BURIED TREASURE
Dub And Thunder
This month’s deep sea salvage operation: Anglo-Jamaican space-reggae sorcery.
Prince Far I & The Arabs Cry Tuff Dub Encounter Chapter IV
Tuff love: Prince Far I, AKA Michael Williams, delivers his chapter and verse, 1981.
Malcolm Gillett
TROJAN, 1981
IN MID-’70s High Wycombe, teenager Adrian Sherwood had started DJing at reggae parties at the town’s Newlands Club, and within a few years founded his own Carib Gems label. He also accommodated touring Jamaican musicians at his mother’s house. These included Prince Far I (real name: Michael Williams), a sometime security guard and ‘chanting’ deejay from Kingston, whose gravel-throated exhortations on tracks like 1976’s Under Heavy Manners epitomised roots reggae’s mood of ‘dread’ and earnt him the epithet, the ‘Voice Of Thunder’.
“Mum was a secretary,” Sherwood told this writer in 2011, “living in a little two-uptwo-down, but she was really open-minded letting these guys stay. She used to call Far I the ‘Honey Monster’ [after Sugar Puffs cereal’s benignly growling mascot] and he called her ‘Mummy’. Eventually I ended up mixing gigs for him.”