Less pillow, more comfort blanket, this gentle, stringsified reggae lope starts with a promise of heartbreak – that bowed and broken intro – which the lyrics might keep but the music doesn’t. It’s not that reggae songs can’t be sad, but ones as jauntily and lightly played as this would find it difficult: the rhythm here is lending Nash strength, not underpinning his sorrow. It may not carry much emotional punch, but “Tears On My Pillow” is perfectly acceptable pop – a strong melody, well-sung. The only duff moment is the spoken word mumble in the middle – one of the least committed I’ve ever heard.
Score: 5
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I’m never sure what to make of this. It’s pleasant enough, and I seem to remember it went agreeably with sitting out in the sunshine in my parents’ garden (parents being still in Canada and the last lot of tenants having been removed so that I could slob about in it for the summer!) with a glass of something cool and a book (I think this was about the time I sat and read the whole cycle of G K Chesterton’s Father Brown stories in a week).
Agreeable it may have been, and its jaunty melancholy is certainly infectious, but it doesn’t induce any particular emotions in me. I’d rather remember Johnny Nash for I Can See Clearly Now from a few years earlier, but that might be an age thing.
I may be a meringue but I believe we’ll be seeing this again at some point as another recycled title, if not a thinly-disguised recycled song.
“I Can See Clearly Now” is a lot better than this, yes!
And yes, this one crops up again so we can compare and contrast then
Not the Little Anthony and the Imperials song but *SPOILER* a version of that is still to come *END OF SPOILER*…
Not too much to say about this one; I wish “I’m Not In Love” had been succeeded by a more potent record than this (for instance, “Jive Talkin'”) and while Nash stands as a key-ish figure in terms of popularising reggae – his “Stir It Up,” two years ahead of Clapton’s “I Shot The Sheriff,” introduced the music of Bob Marley to our charts – “I Can See Clearly Now” is so clearly his one great record that it seems bizarre that it stopped at #9 in the UK and yet this entirely unremarkable midtempo smoocher went all the way. Pop as Chinese food – half an hour later, you’ve forgotten it. Except that the first part of the song seems to come from another record altogether.
A well-deserved reward for a solid performer who had been around for years. Nash, actually an American, plied his trade in doing a reggae turn and scoring nicely in this guise. Never a musical heavyweight, Johnny nonetheless did “pleasant” very well and TOMP rated high in this regard, the result being the CBS record selling bucket loads. It loses brownie points, as Tom says, when Nash goes talkabout in the middle, always very annoying, but in the main we are left with a nice enough little number, albeit one sung by a bit of a wuss, who clearly didn’t follow the manly principal laid down by the female voiceover in the middle of the last number one.
The “I Can See Clearly Now” album is rather splendid.
I always thought he was a Jamaican or a Brit and was quite surprised to find out he was a Yank, I believe he even had a few minor R&B hits before he discovered Reggae (and a young lad by the name of Marley) while on holiday in Jamaica.
I’ve a feeling I like this one more than most people here but I’m a sucker for 70s pop reggae.
i’m no expert but wasn’t this stuff a bit passe by ’75? My knowledge of reggae is a bit poor when it comes to dates, strict chronology etc but i figured the heyday of smooth string-laden pop-reggae hit covers of US soul tracks had been around the 68-72 period and by this point most folk had moved on to Roots, Marley, Dub etc. I know pop history never moves along a straight line but having just listened to this for (i think) the first time i would have figured it originated at least 4 years earlier- was this a final horrah for this sound, something of a throwback to a slightly earlier period or am i (gulp)just plain wrong here?
Radio 1 weren’t exactly going out of their way to spin things like “King Tubby Meets The Rockers Uptown” or “Slavery Days” during the daytime. Probably the closest the ’75 charts came was “Hurt So Good” by Susan Cadogan, produced by Lee Perry and marketed in Britain by Pete Waterman, but otherwise, apart from “No Woman No Cry” (which seems to do its best to avoid sounding like reggae at all, he says controversially), 1975’s pop reggae crossover as such was more accurately indicated by Judge Dread’s top ten cover of “Je T’Aime,” though the appearance of Paul Davidson’s splendid cover of the Allmans’ “Midnight Rider” right at the end of the year was most welcome.
