Nopane in my brain

Lester Bullock, more famously known as Dillinger, is 56 today. How did I get to Dillinger and why is he still running around my brain? We can all post-rationalise and say we were into reggae in the lead-up to Punk. Truer to say that some of us were into Bob Marley, the first reggae ‘crossover’ artist. I first noticed Bob Marley on my Sunday morning paper round. At the age of 15, I was delivering two heavy, Sunday paper bag loads for 50 pence, to bulk up the 75 pence I got for my five-nightly, five-mile evening paper round. While I was baiting a dog and jamming several newspaper supplements through a rusty letterbox one cool November morning, a front page caught my eye. It was taken up entirely with the front cover to Natty Dread, the newly released LP from Bob Marley & The Wailers. It was the most beautiful LP cover I had ever seen. Buying the LP would have been beyond the pale (and cost over two weeks’ ‘wages’). I wasn’t yet that experimental. My meagre record collection contained albums by David Bowie, Status Quo, T Rex and Elton John. Disco, soul or black music of any kind was not for me. I lived in a quiet, traditional, mostly white Midlands county town in which it was normal to poke fun at people with dark skins. I hadn’t realised that Eric Clapton’s hit, I Shot The Sheriff, was a Marley cover. There had been Ken Boothe. But, even when Everything I Own reached number one in 1974, solitary reggae artists still seemed like novelty acts on Top Of The Pops in the early 70s. A few weeks after I saw the Natty Dread cover, however, we had Rupie Edwards’ Ire Feelings at the top of the charts. Something was stirring in me, but local conditioning and peer pressure kept it down. But not for long. By 1975, I was actually attending gigs and literally feeling the bass sound run right through me. Now, the whole world was talking about Bob Marley. I didn’t get down to London to see Bob Marley and the Wailers live at the Lyceum in the summer (my big trip was Led Zeppelin at Earl’s Court instead), but I was aware of it and rushed out to buy Live! when it emerged in December. A few months later, even The Rolling Stones had included a reggae cover version on their LP, Black and Blue. Reggae was officially OK if they said so. Then, the fledgling Virgin record company made what seemed a brave decision at the time to release The Front Line, a promotional LP of various reggae acts, including U Roy and The Mighty Diamonds, pushing these bands into appearing at the Reading Rock Festival in August. At the time, I remember thinking this was a bad idea. I attended the three days of this festival with Buffalo Johnson and a couple of other mates. The two reggae acts were literally canned off by heavy metal fans who had come to see Rory Gallagher, Ted Nugent and Black Oak Arkansas. I wanted them off, too. It was the right time, but wrong audience, wrong place. Punk was around the corner. John Peel was playing dub reggae. The old order, exemplified by the Southern Man Lynyrd Skynyrd brigade, was slipping away. I was faced with a choice that took me several months to make. The fact that I chose Punk meant that I brought reggae with me. The tie-up between Punk and Reggae was certainly odd. Even Bob Marley thought it strange at first, though he ended up releasing Punky Reggae Party as the B-side of Jamming in 1977. He could never understand why Punks desecrated themselves with safety pins and ripped clothes. In Jamaica, people were striving to get away from such things. It was only when he made the rebel connection that congruence became possible. Punk and Reggae were anti-establishment. Both were resistance movements in the heart of Babylon. Dope and weed were associated with hippies and the old order, but their prevalence in the Rasta-related reggae world meant that it was OK for Punks to indulge in an underground way. Which they did. Especially at the Roxy Club in London’s Covent Garden, the major showcase for Punk acts in the first six months on 1977, when they were banned from playing most everywhere else. The music press regularly reported the goings on at this den of iniquity. For us, in the provinces, it was our vicarious taste of the action. We would be told the playlist of host DJ Don Letts – in between the acts of adrenalin aggression from the likes of Wire, Buzzcocks and Adverts, Letts would play all the latest Jamaican 45s. In our remote Midlands hideout, we’d hear of acts like Big Youth, Culture, Lee Perry and Junior Murvin, the latter with his Police And Thieves. And, naturally, we wanted to hear what was happening. John Peel played more of it. Then The Clash finally emerged on vinyl and championed it, with their cover version of Police And Thieves. Marley was touring again and about to launch his best and most popular LP, Exodus. I’m hardly likely to forget it, as it was released on 3rd June, 1977, my 18th birthday. The Sex Pistols were number one in our hearts with God Save The Queen during Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee. I was in the middle of my A level exams. My parents were splitting up. The first love of my life was not responding. I was exploding. I spent some of the summer of 77 recording whatever dub reggae John Peel played. And this I took with me to Bradford University at the end of September, thinking that I would be the only white person in this new universe to like Punk and Reggae. I was wrong. I very quickly met Martin, Graham and Alan, who liked both. Martin had Live! He’d played No Woman, No Cry on the mornings of his A level exams. Graham loved dub. Alan had Virgin’s Front Line LP. And, right at that very time, there emerged a single by a Jamaican artist called Dillinger, called Cokane In My Brain. Martin bought the single. He was the only one who had a record player. That’s how I got to Dillinger. Cokane In My Brain/Buckingham Palace/Ratnam Pizer. And after that, we didn’t need no fertilizer. A knife, a fork, a bottle and a cork...

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk