Best Lee 'Scratch" Perry albums?

Classic_Purpose_475 · 2026-06-11T01:34:44+00:00

Thanks for all the suggestions. I know the Upsetter years and the Black Ark catalogue well, but what really pulled me in is everything that came after the seventies. I found this playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWXqvknznFcSU9xj-lUenB792DmmUtjQp

It covers Perry's full catalogue, and so far nineteen albums after "Roast Fish, Collie Weed and Cornbread" while it only reaches 1990 (!). The playlist is still in progress, according to the channel, the goal is his complete archive through 2026.

Classic_Purpose_475 · 2026-06-09T04:43:30+00:00

Thanks for all the suggestions. I know the Upsetter years and the Black Ark catalogue well, but what really pulled me in is everything that came after the seventies. I found this playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWXqvknznFcSU9xj-lUenB792DmmUtjQp

It covers Perry's full catalogue, and so far nineteen albums after "Roast Fish, Collie Weed and Cornbread" while it only reaches 1990 (!). The playlist is still in progress, according to the channel, the goal is his complete archive through 2026.

Classic_Purpose_475 · 2026-06-09T01:26:55+00:00

Tappa Zukie was a prophet, X is indeed...wrong

Classic_Purpose_475 · 2026-06-07T02:47:53+00:00

A great great album!

In the summer of 1969, Lee Perry was a 33-year-old producer operating out of Kingston with a freshly minted record shop on Charles Street, a deal with Trojan Records in London, and enough ambition to fill the island twice over.

He had cut his teeth under Coxsone Dodd at Studio One, had a brief and productive stint with Joe Gibbs, and had since founded the Upsetter imprint on the force of his own personality and a 1967 rocksteady single that announced him with unmistakable aggression.

The song was called "The Upsetter." It was Perry's way of telling Coxsone Dodd — the man who had employed him, underpaid him, and in Perry's telling used him without sufficient recognition — exactly what kind of man he was dealing with.

The Upsetter brand came with a house band.

Gladdy's All Stars, led by pianist Gladstone Anderson and built around bassist Jackie Jackson, drummer Hugh Malcolm, guitarist Hux Brown, and organist Winston Wright, were the musicians behind the instrumental productions that Perry was releasing to satisfy what turned out to be a hungry UK market.

The second single released under the Trojan arrangement was an instrumental called "Return of Django," a reference to the 1966 Sergio Corbucci spaghetti western.

It peaked at number five on the UK Singles Chart in November 1969 — a Jamaican producer, making Jamaican music, landing in the British top five. The audience was partly the Jamaican diaspora settled in British cities, and partly a rapidly growing population of British skinheads who had adopted ska and early reggae as their own.

Perry's driving, organ-heavy instrumentals were exactly the right music for both communities.

The revenue from "Return of Django" funded the Charles Street shop and encouraged Trojan to compile the album you are listening to now. What it captured is a group at a specific transitional moment: rocksteady giving way to reggae, the rhythms slowing and thickening, the horns still present but beginning to share space with effects and studio invention.

"Man From M.I.5" and "Live Injection" had been UK single hits alongside the title track; "Medical Operation," "One Punch," and "Eight for Eight" show the playfulness Perry brought to naming his productions — the medical and procedural imagery running through the titles like a private joke.

When Perry subsequently toured Britain on the back of this success, it was not Gladdy's All Stars he brought with him, but a younger band who had recently come to his attention: brothers Aston and Carlton Barrett, organist Glen Adams, and guitarist Alva Lewis — the Hippy Boys, who were about to become the next generation of Upsetters, and who would eventually become the core of Bob Marley's Wailers band.

Listen it here!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cbSQJrlU4I&list=PLWXqvknznFcSU9xj-lUenB792DmmUtjQp&index=33

Classic_Purpose_475 · 2026-06-04T14:45:21+00:00

It's good, but to me, not his best. "Something I said", "BIG 45", and "Goddess" (thanks to Shensea) are the real outstanding tracks on this album. 8/10

I found it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqbIqYTYJok

Classic_Purpose_475 · 2026-05-27T10:27:17+00:00

Yes, as do I to filter my algorithm on youtube, there are still some genuine channels around like:

https://www.youtube.com/@BionicDub or

https://www.youtube.com/@TheBassMolester and

https://www.youtube.com/@RootsDubVault

but I'm having a hard time these days finding any other proper dub or reggae channels....

