first song I ever heard by the Beat was Whine and Grind/Stand Down Margaret which became the anti-Thatcher anthem of the post-punk era. When I was in London in 1980, the song had a ubiquitous presence in record shops, night clubs, and on radio stations. Stand Down Margaret was the even selector's choice in the Jamaican run dancehalls I visited in Brixton in the fall of 1980 where Linton Kwesi Johnson, Culture and Mikey Dread were performing. Stand Down Margaret had more of a contemporary reggae dancehall one drop reggae beat, which was very different from the trademark 2Tone ska revial riddim.

30 years have past, but each time I hear Stand Down Margaret it summons all these memories of my year long visit and internship as an aspiring American journalist in Londontown. To mark the occasion I'm presenting this rare dubwise version of Stand Down Margaret that I bought in 1980 as a 12" vinyl single. I converted the vinyl recording into a high quality MP3 file, cleaned up and remixed the sound and posted it on YouTube yesterday. I've never seen this dub version available anywhere in the United States. The dub version may be available on a UK Beat anthology that I'm unaware of, but I think Stand Down Dub has fallen completely out of issue.

U Brown: Special Pon Hi Fashion Riddim



Lootyard by U-Brown U-Brown was one of the great original deejays along with U-Roy and Dennis Alcapone. U-Brown was only 15 when he began deejaying shows in Jamaica in 1971. Unfortunately U-Brown has gotten the attention of his early peers because he was living in London and recording in obscurity when the big stampede to sign Jamaican reggae artists in the mid Seventies began. He moved back to Jamaica in 1990 and still continues to deejay and record from time to time.

I've been skimming through this thread for a few days now, you have quite a few interesting reggae acts that you posted about so far. I know a bit about reggae, but not nearly as much as I'd like and it's starting to irk me. I think what would be most helpful for a philistine such as myself is to get an introspective view into the history of the movement, how it evolved from rocksteady & ska and so on. Just so my understanding is accurate, the "golden age" was approximately 1965-1973, correct?

Here's a 1000 albums blog I think you might enjoy, it's got some pointless sacred cows on it but more than a healthy dose of ska & reggae that you might appreciate:

The Best Albums Since 1965

The "Golden Age of Reggae" is a term I've used to cover the era from roughly 1973 until 1986 which was the era when roots reggae, dub and dancehall were in their prime. It's also the era when reggae music went international and reggae musicians like Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Burning Spear. Peter Tosh, U-Roy, Gregory Isaacs, Steel Pulse and Culture brought reggae music to the attention of people all over the world.

Reggae music didn't really exist before 1970 when the Wailer's drummer Carlton Barret developed the slower one-drop drumming riddim that distinguished reggae music from faster ska riddim. During the next 2 or 3 years other Jamiacan drummers, most notably, Horsemouth Wallace and Sly Dunbar adopted the one-drop riddim and by then end of 1972, this distinctive one-drop riddim music with a Rastafarian consciouness became known as "reggae" all over Jamaica.

Chris Blackwell and Island Records changed everything. Blackwell, a British national Jamaican citizen founded Island Records. Island Records was the most successful indie rock label of the 60s. Blackwell signed such rock stars as the Spencer Davis Group, Traffic, Fairport Convention, King Crimson, and Emerson Lake and Palmer to Island Records.

As a sideline, Blackwell had been recording ska music in Jamaica since 1959 and Blackwell became the most prominent figure in the rise of reggae. Blackwell founded Trojan Records to distribute ska music in the UK where it developed a small but devoted following among West Indian expatriates and a youthful audience of skinheads and mods. Because of his involvement in early ska music scene, Blackwell became the most prominent promoter of reggae music outside of Jamaica almost by default. His only competitor was Richard Branson, another British national who was scouting Jamaica for reggae talent for his newly founded Virgin Records.

In 1973 Blackwell's Island Films released the theatrical film The Harder They Come, and in the same year Island Records released Bob Marley and the Wailers' first globally distributed major label album, Catch A Fire. Both the film and the album marked ground zero in the rise of reggae music to international prominence. Few people outside of Jamaica knew what reggae music was before The Harder They Come and Catch A Fire were released.