i think it depends a bit what you mean by “most folk” crag: the most militant reggaehead and roots expert at nme, penny reel, who not only knew all about the music but hung out with half its makers, was also a deep lover of the pop and MOR side of the sound*, which of course remained beloved of the non-youth end of the market in JA as well as london**
*he wrote a very funny and loving piece abt boney m playing a UK seaside resort in 1978, called “by the rivers of babbacombe”
**ie militant youth (black) weren’t fierce advocates of their mum and dad’s MOR faves, but they weren’t especially hostile either; militant youth (white), esp. if they’d ONLY JUST DISCOVERED REGGAE, tended to apply a much more rockish anti-parent discrimination; old-skool aficionados*** reacted a little against this earnest influx
***ie the writers at black echoes (later just “echoes”) mag
I have a Nash ‘best of’ CD which is mostly great throughout. But I agree his masterpieces are “I Can See Clearly Now” and “Stir It Up” (the latter included on the first LP I ever owned, a K-Tel comp I’ve mentioned on about four Popular threads now).
I didn’t mention this at the time, but when “I Can See Clearly Now” was #1 in the US, “My Ding-A-Ling” was #1 in the UK.
I don’t know this song, it sounds fine aside from the spoken word part though.
SELF-CORRECTION (if only):
“I Can See Clearly Now” actually made #5 in the UK, so that wasn’t so bad. The four above it? Donny and his Puppy Love, the double G with Rock ‘N’ Roll Part 2, the good Dr Hook with Sylvia’s Mother (the bad Dr Hook we’ll come to later) and the New Seekers sing Harry Chapin (“Circles”).
You can always trust the Great British Public to cock it up royally – Nash’s ‘I Can See Clearly Now’ (with it’s sublimely dreamy ‘..there’s nothing but blue skyyyyy….’ section) should have been number one, not this ! That’s not to say TOMP is a bad record – it isn’t – it just seems a bit characterless and lightweight. At this moment in time Marley was still pretty unknown and reggae still a bit of a novelty in the charts (witness an upcoming entry). There was also Judge Dread……
Marcello, i appreciate Diddy David Hamilton and The Hairy Cornflake weren’t spinning much I-Roy or Burning Spear at this time but would i be correct in believing that by ’75 unashamedly “pop” reggae was , at least for the time being, well past it’s commercial peak (apart from the odd exception of course, such as the track under discussion) and reggae had instead began to become seen by many as “proper” music, appreciated by serious, young white men with beards who read “Sounds” every week, worshpped Zeppelin and Clapton, and only bought albums, considering singles as “kids stuff”? Again i could be way off mark but i’m curious to hear from those around at the time.
(Btw good point re: “Jive Talkin'”- a much more worthy number 1 than this, I say…)
Not quite, crag; in ’76 you still had the odd “Dat” or “Sideshow” coming through…though the next major influx, unsurprisingly, comes in the wake of punk…
Incidentally, Number Two Watch: Mr Nash kept off Ray Stevens’ radical reworking of Erroll Garner’s “Misty.”
The West Indian kids at my school derided even the sainted Bob Marley as “white man’s music” as they played their heavy 12″ dub tracks on the youth centre record player.
There’s a major pop reggae #1 coming up in 1978, probably the biggest one ever.
Stevens’ “Misty” was wonderful says I. I remember having to correct someone once when he insisted that it was in fact JOEL Garner who had written it, Erroll presumedly being the fearsome pace bowler for both the West Indies and Somerset.
Bunny alert, LondonLee. Tread carefully!
Biting my tongue.
I just thought of a few others too.
er did you not read what i said crag? “seen by many” is a very vague term: pop is not owned by the young, black or white, and nor are its commercial peaks solely defined by rockmag-readers
i think it’s absolutely the case that this music was coming to be seen to be uncool by militant youth — but when londonlee sez “even” marley was “white man’s music”, there’s a specific history (of marley’s own choices) there which DISTINGUISHES him from the MOR reggae-pop that carried on selling big back in jamaica to black mums&dads, and could still sell out big halls in london for years to come, just off the radar of white critics
also of course, american soul and soul-pop and soul-MOR (and country) were all enormously popular in the caribbean — but also off the radar of the recently-converted (white) critical militant
Re: Post 8, subsection 2:
Yeah, I always thought the Clash song had it “You can’t put UK pop reggae through backin’ fine sound systems”
In fact, it was “Ken Booth, UK Pop reggae” and was being approved of. (It was the supposedly more ‘radical’ stuff that was ‘four tops all night’)…
Spot on, Mark (#19, 20). I once walked into my nearest record shop just off the Brixton Road (I think to buy Gaye’s “Got To Give It Up”) and witnessed a dreadlocked guy in his thirties, I guess, purchasing a Perry Como record. The shop doubled as an electrical shop and the owner was a middle aged bespectacled white fellow in yellow overalls. His younger assistant looked like the guy out of Blue Mink. Very odd.
