Reggae has travelled the globe since its beginnings in 1960s Kingston – but the Jamaicans still do it best, says Charlie Connelly.

As the 1960s edged towards the 1970s, Jamaican music began to slow down. It was almost as if the 60s had been such a decade of fantastic development for the island’s music that it didn’t want it to end; as if the dawning of 1970 would trumpet the closure of a unique period that could never be surpassed in terms of popularity and creativity. But the 60s would be surpassed musically by Jamaica. The global spread of reggae would see to that. The frantic beats of ska, that had stormed both the island and the wider world, had by 1968 eased off slightly into rocksteady, a genre that took its name from Alton Ellis’s 1967 hit single of the same name. Across the Atlantic the ‘rude boys’ of the United Kingdom were asking DJs to play their 45rpm ska and rocksteady singles at 33rpm to give them a slower groove to dance to. It wasn’t long before the bands themselves slowed everything down. Kingston band The Pioneers’ 1967 hit ‘Long Shot Bus’ Me Bet’ is regarded by many as the fi rst reggae record, and it was soon followed by hits such as ‘Nanny Goat’ by Larry Marshall and ‘No More Heartaches’ by The Beltones.

Famous Jamaican producer Bunny Lee is frequently credited as a key reggae pioneer, slowing down the ska and rocksteady beats and introducing a driving organ pattern over the offbeat skanking of the rhythm guitar. Lee Perry meanwhile released ‘People Funny Boy’ which sold so well that he was able to open his own studio in Kingston and launch his own Upsetter label. It was the unlikely medium of celluloid that put reggae on the global map however, thanks to the 1972 feature fi lm The Harder They Come, featuring Jamaican reggae star Jimmy Cliff. The first feature film ever to be shot on the island, it featured Cliff as the starry-eyed reggae singer Ivanhoe Martin, who finds himself drawn inexorably into the seedy underworld of the music business in his quest to have a hit record. As well as the title track the film featured two more all-time reggae classics in ‘Many Rivers To Cross’and ‘You Can Get It If You Really Want’. ‘This was the fi rst extensive American movie exposure for reggae, the insinuating Jamaican music that was just beginning to make itself heard over the omnipresent rock,’ wrote the eminent film critic Roger Ebert. It wouldn’t be Cliff who truly brought reggae to the world, though. That role would fall to a man who’d been around the Jamaican music scene since the early days of ska: Robert Nesta Marley, the son of a Jamaican English captain in the Royal Marines and his young wife (whom he rarely saw due to his naval commitments and sudden death when Bob was ten).