Caribbean music in the United Kingdom
[1] The 1951 Festival of Britain brought the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (TASPO) and Roaring Lion to public attention.
Roots reggae was increasingly popular with the UK's black working-class youth from the 1970s onwards, its message of Rastafari and overcoming injustice striking a chord with those on the receiving end of racism and poverty.
Bands such as Aswad, Steel Pulse, Misty In Roots and Beshara released records and played gigs throughout the UK.
The 1990s saw a resurgence of interest in 70s roots reggae and dub with a number of UK-based specialist labels such as Pressure Sounds, Soul Jazz and Blood & Fire being set up to re-release classic recordings.
"Punky Reggae Party" is a song written by Bob Marley as a positive response to the emerging UK punk scene.
After the Sex Pistols split, Rotten was sent to Jamaica by Virgin Records as a talent scout for their Frontline reggae sub-label.
The Clash started out as a straight-ahead punk rock group, but their first album covered "Police & Thieves", a reggae track by Junior Murvin.
Increasingly the group took significant influence from reggae, on tracks such as "The Guns of Brixton", which used themes of impoverished criminality and a renegade lifestyle, with a punky edge.
The early years of "lovers rock" have two main resonances: London "blues parties" and discs by girl singers who sounded as if they were still worrying about their school reports.
The record that kick-started the phenomenon was the 14-year-old Louisa Mark's plaintive reading of Robert Parker's soul hit, "Caught You In A Lie", with Matumbi as backing group and production by sound-system man Lloyd Coxsone (b. Lloyd Blackwood, Jamaica); this appeared on Coxsone's Safari imprint in 1975 and was impressive enough to see release in Jamaica by Gussie Clake.
Several of Louisa Mark's subsequent titles, including "All My Loving" (Safari) and "Six Sixth Street" (Bushays), repeated the success and have remained favourites at revive sessions ever since.
Mark's hit was followed by Ginger Williams' "Tenderness" (Third World), and a genre was born-essentially Philly/Chicago soul ballads played over fat reggae basslines.
Ross's massively popular "Last Date" (Lucky), another key record, and set up a new imprint, Lover's Rock, giving the genre its name.
Later labels such as Fashion Records and Ariwa would go on to take lovers rock to more sophisticated plains and beyond the music's original market of working-class teenagers.
Paul McCartney bought Jamaican-imported singles, but this was not obvious in The Beatles' repertoire until "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" on the White Album.
Ska/reggae artist Judge Dread (named after a Prince Buster character) released his first single in 1972; the somewhat X-rated "Big Six", which went to number 11.
Judge Dread (born Alexander Hughes) continued his popularity with other rude songs, chiefly enjoyed by skinheads, who had always been avid fans of ska and reggae.
Both Harry Belafonte and Nina & Frederik had hits with "Mary's Boy Child", but it was Boney M who gave this slow ballad a reggae rhythm in 1978 and took it to number 1 in the UK Singles Chart for four weeks.
Based in Birmingham in the Midlands, they appeared on numerous radio shows and participated in the prestigious Edinburgh Festival, again increasing awareness of this genre.In later years and decades when black people began to settle in the UK, groups such as the Doyleys, Paradise, Lavine Hudson and the Bazil Meade-inspired London Community Gospel Choir began to drive the music much further towards the mainstream and out of the comfort zone of the black churches.
The Singing Stewarts are featured in the book British Black Gospel: The Foundations of This Vibrant UK Sound by Steve Alexander Smith.
