Dizzybeat.com – ska, reggae, rocksteady, mod and skinhead

Founder of the ska and rocksteady vocal group the Techniques, Winston Riley, passed away on Thursday, never recovering from a gunshot wound to the head he had sustained in November. He’d previously been shot in August and stabbed in September. Like so many of the Jamaican talents we respect, he was not only a talented vocalist, but an accomplished reggae producer and record shop owner.  That record shop was burned to the ground some years ago.  Such a run of “bad luck” remains a mystery, according to the family (as reported to AP).

Read the Associated Press report

This of course, comes at the same time as the death of Etta James, Johnny Otis and Errol Scorcher.

So, while life moves on, reflect on the good things, brought to us by individuals whose legacy will always remain as long as a select portion of the world have good taste in music.

Early word is that The Toasters will come to Australia for the first time in September.  The 30 + year ska veterans are undertaking a huge Asian tour in the second half of the year and we’re very lucky to finally have them coming to our shores.   They have a very special place in my heart – I’d only just started to get into ska when I took a chance with their record Hard Band for Dead and while my tastes have changed a lot since then, I can still go back to The Toasters and listen to their records with joy.  Their commentary (as well as their great danceable music) sets them above many of the same bands that became quite big in the US “3rd wave” of the late 90s.

More news to come on this, I’m sure!

I had my first excellent musical experience of 2012 on Friday seeing Lewis Floyd Henry at the Vanguard in Sydney as part of a one-man-band festival.  I didn’t feel 2011 was a particularly inspiring year for me musically, but 2012 has started on a good note.  While LFH is not a reggae artist, there are multiple connections to Jamaican music – he even commissioned his latest hat in the style of the great Jamaican 70s deejays and producers and has recently supported Little Roy.

We first saw LFH and his one-man-band in London during 2008, the last time at the community-run Hackney-Chats Palace.  He has since gone on to much bigger things and we were excited to see him out in Australia playing some shows and busking.  The man will always be compared to Hendrix in his guitar playing, but with drums at his feet, guitar amp in a pram as a sidekick and a most witty sense of humour, one stops making comparisons and is drawn into the LFH experience.

On this occasion he blended soul, psych, folk and hip-hop to chaotic success, feeding red wine to himself and his guitar amp pram between songs.  The tiredness from a days work drifted away from me  – the second-wind one hopes for came thanks to the energy from LFH and I can’t help but think 2012 might continue in the direction he has set.  He is in the country for at least another week and I suggest you seek him out and enjoy his talents.

Following on from this Saturday’s night at the Bald Faced Stag, Dub for Juss, comes a night at the Sly Fox in Enmore that is bound to get those into black music interested.  Reggae Got Soul has really found its feet in Newcastle, and now the night is coming to Sydney.

The night will highlight the wide variety of exceptional music that came out of Jamaica and the USA in the 50s, 60s and early 70s. Find all the details below and see you at the bar!

DJs spinning the best selection of vintage reggae, soul, funk, r’n'b, rocksteady and traditional ska!

From Newcastle: Dan Phelan, Luke Dolan and Juz Moon
From Sydney: Rudy Powell, Glen Smyth, Beccy Connell and Mark Keith Brown

When: Saturday 13th August 2011!
Where: The Sly Fox, 199 Enmore Rd Enmore
Time: 9pm – late!
FREE!

Join the Facebook group:
http://www.facebook.com/so​ulshakedownparty

A good mate, who many of you from Sydney would know, Gilesy, has organised a do featuring the best of vintage Jamaican sounds to help a friend out with some reconstruction surgery following a battle with cancer.  We’re happy at Dizzybeat to be supporting his efforts, particularly as we know the music will be of the highest quality.  Please come along for a boogie to the best in ska, reggae, rocksteady and dub.

Check out the facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=198822866836905&ref=ts

While many ska and reggae fans will have, at one stage, gathered around a computer together to share the joys of Yo Gabba Gabba, particularly the Aggrolites doing Banana or an animated Alex Desert from Hepcat highlighting the benefits of cleaning your room, when it comes to bringing the soul, Sesame Street is the originator.

Having grown up with Sesame Street, like so many others, it doesn’t really ever leave you. The reason being, the quality of the songs, as well as the fairly novel approach to them, making them universally infectious.

What started the youtube marathon of Sesame Street was Gen putting me on to a reggae tune about a rubber duck, after I’d bought her a St Pauli FC one for her birthday.  A favourite topic of Ernie, of course. With the wonderful credit, from the motion picture The Harder They Scrub, it is an extravaganza of muppets, introduced by the Count, and catchy to boot.