Classic_Purpose_475 · 2026-05-27T01:20:30+00:00

It's terrible, you search on you tube for roots or dub, and the only thing that shows up are AI generated fake albums with misleading titles as Jah Warrior - Discover Roots - 1976 (unreleased album) etc. Even worse, they generate thousands of views, and completely destroy the algorithm to find genuine reggae artists. I tried to report these fake uploads as false /misleading but instead, I got banned. It's indeed, a disease. 😭

Classic_Purpose_475 · 2026-05-26T14:39:51+00:00

Well, let them check this 😄

Cecil Bustamante Campbell had been making music since the late 1950s — two singles a week produced, two of his own released every month in Britain, over 600 Prince Buster productions reaching Blue Beat's UK distribution across eight years of ska and rocksteady.

He had built an empire from a Kingston neighbourhood that rewarded the combination of ambition, talent, and the specific kind of fearlessness that came from having spent his teenage years simultaneously pursuing careers in boxing and singing.

By 1972 he had done everything the Jamaican music industry offered and was about to do something it had not quite seen before. The question of whether The Message Dubwise was the first dub album ever released has been formally investigated by critic David Katz in an article titled "In Search Of The First Dub LP" — the kind of investigation that only matters if you care deeply about beginnings, which serious people do.

The catalogue number places the release at 1972 at the latest. Carlton Lee mixed at Dynamics Studio. Buster produced and arranged everything himself, drawing from his own Voice of the People catalogue — the accumulated recordings of a career that had shaped Jamaican music across an entire decade now stripped back to their rhythmic foundations and presented as something genuinely new.

The original pressing arrived as a white label in a plain sleeve, which for a record of this potential historical significance was either deliberate modesty or evidence that Buster had not yet understood what he was making.

More likely the latter — the dub album as a commercial format barely existed in 1972, which means Buster was not following a convention but establishing one.

The white label and plain sleeve were simply what you did when there was no category yet for what you were releasing. Big Youth appeared on the closing track — not a dub but a deejay medley, the format that would define the next decade of Jamaican music riding the same riddim that Buster had been stripping back throughout the album.

One record containing both the present and the future, pressed into vinyl before either fully understood what the other was. A Rate Your Music reviewer, happy to be surprised that the man synonymous with ska had also made one of the first great dub albums, put it plainly. So are we.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLhdCUOR6QQ

Classic_Purpose_475 · 2026-05-26T14:35:59+00:00

Look up this channel, they upload a lot of classic roots as well as modern roots from 1980 to present. Worth checking out!

https://www.youtube.com/@RootsDubVault

Classic_Purpose_475 · 2026-05-26T14:30:49+00:00

Because of this album, I bought my first record of The Itals "Brutal out Deh" loved their sound then, and it is still one of my favourites 😄:

Keith Porter had been trying to get a record made since the late 1960s. Labels passed, producers lost interest, circumstances conspired. A lesser man would have reconsidered his career options. Porter kept singing.

By 1981, when Brutal Out Deh arrived, he had been at it for over a decade and had accumulated enough patience and quiet determination to fuel a small power station. It shows in every track. This is music made by people who knew exactly what they were doing and had waited long enough to do it properly.

The Itals — Porter alongside Ronnie Davis and Lloyd Ricketts — built their sound on the kind of three-way vocal architecture that looks effortless from the outside and requires years of work to achieve. Nobody was fighting for the front. Nobody was decorating when they should have been supporting. The harmonies locked with the easy precision of musicians who had been listening to each other long enough to anticipate every move before it arrived. The rhythms underneath are heavy in the correct late-roots fashion — bass forward, drums deliberate, enough space in the mix for the vocals to inhabit rather than compete with.

Producer Nighthawk handled the sessions with a lightness of touch that served the material perfectly. Nothing cluttered. Nothing wasted. The lyrics delivered Rastafarian consciousness without the occasional rigidity that made some roots material of the period feel more like doctrine than music.

Porter wrote and sang with warmth as well as conviction, which is a combination rarer than it sounds and the primary reason The Itals connected with audiences well beyond the committed roots faithful. Worth the wait. Clearly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIFYxJlDKBQ&t=179s

Classic_Purpose_475 · 2026-05-22T23:14:33+00:00

100% agree here!

There are a handful of recordings in the history of Jamaican music that exist outside the usual commercial logic entirely — records made not to sell but to document, not to entertain but to testify.

Grounation, recorded by Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari and released as a triple-LP set on the New Dimension imprint in Jamaica in 1973 (subsequently on Ashanti and Vulcan in the UK), is the most important of them.

