[1] In 2021 Edward II released the album "Dancing Tunes", bringing their own unique style to a collection of traditional and historic Jamaican calypso and mento songs that pre-date reggae as we know it today.
There was also no doubt at the time of the slow and steady impact the West Indian communities, brought to the UK as part of the Windrush migration, was starting to have on British urban culture, and the early Edward II collective were heavily involved in the emerging anti-fascist Rock Against Racism movement.
The band made their LP debut in 1987 with Let's Polka Steady!, with British dub producer Mad Professor, which contained several reggae inspired instrumentals and is usually considered the highpoint for the original line up.
Further additions to the fluid line-up during the late 80s included Neil Yates (trumpet), Lorna Bailey (vocals), John Hart (trombone), Gavin Sharp (tenor saxophone), and Alton Zebby (drums), all of whom made their début on the second album Two Step To Heaven (1989).
The collective's centre of gravity moved with John Gill (bass player, producer and assistant engineer on Never Mind the Bollocks) to Manchester, where he soon developed connections with the reggae musicians surrounding Moss Side and specifically the Rastafarian organisation, The Twelve Tribes of Israel.
At the start of the 90s the band shortened their name to Edward II and then EII, with Moore, Yates, Sharp, Hart and Zebby joined by new members Tee Carthy (bass), Glen Latouche (vocals), Rees Wesson (melodeon/accordion), and rapper McKilla on 1991's Wicked Men.
After a ‘sell out’ gig at De Montfort Hall, Leicester on 19 November 1999, Zebby, Latouche, and Carthy elected to leave the band, and this line-up dissolved.
Produced in Manchester throughout the industrial revolution, this material tells of hardship, politics, social justice and good times as experienced in the nineteenth century.
The Manchester-born Palestinian singer, Reem Kelani, was commissioned by the Manchester International Festival in 2007 to write a 30-minute composition and to orchestrate and lead its performance by the Beating Wing Orchestra, an assembly of local migrant musicians.