No, I never did play with him, because he’s a man… when it comes to keyboards, you don’t need anybody. As a keyboard player, y’know what I’m saying.
I was more thinking of you playing melodica or so. But what sets him apart, technically speaking?
Well, to me, he’s both classic and roots, yunno (chuckles). He’s a man who’s a very classical player, but then he could really play his roots, so… He can get across to anybody.
When you say ‘roots’, in this instance you mean… hitting the notes ‘harder’ (chuckles)?
It’s a general feeling, the feeling, that roots feeling… OK, I would say, like, an instrumental like (the Beatles’) ‘And I Love Her’, but how I would play it, it wouldn’t be what Jackie would play, with that dancehall feel to it. You know, ‘And I Love Her’, it’s a classical melody, but it’s the mood you put in.
The key to reach the dancehall crowd was to play with both a rough and classy kind of feel.
Yeah, that’s the feel. It makes you feel the dance, it keeps you rocking, y’know what I’m sayin’.
And I can imagine you going out to dances, clubs, sound system events and checking people’s reaction when instrumentals played, what they responded the most to.
Yes, definitely. ‘Cause you see the people react, getting into the music. It’s like it’s natural.
The tracks you created in those days, several at least, the inspiration came largely from watching dancers do their thing?
Yes. How people really react, the feeling that I have as a person. That’s it.
Not just studio vibes then.
Yeah, well, my thing was theory. I would have my melody arranged before, when I go to the studio I wouldn’t go fiddling around. It wasn’t like ‘what am I gonna do?’, wasn’t like that, no.
So when did you decide to set up the Soul Sounds label? Obviously when you had saved your hard earned long enough, but what led up to it?
Yes, what actually happened. I worked as a correctional officer before I matured as a musician, yunno. So I saved my money, so when I think I had enough to do a session, then I went in the studio and did my work. And I just quit my job and went on the road. Those days you could go from record shop to record shop and just sell records.
Like Orange Street.
Orange Street, yeah, we used to call it ‘Beat Street’. Also on Parade, Slipe Road, Cross Roads, Half Way Tree, it was lined with record shops. You have a new record and it sounded good, you could sell hundreds.
Sort of difficult to believe as it is now, but in those days you could sell truckloads of records.
Oh yes, oh yes.
It was cheap, the common man could afford it quite easily.
Yes, but I guess… that’s not the only point – you didn’t have any tape recorders or CD’s and all a that. It was just records, what you had was records.
True.
You had to sell it from pre-release, you had no labels, blank label, until it came upon your label.
Right (laughs). So that’s where you began, producing, doing the first bunch of pressings on blanks and carrying it out there.
Yeah, pre-release or a blank. It sell some more than with a label too, yunno.
How come?
OK. Well, first you had the dubplate. When a song came out first, they didn’t have any stamper company yet in Jamaica, you had to send it to England. And it took a while for it to come back. So what the people used to do, they want to hear the tune, they used to put it on a dubplate. So you had to pay a couple of pounds for a dubplate, and it came on a blank. You pay it cheaper. But when it came out on a label now, the general public, everybody just hungry for that 45.
But Soul Sounds was your first production label.
Yes, I actually created and designed the label. The head ‘S’ in ‘Soul’ is the treble clef, yunno. Head for ‘Soul’, head for ‘Sounds’, I used the treble clef as the head, and I got my label off the ground like that.
What happened to ‘Rhythm & Soul’?
OK, I sold some to a record shop for export. When I went back again they said “Oh, my God, they need this record in England, you can press more and ship it to them”. So they give me a lickle contrac’. I didn’t know anything about it. I signed it and they give me twenty pounds. It was Pama Records, one of them, they took the copyrights and press it in England (released on Pama’s Nu-Beat label). I didn’t know much about the business. I got twenty pounds and say “Oh, yeahhh?”
(chuckles)
I went and bought myself a keyboard.
What kind of keyboard was it?
I think it was a Wurlitzer. You know, those big model, two decks with the knobs and the bass and all a that. Those was the kind of organ they had. It was what I could afford at that time.
Not new, was it?
No, it was a second hand, I couldn’t afford a new one.