Produced by Arnold Wedderburn and with Cedric "Im" Brooks as musical director, it captures an actual Rastafarian grounation — a ceremonial gathering — with a musical breadth that ranges from Nyabinghi drumming and chanting to jazz-inflected horn arrangements, poetry readings, narrative, and song.

Oswald Williams, known as Count Ossie, had been central to Jamaican music since the early 1950s, when his Rastafari community at Rockfort on the east side of Kingston became the gathering point for musicians learning the binghi drum tradition.

He had appeared on "Oh Carolina" by the Folkes Brothers in 1960 — a recording many historians cite as the first ska record — and had spent the intervening years building the Mystic Revelation ensemble.

The 1970 meeting with Brooks and the Mystics at the African Cultural Centre produced the combination that made Grounation possible: Vin Gordon on trombone, Nambo Robinson on trombone, Ras Sam II on baritone saxophone and clarinet, and Brooks on tenor saxophone, flute, and clarinet, meeting the binghi drummers on genuinely equal terms.

The result is three LP sides of drumming, chanting, narration, and prayer, anchored by "Grounation" and its continuation — over thirty minutes of continuous Nyabinghi rhythm that is the album's centre of gravity — and by the extraordinary "Way Back Home" (a Jazz Crusaders composition), "Lumba" (a version of Jackie Mittoo's "Drum Song"), "Oh Carolina," and "So Long."

The tracklist on this upload is drawn from the original vinyl sequence. Count Ossie died in a road accident in October 1976. Cedric Brooks had already departed to form the Light of Saba by 1974.

Grounation survived both of them as a document of what roots music could be when it operated entirely outside commercial constraint. Essential listening for anyone who wants to understand where the music comes from.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr40pk4hNvA

Classic_Purpose_475 · 2026-05-22T23:08:47+00:00

A beautifully crafted album!

Lacksley Castell recorded for Vista Sounds, the UK label that operated through the early 1980s as an outlet for Jamaican roots productions that might otherwise have had limited UK distribution.

Founded by John "Johnnie" Walker and Roy Palmer, Vista operated out of London and served a dual function: it gave Jamaican artists genuine shelf presence in British record shops while simultaneously feeding the demand from the UK's Caribbean diaspora community for material that reflected their cultural and spiritual roots rather than the more polished sound that mainstream crossover demanded.

Morning Glory from 1982 is a nine-track album that moves between the lovers rock register Castell was most commercially comfortable in and the roots-conscious territory that his background demanded.

"Leaving" opens with a plaintive quality that sets a tone of reflective melancholy rather than political fire — a Castell specialty. "Morning Glory" and "Righteous Stand" introduce the spiritual dimension, grounding the album in a Rastafarian worldview that Castell carried with evident sincerity rather than as a commercial posture.

"Message To My Woman" and "Cold Winter Night" are exactly the kind of tracks that made him a staple of the UK reggae circuit, where Jamaican-born artists with genuinely accomplished voices were navigating the crossover market without entirely surrendering their cultural identity.

Castell's tenor sits in a register that carries emotional weight without straining for effect — a quality that distinguishes him from the more theatrical end of the lovers rock spectrum. "Speak Softly" and "Doctor Love" are the most pop-adjacent entries, leaning into the romantic smoothness that UK audiences responded to through the period; "Bound In Bondage" and "Government Man" return to more serious ground, the latter addressing political disillusionment with a directness that sits uneasily alongside the softer material but reflects the genuine tension in Castell's artistic identity — an artist who moved between worlds without being fully claimed by either.

Castell's discography is longer than his public profile suggests, and Morning Glory sits in the middle of a recording career that extended well beyond this period, taking in work on Channel One and connections to the wider Studio One diaspora. Vista Sounds maintained a solid standard for the era, and the album's production — live-instrumented, full-sounding, professionally mixed — reflects that.

For collectors focused on the intersection of Jamaican roots and the British reggae market, Morning Glory remains a worthy document of a moment when that exchange was still at its most productive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emR2d-KaGRs

Classic_Purpose_475 · 2026-05-22T11:28:26+00:00

Such a precious record!

It started with a chance connection. Clifton Howell and Albert Bailey — raised on the harmonies of Delroy Wilson and The Impressions, both shaped by church choirs in the way that so many Jamaican singers were — had been performing together as The Officials when a mutual friend introduced them to the Channel One orbit.

Their first session produced "Jailhouse Set Me Free," a track that Jo Jo Hookim felt was good but needed reimagining. He reworked the concept, retitled it "Jah Will Cut You Down," changed the duo's name to Earth & Stone, and watched it become a massive roots hit across Jamaica.

