FILTER ALBUMS
Dreadlocks in moonlight
Reggae veteran and Massive Attack collaborator meets UK dub don in Ramsgate for a modern roots masterclass.
By Simon McEwen.
Horace Andy
★★★★
Midnight Rocker
ON-U SOUND. CD/DL/LP
PICTURE THE scene: 13 Brentford Road, Kingston, Jamaica, the home of producer Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd’s fabled recording and publishing facility Studio One. It’s 1970, and a nervous teenage singer by the name of Horace Hinds steps up to the mike to run through a reggae tune he’s written called Got To Be Sure. The stakes are high:
Hinds has already unsuccessfully auditioned here a few days earlier as a duo with Frank Melody, and his first single, This Is A Black Man’s Country, cut with producer Phil Pratt four years earlier, was a flop. It’s now or never for the young Rastafarian vocalist, but something isn’t right. The musicians around him fidget and giggle, bemused and surprised by the singer’s distinctive, quavering falsetto – the way it sounds both male and female. These seasoned session men have never heard anything like it. Fortunately for Hinds, neither has Coxsone, who spots something unique in the singer’s heartfelt emoting and signs him up on the spot.