“We don’t often get one of your lot asking for Perry Como,” the older man remarked.
Whoops!
sorry pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør- i read ur v interesting post (#8) AFTER i’d written my own second post! Sorry for any confusion. Since i wasnt around at the time ive unfortunately had to rely on the “established history of pop and rock” as outlined by rock hacks(many of whom probably werent around then either)and i appreciate the chance to read post here about how these developments and changes in pop felt to real people who actually were there. I wasn’t actually enquiring about the percieved “coolness” of Nash and the like, merely the chart success of pop-reggae artists which i thought had dwindled by this point(and which, as several have been kind enough to point out, i was completely wrong in doing so!) Thanks to all for their thoughts on this matter…
I used the phrase “even the sainted Bob Marley” as an ironic joke considering how he’s now some kind of holy figure to white rock fans (epscially here in the States where they never bought any of his records when he was alive) but the reality at the time was a little more complicated, I remember his “Kaya” album getting mixed reviews because it was seen as being too light and fluffy.
unlike the last three No.1s, all of which marked their time indelibly (particularly ‘I’m Not In Love’), this one doesn’t seem to have left a trace in my memory for these things. Not a bad record, but I found myself saying: ‘so THAT’s when it came out. ’75. Hm..’
Re-#24. It’s Marley canonisation by the the white rock fans that actually has always put me off investigating his work- his admirers tend to always be people who don’t actually particularly like reggae and probably havent even heard of King Tubby or Dr. Allimantado. Probably a slghtly stupid stance on my part but i do have a real fondness for certain types of reggae/ska rocksteady etc even though my knowledge of the genre is hardly perfect(as has already been demonstrated!)and feel many Marley fans think owning a copy of “Legend” means they know all there is to know about Jamician music- a stance i find irritating and a little distasteful.
yes, i didn’t mean to sound snippy! and i wasn’t jumping on yr point, lee, which i think is perfectly valid re marley, more that i’m just not sure if you can extrapolate from how marley was being talked about by angry black london schoolkids in the late 70s (?)*, to how they (or their parents) (or uncles and aunts back in jamaica) would have been talkin about the infinitely less “cool” johnny nash a few years earler: bcz very very uncool dadreggae or mumreggae — if broadly popular in jamaica or brixton — might still not in ANY sense be “white man’s music”; where marley (can be said to have) sold out, johnny nash never pretended to have “sold in”, and so wd have continued to have been held in much more fond regard (possibly)**
*you didn’t actually say when exactly yr schooldays were!
**of course there’s also that element of dread that was deliberate baffling black hipsterism — whereby notably “uncool” things wd be embraced precisely to throw off and trip up neophytes… this is what’s being celebrated and mocked, i think, on the legendary cover of dr alimantado’s “best dressed chicken”, where he has his flies open and his scarlet underpants on show… yr meant to be thinking “haha is this man the COOLEST GUY ALIVE?” (or is his flies undone?)
Aren’t some of these comments sailing a bit close to a particularly insidious wind of racial stereotyping? I’m sure there was a substantial body of Caribbean-heritage young people which was enthusiastic about heavy-duty dub. There was also a substantial body of enthusiastic white people. I doubt if they formed a majority of either sector. Certainly my experience of living in North Kensington suggested that large sound systems were a minority taste barely tolerated by most locals of any hue even at Carnival time. One might as well suggest that all the cool young English folks were into morris dancing.
I like Bob Marley and mourned his passing way back in ’81, and I don’t get particularly excited about most reggae, if anybody wants to make something of that. I think Marley was more or less sui generis, and I wouldn’t like to see him portrayed as some kind of sell-out.
re:#27- I’m intrigued with the comment that Nash, Ken Booothe etc ‘might still not in ANY sense be “white man’s music”- i’d always figured that their records had been specifically designed to be exactly that i.e. unashamedly ‘pop’ records, aimed at a mainstream (white, in other words)audience who bought records in the charts by anyone from Mud to Tammy Wynette as long they had a nice tune, a beat you tap your toes to, and a sound that was earcatching witout being too disorientating or ‘alien’. Surely it was these people who sent these records to number 1 more than the ‘mums and dads in Jamacia and Brixton’you refer to?