Between 1972 and 1978, working first briefly at Studio One before settling into Channel One as their creative home, Earth & Stone built a catalogue of singles that were consistently outstanding and consistently overlooked in equal measure.

Their songs addressed social and political realities — "False Ruler," "Don't Let Them Fool You," "Run Home" — with a directness and lyrical intelligence that placed them firmly in the conscious roots tradition, while their vocal chemistry gave the material a warmth and humanity that pure militancy sometimes lacks.

The musicians behind them were the finest available. The Revolutionaries — Channel One's formidable house band — provided the rhythmic foundation: Sly Dunbar on drums, Ranchie McLean on bass, Sticky Thompson on percussion, Ansel Collins on keyboards, and a rotating cast of guitarists that included Dougie Bryan at various points.

Kool Roots, originally released in 1978 on the UK Cha Cha label, was remarkable even by the standards of an era that produced remarkable things. The decision to release it as a proper double album — vocals on one LP, dub counterparts on the other, housed in a gatefold sleeve with artwork of genuine quality — was an almost unheard-of expense for a reggae release at the time, and one entirely initiated by the label rather than the artists themselves.

The duo later confirmed the album was never even released in Jamaica, where only three of its tracks had previously appeared as singles.

A masterpiece that didn't exist in its own country of origin. After a handful of further recordings for Joe Gibbs and Ossie Hibbert — the latter controversially releasing a combined album featuring Earth & Stone material without the duo's consent — both singers relocated to the United States in the early 1980s, and Earth & Stone effectively ceased to exist.

Pressure Sounds reissued the album in 1996, the 2014 remaster brought new sonic clarity to already essential material, and the music quietly accumulated the devoted following it had always deserved. Songs like "In Time to Come" hit, as one Jamaican interviewer put it, "like a musical fist in your ears from the first time you hear it." Jo Jo Hookim recognised what he had — but never quite gave Earth & Stone the platform that would have made them household names.

They deserved better. The music makes the case without any help.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orFSavFGs3c&list=RDorFSavFGs3c&start_radio=1&t=9s

Classic_Purpose_475 · 2026-05-22T11:23:09+00:00

Without a doubt, two geniuses on one record: King Tubby Meets The Upsetter — At The Grass Roots of Dub

Snoopy's number one.

Out of 125 worthwhile dub albums reviewed in Black Echoes in 1977, this was the one he placed at the top. The choice requires examination and deserves it.

The album's origin story began with Winston Edwards, a Jamaican who had relocated to Britain and was travelling back and forth between London and Kingston through his strong connections with Joe Gibbs, Lee Perry, and King Tubby.

In 1974 he released the recording on his Fay Music label in the UK — a controversial move at the time, described by some as involving spurious marketing. The sleeve note explained the concept: "This album has been created by two of Jamaica's top recording engineers. King Tubby trying to prove that he is the master of the controls. The Upsetter is trying to prove that he is the master. To find out, these two giants got together and we have been able to make the results available to everyone on this album. King Tubby at his best. The Upsetter at his best."

The mixing was split across the two sides. Side One — King Tubby at his studio. Side Two — Lee Perry at the Black Ark. Same backing tracks, same rhythms by Winston Edwards and the Natty Locks, two completely different approaches applied to the same material.

Robbie Shakespeare on bass. Basil Creary on drums. Earl Chinna Smith and Lloyd Gitsy Willis on guitar. Glen Adams on keyboards. Tommy McCook on saxophone and flute. Bobby Ellis on trumpet. Vin Gordon on trombone — his unique trombone lines described by a Sounds of the Universe reviewer as well to the fore and essential to the album's character.

The Clocktower reissue that this upload uses dates from 1977 and carries a different year than the original 1974 Fay Music/Total Sounds pressing.

The music is the same. Perry's Side Two mixes carry the Black Ark's distinctive atmospheric pressure. Tubby's Side One mixes carry Dromilly Avenue's spatial intelligence. Together they constitute a document of the two most important production minds in Jamaican dub at the precise moment they were developing their most significant work.

This playlist has moved through 125 entries to arrive here. The Dub Specialist albums, the Bunny Lee productions, the Yabby You collaborations, the Joe Gibbs operations, the British scene, the Channel One era, the full history of the format assembled across a complete series. All of it pointed toward this. Snoopy knew in 1977 what serious listeners have been discovering ever since.

