One of the key criteria I use for this series is that an
album must have stood the test of time. That's principally my time – and by that I
mean something that I'm still keen to play again and again and without any of
the social unease I might attach to something like Thomas Dolby's Aliens Ate My Buick – but also Time with
a capital T.
That's not so easy to assess, particularly if it's an
album that's not generally considered to be an artist's best or most
representative work. But something like Man
In The Hills for me beats the more critically acclaimed Marcus Garvey probably by dint of being my
first introduction to the man known as Burning Spear. A sort of first
girlfriend syndrome. It was my insatiable thirst for more music that took me
one Sale time into W.H. Smith, a chain not generally renowned for the quality
or range of its musical offerings, and there I found 'this bargain' for £1.63 (of
all strange prices).
My, how it has repaid that modest outlay. An Island
record, it came out around the time of Chris Blackwell's mid '70s master plan
to turn reggae music into a global phenomenon. The sleeve notes talk about
Burning Spear as a 'collective endeavour' in the third person plural, perhaps
in an attempt to come up with another Wailers, but Rupert Willington and Delroy
Hines were somewhat incidental to Winston Rodney whose gruff vocals dominate
this and every other Spear record. It's Rodney who was and still is Burning
Spear himself, right from the early days at Studio One where he took a name
associated with Kenya's presidential guerrilla warrior, Jomo Kenyatta.
While Marcus Garvey
and its dub mirror, Garvey's Ghost,
were deep and heavy roots reggae, unlikely to appeal to audiences in the same
numbers as, say, Bob Marley's Exodus,
Man In The Hills is lighter and
punchier, and more pastoral than political in theme. With both Robbie
Shakespeare and 'Family Man' Barrett among a whole phalanx of legendary
Jamaican session musicians, it's no surprise that the 10 tracks are still
propelled by resonant bass lines, but they are also marked out by a crisp and spritely
horn section. There's even a flute on the catchy 'People Get Ready' (which has
nothing to do with Curtis Mayfield's song, even though Rodney always
acknowledged his influence). More danceable in short, rather like Culture's
marvellous Two Sevens Clash, which is
maybe why I love it so.
Above all, it's consistently good. There's not a weak
spot in the neat five tracks per side. Subsequently, Spear broke with the
producer, Lawrence Lindo (who took the moniker, for some reason best known to himself,
of Jack Ruby) and, in my mind anyway, never quite achieved the same degree of
overall excellence. Every later album that I've either bought or heard has been
graced by jewels, often title tracks like 'Social Living', 'Mistress Music,
'Far Over' or the glorious 'Reggae Physician' from Appointment With His Majesty, while leaving an overall impression
of slight disappointment.
No such disappointment here. While many reggae songsters,
you feel, paid lip service to the Marcus Garvey legend, Spear has always taken
the original Back-to-Africa activist very seriously, and Man In The Hills is full of Garvey's teachings about
self-determination (which might at a stretch even include chanting 'down
a-Babylon, as the rootsier 'Door Peep', a re-working of an earlier Studio One
single, advocates). 'It Is Good' suggests that 'it is good when a man can live
for himself' and 'if we should live up in the hills', suggests the title track,
the 'social' living of rural communities knocks 'a government yard in
Trenchtown' firmly into a cocked rasta-hat.
Until he moved to New York, Spear avoided the call of wild
and wicked Kingston by basing himself in the small northern community of St.
Anne's Bay, which provides the childhood landscape explored in songs like 'Lion',
'Children' and 'Mother', with its refrain of 'no you can't catch me' and a
wickedly insistent bass line that, for some peculiar reason, always makes me imagine
driving at speed through a long tunnel.
There's lots to love in this album. It may not have the
gravitas of the seminal 'Marcus Garvey' or his ghost, but there are catchy
melodies, memorable refrains, irresistible riddims and a truly memorable
climax. I'm not sure what the final track, 'Groovy', is all about – 'Shooska!',
Spear appears to sing at one point, followed by what sounds like 'John White
aware', which makes no sense, even to fans of Tottenham Hotspur's legendary
inside left of the early sixties – but it ends with cries of such triumphant
anguish that I can only think of someone finally moving their bowels after a
fortnight's solid compacted constipation. So don't for heaven's sake 'get me
groovy'.