I do hope one off-hand comment by some loudmouth kid in my youth centre circa 1977 isn’t going to set off some kind of race controversy here.
Reggae of all kinds was very popular among the (white) kids around my way in SW6, especially the home-grown Lovers Rock of the late 70s.
Rosie, i by no means meant any “racial stereotyping” by my comments.Obviously many white music fans love many different reggae artists as well as Marley while others, like yourself do not have much time for the genre beyond him. Both are equally valid. What i was commenting on was the people(and i have meet many)who adore Marley but seem unaware of practically any other reggae artist- people who would list UB40 as their 2nd favorite reggae then struggle to name a third. You, however, seem to have some knowledge of the music and simply don’t find most of it to your taste which is obv fair enough. As i acknowledged my opinion was probably ” a slightly stupid stance” and i apologise for any offence caused.
It’s not so many years after this that Errol, a friend of mine of working-class Jamaican parentage, was wont to say of a rainy day “dat white man’s wevver man!” In other words, a general term of disparagement with tongue firmly in cheek.
Errol took umbrage at the suggestion that at home he might enjoy things like ackee and saltfish, plantain and curry goat. He got, and liked, sausage and chips. The ackee and saltfish was more likely to be consumed by middle-class white people trying to salve their consciences. I’m not suggesting that Errol was either typical or untypical, but I am suggesting that there might be a parallel here.
Crag: our posts crossed. I know and accept what you are saying, I wasn’t attacking anybody, just suggesting that we might all be a bit careful.
there’s two different things going on, i think, crag:
i: these are artists who are beloved in the black communities in london and in the caribbean, over many years…
ii: … who at a particular point have a very sizeable crossover hit, possibly by design, possibly by accident…
iii: no doubt some of them then spent a season trying calculatedly to recapture the effect, but to no avail…
iv: … so they relaxed back into being adored by their first and most loyal audience, for many years to come
whereas marley was certainly seen (by some) as having spurned his roots audience for worldwide attention, as a long-term proposition: at the behest of chris blackwell, he changed his band and his sound, dispensing with the services of the great bunny wailer and the er occasionally great peter tosh, and made music with a rock audience in mind (to be fair, others were pleased by and proud of this wider success, and didn’t hold it against him)
in other words, a lucky one-off doesn’t make you “white man’s music”; but a long and deliberate campaign MAY DO SO (especially in a politicised context, as a key strand of reggae was increasingly to become)
and, yes, all caveats about rubbish generalisations apply
Apropos morris dancing (#28) – I remember my brother telling me to my general disbelief that at his own school (one of the best grammar schools in London – all male), they enjoyed the benefit of being schooled in the nicities of “country dancing”. This, I felt, was where the participants “hit” each other “playfully” with batons as they circled each other. Dear God, had we had that at Stockwell Manor, the playground would have been covered in chalk outlines within twenty minutes.
a logged out p^nk s lord sukråt (#33, i totally agree with you regarding ‘selling-out’, ‘crossing over’ etc etc. I imagine its the same with reggae as it is with every single type of music usually seen as outside the “mainstream” when an artist working in the genre achieves “mainstream” chart success.
Surely one of the points of Popular is, as well as sharing musical opinions, memories, amusing anecdotes etc is to work out HOW certain records made it to number one, particularly if as in the case of “Tears on my Pillow” their musical merits are not especially obvious(IMO). This was why i was enquiring what section(s) of music fandom would have been purchasing the record and figured those of you around in ’75 may have had some idea.
I will try to keep any generalisations(rubbish or otherwise) to myself in future..
As for who was buying this, I can’t really answer that with any authority, but from my knowledge of friends who did have copies of it later on, they were typically women in their late thirties/early forties, whose teenage bedrooms might have been adorned with Cliff Richard or, more probably, Billy Fury. who (in the words of a wonderful song of 1975 that the same demographic evidently wasn’t buying. which is a shame) “married young and then retired”. Or, more likely, they were those “with ravaged faces, lacking in the social graces” (a bit like me I guess, which is why I love that particular song) trying to find some romance in the spaces of their humdrum lives.
The audience for pop music has always been much less tribal that is sometimes portrayed. Of course there is a spectrum, with all kinds of shades along the line. Most records are bought because they have been heard on the radio or at the club/disco and the buyer either likes the sound of it or associates it with some kind of pleasurable experience.
Funnily enough, today’s post brought back my CD of Trout Mask Replica which I’d despaired of ever seeing again after lending it a couple of years ago to somebody who listened to it and then tried to bury it somewhere where it wouldn’t do any more harm. As these things will, like nuclear waste, it surfaced again so it’;s come back to me. Now there’s an album it’s hard to associate with the words ‘pleasurable experience’ – although I’ve grown rather fond of it in a perverse kind of way.
no, i agree — why this crossed over in such a way at such a moment (and who did it cross over to) is very intriguing, but i think any guesses on my part will end up plunging into exactly the assumptions i’m trying to be a bit sceptical of!
taking this plunge:
one thing we have been seeing a little of — with “whispering grass” for example — is a little mid-70s bubble-up of music redolent of pre-rock’n’roll pop styles, a sort of post-60s-turmoil old-timers chart insurgency, perhaps fuelled by DJs *NOT* simply working the “kids’ market”; marcello will be way better than me on who in particular these DJ might have been
in other words, treating the reggae beat as just happenstance colouring, is this a song that would via vocal styling appeal to, i don’t know, a brook benton fan, say? [or insert other late-50s pre-soul crooner here…] [my dad would always talk about singers who were CLEAR, as a value: he didn’t like the rock or soul shout-and-grunt]
this is pure speculation — for all i know it was the tune for a humorous lawnmower commercial
Perhaps I can help Crag out (#35) by offering this from personal memory. The record we are discussing was extremely popular amongst my school friends both male and female, black and white (the same would apply to a varying degree to a number one coming up very soon). It would seem logical to suspect (sans figures to back this up) that this was mirrored broadly across the other conurbations of the UK. Result? Best selling single.
Aren’t you all over thinking this? It was a hit because it had a catchy tune and people liked it.
It’s not rocket science.
Fair point, Lee. The discussion just seemed to spiral for some reason. Time we moved on, i think..
ps Rosie, re: ur recent cd purchase- ur a woman after my own heart- fast and bulbous etc!
Yeah, I think it’s quite simple as well. It was Engelbert with a backbeat, and hence universally wishy-washy enough to strike big with the Harmony Hairspray brigade, in a way that the patently superior “Stir It Up”, “I Can See Clearly Now” (and to a lesser extent “There Are More Questions Than Answers” couldn’t). A random break-out, that just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and I dare say much loved by the “Diddy” David Hamiltons of this world.
(And also, as others have said, remarkably forgettable; I couldn’t have put a tune to it at all.)
What a fantastic thread! I’d never have guessed at the outset that the discussion would see Marcello referencing Harry Chapin at #11 and Rosie at #36 invoking Janis Ian (and if there was a better 1975 album than Between the Lines it passed me by). Truly I am blessed!
I should have commented on INIL (I’ve been very busy at work), but have really enjoyed these two discussions partly because the INIL thread brought up Joan Armatrading’s “Love and Affection”, and this has encompassed “No woman, no cry” without doubt the two most-played singles in my sixth year Common Room of 1976-77.
I have no memory at all of this being #1 (though I remember the record well enough). Surprising, because looking at the dates it would have been Scottish school holidays, so lots of leisure time. I seem to remember we did a tour of the Highlands for our hols in (the hot, hot – never understood the fixation with ’76)1975, but that would have been in August.
It’s pleasant enough, I suppose, but I always thought it was a bit wimpy (As we all now know, “Big boys don’t cry”, after all…
The discussion is far superior to the single! It’s hard to find much to say about it – its not the sort of thing that you could mind much, but a bit pallid and dull, and the more interesting exercise of comparison will have to wait until we get to the nineties.
It fails to evoke what crying in bed actually feels like, in my experience.
Re post 22, something that I’m always remembering is – a few years ago, I was in the Central Birmingham branch of HMV and in front of me in the queue was a young black woman buying a Mott the Hoople box set. Had the customer been any two of this combination of age, race and sex, I wouldn’t have thought about it very much, but she just seemed such a long way from the expected audience for such a thing… So I often wonder – Was it a present for someone? Or, if she was getting it for herself, was it what she expected? Either way, I hope that her purchase made her happy.
I wonder why we find it so odd that black people like white music when we don’t think twice about the opposite.
