Weird Granny Slater
- Location: Dover
- Registered: 7 Jun 2017
- Posts: 3,095
#1
As some of the hipsters on here will know, Trojan Records is 50 years old this year. The label is the soul (get it?) reason little white kids in the sticks like me got introduced to Jamaican music in the late 60s and early 70s. It hit me at the YMCA in Leyburne Road, somewhere between Norman Greenbaum's distorted Spirit In The Sky and Nilsson's smoochy Without You. I'd like to think my dance moves have improved since then, and that I know my ska from my rocksteady, so I'll be celebrating with a step or two a label that helped free up my own musical and cultural imaginations, and had such a positive influence on British popular music and, as a consequence, our wider culture. A great British institution indeed.
(Strings were often dubbed over the Jamaican originals to sweeten the raw sound for mild-mannered white audiences. A little cheesy now I know, but it's the way many of us first heard the music.)
Paul M and Judith Roberts like this
'Pass the cow dung, my dropsy's killing me' - Heraclitus