Dreadlocks in moonlight

Reggae veteran and Massive Attack collaborator meets UK dub don in Ramsgate for a modern roots masterclass. By Simon McEwen.

Horace Andy ★★★★ Midnight Rocker ON-U SOUND. CD/DL/LP

PICTURE THE scene: 13 Brentford Road, Kingston, Jamaica, the home of producer Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd’s fabled recording and publishing facility Studio One. It’s 1970, and a nervous teenage singer by the name of Horace Hinds steps up to the mike to run through a reggae tune he’s written called Got To Be Sure. The stakes are high: Hinds has already unsuccessfully auditioned here a few days earlier as a duo with Frank Melody, and his first single, This Is A Black Man’s Country, cut with producer Phil Pratt four years earlier, was a flop. It’s now or never for the young Rastafarian vocalist, but something isn’t right. The musicians around him fidget and giggle, bemused and surprised by the singer’s distinctive, quavering falsetto – the way it sounds both male and female. These seasoned session men have never heard anything like it. Fortunately for Hinds, neither has Coxsone, who spots something unique in the singer’s heartfelt emoting and signs him up on the spot.

That voice, with its singular vibrato warble, coupled with a stick-to-your-guns attitude, has well served Horace ‘Sleepy’ Andy (renamed by Dodd as a tribute to former Paragons vocalist Bob Andy and to distance him from his cousin Justin Hinds; nicknamed Sleepy, see Q&A) over a career spanning five decades. It’s what compelled esteemed producer and On-U Sound label boss Adrian Sherwood to team up with the singer for Midnight Rocker, a record which skilfully distils the essence of one of the most respected and influential Jamaican artists of reggae’s golden era (1968-85). It also, of course, helped bring Andy international acclaim due to his on-going association with pioneering Bristol soundsystem collective Massive Attack. Andy has contributed to all five Massive LPs, from 1990’s Blue Lines up to 2010’s Heligoland, making him the band’s most faithful vocal stalwart. A fact not lost on Robert Del Naja in a recent interview: “Horace connects us to the Afro-Caribbean scene which is part of Bristol’s history. He has such an amazing history, in America, the UK and Jamaica, it’s just a privilege to work with him.”

The 70-year-old singer began making history in 1972, when he and Dodd hit big with Skylarking, a song about idle ne’erdo-wells hanging around Kingston street corners. A string of self-penned conscious roots singles (Illiteracy, Help The Children, Every Tongue Shall Tell) followed alongside yearning lovers laments such as Fever and a stunningly soulful cover of Al Wilson’s Show & Tell. By the mid-’70s, it was evident Andy had the interpretive powers and lilting vocal technique to suit any setting, from cultural roots material through to lovers rock and the burgeoning dancehall scene. He cut a series of superb 45s with producers such as Bunny

Lee, Winston ‘Niney’ Holness, Keith Hudson and Leonard ‘Santic’ Chin, before relocating to Hartford, Connecticut in the late-’70s. It was in the States he made 1977’s dread-heavy roots set In The Light/In The Dub with producer Everton DaSilva and ’82’s

Dance Hall Style – a genuine masterpiece of the genre – for Lloyd Barnes’ Bullwackies imprint based in the Bronx (Andy would revisit stand-out track Spying Glass on Massive Attack’s 1994 Protection LP). After a move to London’s Ladbroke Grove in the mid-’80s, the singer would continue to collaborate with venerated UK dub producers such as Mad Professor and soundsystem operator Jah Shaka, while also regularly returning to Jamaica to record.

It’s surprising then, after such a peripatetic existence, it took until as recently as 2018 for Andy to hook up with On-U’s Adrian Sherwood. For Sherwood, currently operating out of his home studio in Ramsgate, Kent, is associated with many other notable Jamaican artists including Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Bim Sherman, Prince Far I, Little Roy and Junior Delgado. What’s equally surprising is that Midnight Rocker should sound as it does: an immaculate set of catchy, conscious modern roots largely shorn of Sherwood’s trademark fusion of trippy dub techniques and post-punk noise, as typified by On-U regulars New Age Steppers, Creation Rebel, Dub Syndicate and African Head Charge; a sonic template once described by the late NME journalist Dele Fadele as, “Drug music which you don’t need to take drugs to enjoy.”

On Midnight Rocker, Sherwood’s often extreme psychedelic tendencies (channelling the supernatural soundworlds of dub pioneers King Tubby and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry) are tempered in favour of a more sympathetic, nuanced treatment, with reverb, echo and FX employed for textural sonic detail rather than pure amplification. From the brooding majesty of opener This Must Be Hell onwards, Sherwood allows Andy’s fragile, yearning falsetto to float above the mix, a similar, uncluttered modus operandi the producer adopted for Bim Sherman’s landmark 1996 LP Miracle. It’s a simpatico, cross-generational alliance not unlike Rick Rubin’s work with Johnny Cash, or Richard Russell and Damon Albarn’s team-up with Bobby Womack for 2012’s The Bravest Man In The Universe.

There are moments of genuine wonder here too: the inspired cover of Massive Attack’s Safe From Harm (originally sung by Shara Nelson), with its propulsive, rumbling bassline and Andy’s foreboding delivery – “Midnight rockers, city slickers, gun men and maniacs…” – before the song heads skyward on an updraft of escalating synths (courtesy of Anglo-Italian musician Gaudi – see Back Story). Likewise, the emotional heft of Today Is Right Here, a reconstituted take on Dreams Come True from the Sherwood-produced Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry LP Heavy Rain, where Andy mulls over life’s vicissitudes in soulful, featherlight tones: “You got to live for today/’Cos tomorrow might not come your way.”

Fittingly, Midnight Rocker ends where Andy began, with a re-upholstered version of his evergreen Studio One hit Mr Bassie – a tribute to Heptones singer/bassist Leroy Sibbles, though now it’s tempting to re-imagine it as a kiss off to one of the S1 musicians who may’ve laughed at the singer back in the day. Over its funky, syncopated one-drop rhythm and nursery-rhyme piano melody, Sleepy pleads for the song to keep playing from “dusk ’til dawn”. Still rocking beyond midnight, then, and long may he continue to do so. This is not only Horace Andy’s best album in 40 years, but it is also a work of lasting power.

“Andy’s fragile, yearning falsetto floats above the mix.”