Is it because black music is usually so much better that we’re puzzled as to why on earth they would like our rubbish?
one thing we have been seeing a little of — with “whispering grass” for example — is a little mid-70s bubble-up of music redolent of pre-rock’n’roll pop styles, a sort of post-60s-turmoil old-timers chart insurgency, perhaps fuelled by DJs *NOT* simply working the “kids’ market”; marcello will be way better than me on who in particular these DJ might have been
Well, by summer ’75 the “kids’ market” had kind of imploded – it was essentially the Rollers now and everyone else had fallen off or dropped out for one reason or another; the Osmonds, Cassidy, Slade etc. were still getting hits but these were getting progressively smaller and people got progressively less excited about them (possibly relevant is the emergence of Barry Manilow in ’75 as a commercial force just in time to catch those who had “grown out” of Donny and David). Meanwhile the Big Blokes (Rod, Bowie, Queen, Floyd, Zep &c.) continued to thrive but they were not “kids’ market” orientated as such.
Set against that 1975 saw number one greatest hits albums from Perry Como, Jim Reeves, Tom Jones and Elvis so the Radio 2 demographic of that time were clearly leading the way and – as Abigail’s Party proved – weren’t invariably old timers in age terms but were maybe worried.
In terms of pop that kids could buy there probably wasn’t too much except for dance music (and paradoxically 1975 was one of the great years of dance music). Daytime Radio 1 and Radio 2 playlists and broadcasters were more or less interchangeable (Johnnie Walker excepted, and R1 may have had greater disco input); this was the era of Blackburn having his daily nervous breakdowns and playing nothing but weepy ballads, of aural valium/sherry cocktails.
For the novelty hits, though, look to Noel Edmonds (R1) and Wogan (R2) and the undervalued and always forgotten Junior Choice with Ed Stewart which was largely responsible for the popularity of things like Mike Reid’s “Ugly Duckling,” “Trail Of The Lonesome Pine” and what have they.
I think we might also now be into the era when R1 and R2 merged frequencies for David Hamilton’s afternoon show. “Three at three”, “four at four”, “everything stops for tea”…
This is a great thread, but I’m going to interrupt it anyway for my regular nudge in the direction of the Europop 2008 game:
https://popular-number1s.com/ft/2008/03/europop-2008-group-c-france-v-romania/ – France v Romania (closes in 24 hours)
https://popular-number1s.com/ft/2008/03/europop-2008-group-c-holland-v-italy/#comment-401853 – Holland v Italy, ft none other than Dr Mod!
I’ll steer clear of any in-depth discussion on race, stereotyping and reggae (we’ll have plenty of this before the summer of ’75 is out) and just agree with those above who pointed out it’s a perfectly nice summery song well performed by a singer who was generally seen as a nice guy who made good records (although “I Can See Clearly Now” or “More Questions Than Answers” should have been his Number 1.)
A couple of remarks about “unlikely” punters for certain types of music – Billy (#43), I’m not sure if we’ve mentioned this before but a notable fan of Mott the Hoople in their early days was a London-based student by the name of Benazir Bhutto.
And about a year later, our Latin teacher – none too worldly-looking, lay preacher in his spare time – was talking about the vocative case of the noun “rex”, leaned back and said “a little rege like it used to be”. OK, he was invoking Paul Nicholas rather than Burning Spear, but we still sat open-mouthed.
Great to have “At Seventeen” invoked on this thread. What a superb song.
Just a few stray thoughts: what’s time specific about the Marley marketing for the global audience – which comes across very clearly in the episode of Great Albums Catch A Fire – is that what was happening to the music was the opposite of the conventional notion of a ‘sell-off process’. IE, the songs were made less bright and perky so as to be more acceptable to ‘serious rock fans.’
For those who are interested in the ever-contentious subject of white fetishisation of “authentic black music”, Marybeth Hamilton’s In Search Of The Blues is really interesting, if ultimately a little unsatisfying.
Finally, I’ll try not to mention this again, but… the African-Caribbean population of Britain isn’t very big, so any black hit ever will have had predominantly white buyers.
mark is that because what i’ve been calling “militant” reggae tended to exist in TWO forms: viz the (jamaican) pop hit and the dub version(s)? a rockified reggae being murkier than the pop version but less alien (alien that is to rock fans in the mid-70s) than the dub version?
some of the confusions here arise because the years 1975-82 were so compressed in pop time — all kinds of attitudes turned inside out, and inside out again, and it’s really hard from the vantage point of now, not to misperceive 1976 say, through the eyes and ears of 1979 even if you laboured through both years as an music obsessive