Remember when reggae ruled Britain’s radio stations? One concert relived it

Just as the summer heatwave arrived, a show of pure sunshine finally pitched up at the Royal Festival Hall. Jazz Jamaica’s show, The Trojan Story, was conceived three years ago for the 50th anniversary of the legendary Jamaican music label Trojan Records, responsible for many 1960s and 1970s hits that took reggae into mainstream pop. The show was halfway through a UK tour when the pandemic struck and was put on ice for more than 18 months, so this gig was designed to be a joyous comeback.

It worked, but it has to be said, it took a while. The Hall was much less than half full – a dampener in itself – and the serried seats of a classical venue are never the greatest inducement to having a great time. Gary Crosby, the evening’s compère and founder-director of the jazz academy Tomorrow’s Warriors (which supplied many of the personnel on stage), put it sarcastically: “You can dance as long as you don’t move.”

To begin with, as often happens with homages to the past, the glories were monumentalised, rather than merely celebrated. Trojan’s little three-minute hits were amazingly vivid, with an instantly recognisable clipped bass sound, a crooning backing trio and a Hammond organ sharp and tremulous enough to strip the enamel from your teeth. Last night, those songs ballooned into 10- or 15-minute epics.

The crooning was there, in the form of Dem Three trio Cherise Adams-Burnett, Cara Crosby-Irons and Kianja Harvey-Elliott; Harvey-Elliott had the best voice on stage, as she proved in her rendition of Dawn Penn’s hit ‘You Don’t Love Me (No, No, No)’. Those voices were augmented by the Reggae Choir, swaying in the choir stalls at the back. On the left was a string quartet, an authentic touch given that some of Trojan’s releases had string tracks added to soothe BBC bosses, who were worried the unadorned sound of reggae was too raw for their listeners’ ears. On the right was a hefty brass and horn section.

These lavish forces were used to surround each song in massive arrangements, with parts added and subtracted in subtle degrees to make affirmative endings or atmospheric fade-outs. There was some fine solo playing, most strikingly from guitarist Shirley Tetteh, who provided a melancholy, harmonically questing introduction to the 1969 Harry J Allstars hit ‘Liquidator’. Too melancholy, frankly: when the song finally arrived, its straightforward good-time spirit felt like a jolt. The more extroverted, virtuoso, ear-drum-popping high notes from the Tomorrow’s Warriors trumpeters were more in keeping.

As the evening wore on, the musical temperature rose. Brinsley Forde, veteran singer from the British reggae band Aswad, couldn’t muster Desmond Dekker’s falsetto notes in ‘The Israelites’, but there was an irresistible authority in that gravelly voice and hip-swaying rhythmic drive. By the end, when Noel McCoy gave his ecstatic rendition of ‘Red, Red Wine’, the crowd was on its feet, with silvery-haired matrons jiving next to eight-year-olds. Trojan Records may be no more, but its spirit lives on.

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