Reggae music received even wider international attention when Eric Clapton recorded a version of Marley's song I Shot the Sheriff on his 461 Ocean Blvd. album a year later in 1974. Clapton was still the most influential rock guitarist of that era and he served as a gateway to introduce the music of Bob Marley to millions of rock music fans all over the world.

Roots reggae music was at it's peak between 1977 and 1982 when Bob Marley and the Wailers, Burning Spear and Peter Tosh were doing extensive American and European tours and the newly arrived punk music scene began to incorporate the one-drop and dub effects of the reggae idom into their highly stylized rock music. The Clash produced the Black Market extended play single with dub oriented producer Mikey Dread at the controls, Public Image experimented with dub on their Metal Box album and the Specials founded 2-Tone Records and began recording like minded ska and reggae oriented groups like the English Beat, Madness and the Selector.

I was a big fan of punk and the 2-Tone bands but I most of the early 80s ingoring "new wave" music and listening to dub music and the early dancehall deejays, like U-Roy, I-Roy, Big Youth and Mikey Dread. My biggest reggae hero was, and still is the mighty U-Roy who created the dancehall style during the ska era, became the first reggae (and still the best) reggae dancehall deejay and is currently aninfluential force on the electronica scene with his Love Trio In Dub group.

It's all too easy to say that the decline of reggae began with Marley's death in 1981, however Bob's presence was a central force in maintiaing the socially conscious integrity of roots reggae.

Ironically it was the success of reggae that contributed to it's decline. The Jamaican deejay music and dub music became a big influence on the rising American hip hop and rap music scene, in the late Seventies. As a result, reggae producers began experimenting with different tempos and began adding synthesizer tap loops to dancehall music. Roots reggae was mutating into a form of tropical hip hop. As hip hop went international, the one-drop riddims of real roots reggae got lost in the mix.

The "Golden Age" ended around 1986 with the rise of the 165 beats per minute of the sleng teng riddim and the increasing prominence of the dancehall deejays who toasted in the boastful and misogynistic slackness deejay style instead of the roots conciousness style of the early deejays like U-Roy, I-Roy and Big Youth. Slackness is a Jamican term for rude boy behavior.

There really hasn't been a significant international roots reggae star to emerge from Jamaica since the early 80s. The elder statesmen U-Roy is now 67 years old, Burning Spear is 62 years old and the last young turks of the early 80s dub music movement like U-Brown & the Mad Professor are now in their early 50s.

There has been a small revival of both dub and roots reggae the past year but many of the artists are outside Jamaica and artists from the UK, France, Africa and Australia have become a prominent force is this revival . One example is the Austrailan group, the Moonraisers who combine reggae music with their own native Aborigine music.

The video below is an incredible live performance of the Moonraisers doing their song Slave Station.

I mentioned something similar to this on the forums a year or two back but the consensus seemed to be that it didn't influence Hip Hop which I find incredulous considering 'toasting' over beats was in force in Jamaica many years before Hip Hop came to the fore and the correlation between the use of words and experimental beats was very similar even though Hip Hop used European Electronica and Funk/Soul cuts to provide the backbone but the processes involved were very similar.

Gil Scott Heron is (quite rightly) heralded as an early pioneer of Hip Hop but other similar artists are not given their due. Linton Kwesi Johnson was another phenomenal artist who deserves far more recognition and not just because of the template he used regarding words and music. His spoken poetry over beats regarding social and political issues put him far ahead of his time.

Very perceptive comments. There was a very large contingent of Jamaican deejays doing dancehalls in the Bronx and Brooklyn prior to the rise of the first wave of hip hop. By the time Grandmaster Flash came along, local toasters like Shinehead and Sister Carol were sharing the same dancehall venues with Flash, Run DMC and Curtis Blow. Jamaican deejays like U-Roy, I-Roy and Big Youth were very influential and well known among Bronx and Brooklyn rappers. This current generation of rappers adore the early dub poets like Oku Onuora, Linton Kwesi and Mutabaruka.

Both rap music and reggae toasting go back to the ancient dance rituals, drum riddims and tribal chanting of the African homeland. (As does jazz and blues music for that matter). Any music historian knows that nearly all black music in North America and the West Indies share a common African root. The development of rap music and Jamaican dancehall are very closely linked.