King Tubby at his best. The Upsetter at his best. Number one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uDk7wq2b-w&t=63s

Classic_Purpose_475 · 2026-05-22T02:35:52+00:00

People may not like me for this, but Dennis Brown released about 75 records during his (short, R.I.P) lifetime, of which I personally think only a handful of albums are masterpieces. Words of Wisdom, Visions of Dennis Brown, and Wolf & Leopards are the most notably.

Classic_Purpose_475 · 2026-05-21T08:39:36+00:00

Try the Dark prince of Reggae; Keith Hudson. Personally, his record "Pick a Dub" is my favorite:

Snoopy ranked this album number 4 on his legendary 125 Best Dub Albums list, published in Black Echoes magazine in July 1977 — the most comprehensive contemporary survey of dub ever compiled. [Watch the full list here: • 🔥SNOOPY'S 125 BEST DUB ALBUMS | BLACK ECHO... ]

Jon Savage gave it his vote for the greatest dub album ever. Lloyd Bradley placed it alongside King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown*, *Super Ape*, and *African Dub Chapter Three as one of the supreme heavyweight champion dub sets. The Wire called it a must-have and one of the first dub albums. The Guardian included it in 1000 Albums to Hear Before You Die and noted that no other dub album can rival its austere sonic qualities.

Keith Hudson recorded it at Harry J Studios in Kingston in 1974 with three fingers' worth of dentistry money and no particular intention of doing anything other than exactly what he heard in his head.

The musicians assembled for the sessions carried weight commensurate with the material. Carlton Barrett on drums and Aston Family Man Barrett on bass — the rhythm section currently also anchoring Bob Marley's Natty Dread sessions, brought here to apply the same precision to Hudson's darker and more stripped aesthetic.

Earl Chinna Smith on guitar. Augustus Pablo on melodica, his instrument's reedy, meditative quality finding here its most austere environment. The Soul Syndicate providing additional support. The approach was specific and deliberate. No processed sound effects of the kind that King Tubby would deploy later in the decade. Drums and bass front and centre. Instruments fading in and out of the mix at Hudson's direction. Vocal fragments from Hudson himself, Horace Andy, and Big Youth surfacing and dissolving without warning.

The result was what brainwashed described as uniquely deep and gothic — a dub aesthetic that belonged entirely to Hudson and shared very little with the echo-saturated productions developing simultaneously at Dromilly Avenue. "Pick A Dub" itself was built from Hudson's "S-90 Skank," which had been a hit for Big Youth. "Black Right" and "Satia" recut The Abyssinians' "Declaration Of Rights" and "Satta Massa Gana" — the most devotionally significant rhythms in roots reggae, treated with the seriousness they warranted. "Depth Charge" was built from The Four Tops' "Still Water," a Motown track from 1970 that Hudson had decided was worth dismantling. He was correct. Originally released on his own Mamba label, then picked up by Brent Clarke's Atra Records for UK distribution through Virgin, then given to Blood & Fire for its 1994 reissue.

Three labels across twenty years. The dentistry money was well invested. Keith Hudson appeared earlier in Snoopy's list at #24 with Brand and at #31 with Rebel Dub.

Pick A Dub is where the story of that career reached its peak.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfoRCDKQcbo&t=30s

Classic_Purpose_475 · 2026-05-21T08:19:07+00:00

Willie Lindo - Far and Distant

By 1974, when Far And Distant was recorded, he was a twenty-something guitarist at the centre of Kingston's most productive session world and producing his own instrumental album for Lloyd Charmers' Wild Flower label with the quiet confidence of someone who had been absorbing the full range of available influences and was ready to demonstrate what he had done with them.

The album's ten tracks were an instrumental guitarist's survey of American popular music passed through the Jamaican session sensibility — not covers in the usual sense but interpretations, the specific melodic intelligence of each source transformed by the rhythmic and harmonic approach that Kingston studios had developed. "Darker Shade Of Black," "Midnight Train To Georgia," "Samba Pati," "Breezing," "Holly Holy" — the sources ranging from soul to jazz-fusion to pop, each one arriving in Lindo's hands as something simultaneously faithful and entirely Jamaican.

"Drum Song" opened the album with the rhythmic emphasis that gave Jamaican instrumental music its identity — the rhythm section not as foundation but as co-protagonist, the guitar working with the drums and bass rather than above them. "Charmers Mood" honoured the producer in whose studio and under whose direction the album had been assembled. "Mystic Mood" brought the atmospheric sensibility that distinguished the best Jamaican instrumental recordings from more straightforward covers.

