Burning Spear: 'Man In The Hills'

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'.