Gil Scott Heron was a great pioneer but not the first poetic rapper. I've met Gil and he usually will tell anyone listening that The Last Poets were his biggest influence and his musical role models. A few years before Gil began performing, The Last Poets emerged from the New York avant garde jazz scene. The song below, Before the White Man Came, parallels the African influenced Nyahbingi drumming and chanting that Ras Michael and the Sons of Negrus were doing in Jamaica at almost the same exact time. The Lost Poet's Pan-African mindset is also very close to the emerging Rastafarian consciouness in Jamaica.

Buried Treasure From My Distant Past

I came across this ancient I-Tones video on YouTube, The video was made 1985 and brings back a lot of great memories for me.

At the time this video was made, I was living in Cambridge Massachusetts and did quite a few dancehall deejay gigs at the Western Front, a local reggae club. The I-Tones were pretty much the house band at the Front and I frequently spun music at their gigs I became friends with Ram, Chris and Jah Shirt. The I-Tones formed around 1980 I were one of the first American reggae bands and got a few recording contract offers but they wanted to do things their own way and formed I-Tones Records to release their music on.

I met a few reggae stars like Albert Griffiths and Joseph Hill as a deejay at the Front and of any club I've ever played or gone to, the Western Front had the best vibes. They even had their own ital chef, Phillip who cooked up meat pies, curried goat and rice and peas in a small dining area downstairs. The music was upstairs. The Western Front is alive, well and still in buisness when most of the 80s era clubs in Boston are long gone. It will always be a special place for me.

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The marquee and entry to the Western Front in Cambridge

The music video below is for their 12" single which was filmed in Paris but only the singer and bass player, Ram travelled to Paris for the film shoot there. The video of the full band was shot on the tiny ground level performing stage upstairs at the Western Front.

The video and single of Walk On By got a lot of attention and airplay in Europe but didn't do much business in the USA. The I-Tones finally called it quits in 1990 much to the dismay of loyal fans that followed the I-Tones for nearly a decade. The band played a big role in my own musical education and I'm glad this lost video of the band was finally unearthed by an old I-Tones fan.

U-Roy Rocks the Dancehall with Runaway Girl

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(left) Cover of a 1975 Jamaican Album by U-Roy (right) Photo of Richard Branson in 1975, the year his Virgin/Frontline label released Runaway Girl. Branson has hardly aged over the past 35 years and Sir Richard's good health is a testimony to the beneficial effects of reggae music and ganja use on human test subjects.In a similar fashion, U-Roy has remained eerily ageless over the past three and a half decades.

Runaway Girl Is An Early Success For Branson's Virgin/Frontline Record Label

In 1975 Virgin Frontline Records released Runaway Girl by Jamaican dancehall deejay U-Roy. Runaway Girl was a massive dancehall hit and one of the first big success in the UK for the Virgin/Frontline label, which was founded by Richard Branson to bring reggae music to a global audience. Reggae music fans know the rest of the story: The mighty U-Roy became international star and is the acknowledged father of all reggae deejays. At age 63, U-Roy is alive, well, touring all points of the globe and sounding better than ever.

Sir Richard Branson will turn age 60 in June and has became a celebrated icon global capitalism. In 1984 Branson founded Virgin Atlantic Airlines and in 2004 Branson co-founded Virgin Galactic a space tourism company that intends to make space flight available to the public. Branson's personal fortune is estimated at $2.5 billion (£1.5 billion in the UK) and current ranks 261 on the Forbes 500 list of the world's wealthiest individuals.

I could post the best song youd ever hear here but the site isnt letting me post links. dang

You seem so sure of yourself.

I'd wager it's Bob Marley.

Just discovered this thread & have saved the first page and a halves songs to a playlist in Spotify (although there were 4 or 5 that Spotify didn't have) and will add more from this thread when I get familiar with those tracks.

Cheers Gavin!

Lovin this thread. :)

Meant to post this in here ages ago. A Great interview with David Rodigan David Rodigan | Red Bull Music Academy

And smoking my ganja, capital letters. For obvious reasons I kicked into this a lot at uni.

Err...you're re-writing Reggae history here...Reggae existed before 1970.

Superb! Much great music! Thank you

I have around 5 hours of reggae music played on instruments tuned to 432 hz. I fell that i MUST share this with you, so you can expect something different in next few weeks.

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