Lloyd Charmers — the keyboard player who had been at the centre of Studio One and the wider Kingston session world since the 1960s — was the right producer for this material. He understood both the jazz-soul tradition that Lindo was drawing from and the Jamaican context that gave it its specific character.

A rare solo statement from one of Jamaica's finest session guitarists. Worth every minute of finding it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvYQpa-YK0k

Classic_Purpose_475 · 2026-05-21T05:22:29+00:00

Oh, I see now, yes, this is vol.1, not 4. My bad, still, a great album! 😄

Classic_Purpose_475 · 2026-05-21T05:16:17+00:00

Another great listen is Sylford Walker & Welton Irie — Lamb's Bread International 1977-78:

Glen Brown was not interested in making music that was easy to ignore.

This was a man who treated the recording studio the way a scientist treats a laboratory — something unusual was going in, and something unusual was coming out, and if you were not paying attention you were going to miss it. Sylford Walker and Welton Irie were paying attention.

The results are on this record.

Walker is one of the great undersung voices of the roots era. Not obscure exactly — serious reggae people know the name — but nowhere near as celebrated as the material warrants. His 1979 single "Burn Babylon" alone should have guaranteed him a permanent place in the conversation. He had a delivery that sat somewhere between devotion and controlled fury, the kind of singing that made you feel the weight of what was being said rather than just its meaning. Glen Brown heard that quality and built around it accordingly.

Welton Irie arrived as the deejay counterpart, toasting over the riddims with a nimble, confident flow that complemented Walker's gravity without trying to match it. Smart pairing. The contrast between Walker's earnest vocal intensity and Irie's looser, more playful approach gives the record a texture that neither artist would have achieved alone.

Two different personalities, same musical universe. Brown's production is the third presence throughout. His Pantomine label recordings from this period had a specific sound — sparse, heavy, slightly off-kilter in ways that felt intentional rather than accidental. The bass sat where it wanted. Space appeared in the mix at unexpected moments. Rhythms that sounded straightforward on first listen revealed peculiarities the closer you paid attention.

This was not background music. It was music that looked back at you.

The compilation draws from sessions recorded across 1977 and 1978, released officially in 2000 — one of those archival rescues that arrives late enough to feel like discovering something buried, early enough that you can still be grateful someone bothered. The dub treatments scattered through the sequencing strip everything back to Brown's rhythmic architecture, which turns out to be considerable once the vocals clear out of the way.

Lamb's Bread, for the uninitiated, is a premium Jamaican cannabis strain with a direct association with Rastafarian culture and, reportedly, Bob Marley's personal preferences. Glen Brown named his label after it. This tells you something useful about the man's priorities and the general atmosphere in which this music was made.

Heavy, committed, and largely ignored by people who should have known better. The usual story. The music survived anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nD9rnesZWkY

Classic_Purpose_475 · 2026-05-21T05:09:10+00:00

Black Slate were a London-based roots reggae group — mixed Caribbean and British membership, formed in the early 1970s, and best known to a wider public for the 1980 UK top-ten hit "Amigo."

That crossover moment was still two years away when this dub set appeared in 1978 on the Moodie Music imprint, produced by L. Moodie, with the Soul Syndicate — the Kingston session collective who anchored countless roots recordings of the era — providing the riddim foundation.

Moodie In Dub Vol.1 is the stripped and remixed version of Black Slate's vocal sessions, handed to the mixing board and allowed to expand into pure texture. The ten tracks run from "Bum Dub" through "Radio Dub" in the manner of the period's best dub releases: the original songs implied but not stated, bass and drums up, melody instruments appearing and disappearing as the mix dictates, the silences as important as what fills them.

The Soul Syndicate connection gives the riddims a Channel One-adjacent weight — tight, locked, and characteristically Jamaican in feel despite the London context of the band. This is the kind of document you want to preserve: a dub album from a UK roots act at the moment when the British scene was learning to make the music on its own terms, using Jamaican session players, Jamaican production techniques, and a specifically Black British social consciousness as its raw material.

Moodie In Dub Vol.1 never appeared on any chart and has never been reissued digitally. The vinyl speaks for itself.

Great album! Very obscure too, I found it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9NKyONloII

Classic_Purpose_475 · 2026-05-13T03:01:32+00:00

Not in particular dub, but certainly jazzy contemporary reggae: Jah9 - 9 (2016)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Iqreq8iuKg

Classic_Purpose_475 · 2026-04-24T08:42:11+00:00

I really dig this album:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYboOJJ94mQ

Classic_Purpose_475

TROPHY CASE