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With The Specials due in Australia in late July, the Sydney ska scene is coming together on Sunday June 28th at the Vanguard (King St, Newtown) to celebrate our connection to ska and 2-tone. Joining Backy Skank is an all-star lineup including Pat Powell (Club Ska), Steve Montgomery (The Ska Vendors), Steve Phillips (Just Kidding), Stuart Crysell (The Allniters) and Mark Heather (Riot City/Steppin' Razor) for a celebration paying homage to some of the great ska bands. I'll also be spinning some tunes. It's an early start at 6 pm. Please come along!

Tickets are available online

Hawk-eyed readers amongst you will notice I've made a couple of small, but important additions to Dizzybeat. The first is adding a "widget" down the bottom of posts that allows people to tell other folk about the article using their favoured social networking site. So please, don't hold back. The other addition is a section in the right hand column that features interesting ska and reggae news from the web. I figure it is better than simply rehashing the content as my own.

Finally, if you are on Facebook, be sure to "become a fan" of Dizzybeat by following the link below. It's in addition to the Facebook Group, because groups seemed to have taken a backseat. Who knows, maybe we'll even get on to Twitter soon.

Become a fan of Dizzybeat on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/pages/Everything-Crash-and-Di...

The following interview first appeared in the print zine Everything Crash from March 2009.

Pama International were a favourite of ours during our time in the UK in 2008. They are perhaps the most prolific reggae band in the UK. In addition, keyboardist Sean Flowerdew has a rich ska and reggae history and presently runs the record label Rockers Revolt. Pama International will release a new album, titled Pama Outernational, towards the end of 2009. To read the full interview, click Read More.

You’re not new to the record label game. How is Rockers Revolt different from Jamdown, which released the first of Pama International’s records?

I started my first label in 1988, Staccato Records which released albums and 12”s by; The Loafers, Maroon Town, a live comp featuring The Trojans, Potato 5, Hotknives, The Deltones, Judge Dread, and a few others. I ran Jamdown Records from 1996 to 2004, but by that time it had purely become a vehicle for Pama Intl. Rockers Revolt launched at the end of 2007, again primarily as a vehicle for Pama Intl.

There’s no major differences between Jamdown and Rockers Revolt. They’re both born out of love for ska/reggae. I suppose Jamdown released more bands leaning towards punk (4ft Fingers, Rudebones from Japan and Identity No 1, which was a fantastic record, they should of been huge). Under Jamdown we also released some more trad.ska sounds: Topcats and Stubborn All-stars (one of the best records we issued), some US ska (Bim Skala Bim), some 2 Tone sounding stuff (Capone & The Bullets), a couple of decent comps and three Pama Intl releases. Nothing sold though apart from Pama, Stubborn All-stars and 4ft Fingers a bit. Well not enough to justify running a label. It was more of a hobby I guess!

Rockers Revolt is a much serious affair for all the right reasons. Throughout 2008 we tried to put out hot sounds from both sides of the Atlantic and also get label tours going. Some have worked. Some have failed in fine style, which has been a bit of a shock. 2008 was not a good year financially to try and establish a label! But we battle on and I think we’ve got the RR name out there quite well, in a short space of time. The response to the Pama Intl love Filled Dub Band has been tremendous. It’s in a few “Best of 2008 albums” round-ups; Total Music mag had it in their Top 10 of the year and Record Collector had it in their Top 10 Reggae albums of the year. So that’s was a huge buzz. Ed Rome’s debut ‘A Life In Minutes’ is doing very well as well. Steve Lamacq included Ed in his best albums of 2008 on his BBC Radio 2 show. Again, a huge buzz.

As part of the upcoming festival curated by Brian Eno, Lee "Scratch" Perry will be performing at the Opera House on Thursday 11th June. He will be joined by British Producer Adrian Sherwood for a concert of live dub. I haven't caught Lee Perry on any of his previous trips to Australia, but there's no doubting his significant contribution to reggae music and the Opera House is sure to be a wonderful setting for the show.

Tickets: http://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/whatson/leeperry.aspx

Megalith Records

For fans of: Ska and reggae with more polish than grit.

Channel One only recently made it on to the Dizzybeat radar thanks to some coverage on Musicaloccupation.com. Hailing from San Antonio, USA they have a new record out on The Toasters’ label, Megalith. I had to scrounge around for some context to the release and the band, and I am glad I bothered, because context is everything, after all. In other reviews, the alt country label gets thrown into the description of their sound, something I’m not sure the band would be too happy about, having made it clear that they’d prefer that no distinct labels be attached to their sound (apart from ska and reggae I guess). However, the polish I would associate with alt country is definitely evident with Channel One, and while a gritty sound is very common in the world of contemporary ska and reggae, such polish is a welcome change.

Pose & Posture is a fairly brief album with ten songs, though it makes sense given the time associated with recording and the need for a band to build recognition with listeners. After a short introduction from Rob “Bucket” Hingley, the upbeat Please makes a great start to the album. I Let My Guard Down is a more conventional sounding ska track, and is my way into this album. It sits well with the track Hum in that it is more what I expect to hear from a ska album. It’s on other tracks such as Let Her Run and Til It’s Too Late (which has an excellent guitar effect through the verse), where I am forced to open my mind.

Favourite track: Over the course of a dozen listens, Jah became my favourite song. It’s a comment on the variety of religions and their relationships, but it is handled in a very clever and paradoxically positive way. It, more than the other songs steeped in personal rhetoric, speaks to me as someone who is generally very cynical.

Overall: This is an album I’ve been happy to have stuck in the CD player. Personally, I would prefer other band members to pick up some more of the vocal harmonies, but instead they tend to have the horns doing the job, which I’m not so keen on. Also, for a band wanting to be taken seriously for their strength of song writing, I’d move away from generic cover art, but that aside, it is a very considered album with the potential for broad interest. The musicianship is excellent and in many respects quite conventionally ska. The very personal lyrical style of Gerald Hooper is quite endearing and while his voice isn’t something you’ll hear regularly in a ska band, it will be a key element in their success.

Sydney reggae favourites King Tide have a brand new record out. It's titled Roots Pop Reggae and available from Vitamin Records. They'll be taking the new album on tour of the eastern states starting next Friday in Sydney.

You can buy the new record online from Vitamin Records.

While their sound is predominantly roots, they have great admiration for reggae's foundation years, as seen in the video below, Skatalite Feelin.

Long time readers of Dizzybeat.com will know I have occasionally mentioned a print zine we have published called Everything Crash. Earlier this year it was relaunched with a very small run of, confusingly, issue one. It coincided with a visit to Australia by Pauline Black of The Selecter and great singer songwriter Ed Rome. I was lucky enough to get to meet both of them and took the chance to get photos of them reading Everything Crash (inspired by Hoi Polloi zine).

Over the next couple of weeks I'll be putting content from issue one of Everything Crash on to Dizzybeat.com, but for now check out the photos!