Adrian Sherwood: The man who built Jamaica in the Midlands
The founder of On-U Sound tells Nick Coleman that there is more to reggae than ‘ooom-chicky…’
Not much reggae music came out of the Home Counties during the early 1970s, but an awful lot went in.
More than you might think. Quite a lot of it made the journey from London in the record bags of Adrian Sherwood, would-be reggae rebel, junior DJ, and pale-faced teenage entrepreneur of the skank, a boy so transfixed by Jamaican rhythm and its culture that, by the age of 15, he’d already committed himself to the life while skulking around the clubs of Luton, Dunstable and High Wycombe, getting off on the “better and better, madder and madder” threads of reggae’s Seventies narrative.
“It was the sheer diversity of it,” he reflects ardently in 2011, settled in his management office in Bloomsbury, one of the several places that serve as a nerve centre for his 30-year-old On-U Sound operation. “People say reggae is just ooom-chicky, ooom-chicky, but by the mid-Seventies there was a fantastic range: the mellow stuff, stuff for grown-ups, stuff in the American vocal group tradition, beautiful solo singers, the DJs, the mad stuff, early dub. And then there was the Rastafarian movement. It was like entering a whole other world: the weed, the Special Brews, the sound systems, the parties, the lifestyle, and this image of a place that was far away and better than where we lived.”
Reggae music was then a segregated art form, regarded as second class, its sales figures far outweighing its national chart impact. “Records would sell 100,000 copies and still not make the charts,” rasps Sherwood, “because of where they were sold – outlets like Baba’s in Dalston Market and Bailey’s in the Bullring in Birmingham. You could go to Baba’s on a Friday with a load of records and he’d say, ‘We’ll take 700 copies of that.’ The next week, he’d need more.”
At 53, he’s gearing up for the year-long 30th birthday celebrations of his label, an institution that was as groundbreaking in its time as it was passionate. But at 19 he was just one small stitch in the cultural gash which scabbed over to form punk’s affinity with roots reggae.