[1] Their early recordings "Good Nanny" and "I'll Never Come Running Back to You" were self-produced at the Treasure Isle studio in Kingston, Jamaica, using money lent to the Crooks brothers by their mother and appeared on Ken Lack's Caltone label.
[2] The Pioneers' early singles were not successful, and Sydney began promoting concerts, while Derrick took up a job with the Alcoa bauxite company.
[3]The new version of The Pioneers enjoyed success with singles such as "Longshot" (a track written and produced by Lee "Scratch" Perry on Gibbs' behalf about a long-lived but unsuccessful racehorse),[4] "Jackpot", "Catch the Beat", and "Pan Yu Machete" (an attack on Perry, who left Gibbs in 1968 to start working on his own productions).
"Long Shot Kick de Bucket" was a big hit in 1969, and led to a tour of the UK, during which they resolved to relocate there.
[7] In 1976, the Pioneers teamed up with Eddy Grant for an album for Mercury Records called Feel The Rhythm, which featured a nude female model on its cover.
Grant preferred to produce them as a soul group and they released a number of singles in that idiom, including "Broken Man", "Feel The Rhythm" and "My Good Friend James" The change of style was a critical but not a commercial success and the band split up for a time in the late 1970s, with Crooks concentrating on production work and continuing with his brother in The Slickers, while Agard and Robinson continued to record, together on the album George & Jackie Sing, and separately.
1 hit in 1980[9] and resulted in The Pioneers' original version being reissued (as a double A side with "The Liquidator" by Harry J Allstars) and reaching No.
[7] The Pioneers song "Starvation" was also covered on the "Starvation/Tam Tam Pour L'Ethiopie" charity single released in 1985, which peaked at UK number 33.
The Pioneers also had a number 42 UK hit in 1980 with a double-A-side release of "Long Shot Kick de Bucket" and Harry J All-Stars' "Liquidator",[11] and a four-track EP consisting of tracks by The Pioneers, The Maytals, The Skatalites, and Jimmy Cliff reached number 86 in 1989.