My friend Steve Caruana was round last night. Steve is THE reggae fiend. He's off to Togo for 6 months building Databases for them, and wanted to check in on his reggae cds which I look after for him. Steve once owned upwards of 5000 JA 7"s, the real currency of Reggae as any fule kno but he's not a materialistic dude (like me) and sold them after meticulously recording them to CD. I'm actually a third of the way through copying the hundreds of these stone tablets, a typically lunatic undertaking made more insane by the fact that I'm submitting details about each disc to the CDDB org.
I'd been wanting to pick Steve's brains on the Cockney Ragga thing beyond Smiley Culture's Cockney Translation (in relation to the etymology of Gutter Garage) and I gleaned the following gems. Apparently there are some Mad Professor DJ tracks which are cockney tinged, Steve also remembered the I.Roy track Camp Road Skank (I mentioned this myself a while ago). He thought I ought to have a look at some of Prince Buster's early stuff and also pointed out that The Beat's in-house MC Ranking Roger also pressed some of his own 12"s which might be worth inspecting. Best of all we dug out from the cases of stuff round mine Alton Ellis's "Small Talk", which has a really funny cockney bridge, Alton going "I lav a cap o tea" in a funny Patois London mash-up. Alton I know lives in Brixton these days.
Posted by Woebot at April 9, 2003 01:35 PM