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From all the feedback and press, the 2011 London International Ska Festival was a great success, and already the 2012 dates have been announced, with venue and lineup details to follow.

Here is the spiel from the organisers:

We are delighted to announce after the huge success of The London Intl Ska Festival’s return this year we will be making it an annual event. 2012′s festival will be held on 3-6 May’12, with 30+ bands & DJs from all over the world!

We are offering the first 100 x 4 day earlybird tickets at a discounted price – saving you £40! We are also delighted to be offering these with no booking fee!

Pick yours up now at http://www.londoninternationalskafestival.co.uk/tickets/

Venue & line up details to follow. If you enjoyed 2011′s festival, 2012 is going to raise the standard even higher!

We’re heading to the Hollywood Hotel this Saturday night in Surry Hills for a night of ska, soul, mod, reggae and punk for Uptown Top Ranking. It’s always a great night, with a welcoming locale and great tunes on the wheels of steel.

The date is Saturday May 28, 2011 in case you weren’t sure.

And just for the record, in case some “readers” at Dizzybeat think otherwise, we celebrate ska, reggae, rocksteady, rhythm and blues, soul, garage and punk. We’re a positive movement that welcomes any race, sex or creed.

Also, we don’t post comments in response to the haters on this site or any other. It seems obvious, given some feedback, that the haters assume people don’t share my views and don’t act in their own ways. Of course, after ten years of doing dizzybeat.com, I know that many worldwide believe what we believe, and wholeheartedly support our love for music, are welcoming to us, but also act in different ways to us with our best interests at heart.

To another ten years!

Rhoda Dakar and Jerry Dammers are amazing, by the way.

Many will well know we love Pauline Black here at Dizzybeat – we fell in love with her all over again when she performed in Sydney in 2009.  Her voice hadn’t lost any of the power I’d heard resonating out of the original 2-tone recordings, and the energy she had as well as the rapport she developed with the audience made it a truly memorable gig.  Below is her reading our very irregular zine in the back corridors of the Forum, where it was pleasing to find she was as sincere and welcoming as we’d hoped she be.

Skip to video below

Her latest project is in combination with the other original Selecter vocalist Arthur Hendricksen, performing as The Selecter  (Neol Davies is performing with a seperate incarnation of the band).  Pauline and Arthur’s new single is titled Big in the Body, Small in the Mind, a cover of the Woody Guthrie Song, All You Fascists Bound to Lose.  It will make up part of a new album they are set to release in September titled Made in Britain.  The press release for the new single is worth reading too, with some stirring words about the amount of rhetoric being heard from the right in many Western nations currently:

The Selecter was once described as “conspiring to make dancing the only way to walk”. 31 years later, those words still hold true.

In late 2010 the Selecter returned to the music scene with a plan. Uniting the original singing duo of Pauline Black & Arthur ‘Gaps” Hendrickson with a sleek, tight band augmented by a horn section at Bloomsbury Ballroom on Nov 13th, led to instant offers of a storming slew of shows early this year. Energized by the enthusiastic audience response, they decided to record a brand new 10-track album “Made In Britain”, produced by Neil Pyzer- and due for release on Sept 1st 2011.

“Big In The Body- Small In The Mind” is the first single taken from the album. It is a slice of The Selecter doing what they do best, mixing a ska/rocksteady beat with a pop sensibility, coupled with some acute social observations on the state of the world right now. An homage to Woody Guthrie and a rallying call to all those fans who still feel that 2-Tone bands should be musically confronting the ugly face of racism, represented worldwide by odious organizations like EDL,BNP, KKK, Forza Nuova, Tea Party etc. The Selecter is proud to embrace the idea of multiculturalism. Many of the organizations just mentioned and seemingly the British ‘ConDem’ Government want to stamp it out. We believe multiculturalism is worth fighting for – and not only that, in the words of the song – all you fascists bound to lose!

For more info visit: http://www.theselecter.net/

The influential ska drummer and original Skatalites member Lloyd Knibb has passed away, aged 80. I’ll link to the obit when it gets written in the Jamaica Gleaner or the UK’s Guardian.  Time is an inevitable destroyer of greatness, but we will have our memories, and knowledge that the world is a better place for the drumming of Lloyd Knibb.

I was also saddened to hear of the death of Lionel Rose this past week, at the relatively young age of 62.  An amazing World Title winning Indigenous boxer, role model, snappy dresser and friend to Elvis. Humility is a wonderful thing.  Read the obituary on the Sydney Morning Herald website.