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Record of 1990, selected by Geoff Parker

 

Drum Pan Sound

Reggie Stepper

Steely & Clevie were riding a wave when they produced this record for Reggie Stepper. Some of their best work with Ninjaman was produced around this time, including the ferocious and brilliant Hortical Don, and on a more polished and sophisticated tip, the fine Steely and Clevie Play Studio One album, featuring digital reworkings of Studio One classics like Melody Life by Marcia Griffiths and No, No, No by Dawn Penn, later to achieve crossover hit status in the UK.

Reggie Stepper's Drum Pan Sound ranks with the best of their work at this period, which gives some idea of just how good this record is. The title marks it out as one of the innumerable "sound bwoy" records made during the dancehall era, a drum pan sound being of course an inferior dibbi dibbi sound system doomed to total humiliation and ruin in any sound clash. So Reggie Stepper declares:

"We no tolerate these sound up here so, back up through the gate you fi go" and "you think you down ah Mocho", Mocho being that district in the Jamaican parish of St. James which, doubtless unfairly, is considered the place where only foolish and gullible people live and is the butt of countless Jamaican jokes and exclamations. So, big up the Mocho possee!

What makes the record special is Reggie Stepper's blistering, declamatory delivery over an equally uncompromising rhythm. Drop this one in any dance and instant madness is guaranteed. Reggie Stepper cut an equally savage successor to this on the same rhythm, Cu Oonuh, which boasts an intro by the godfather of sound bwoy intros, the late Fuzzy Jones, who sadly died in a car crash not so long ago.

Geoff Parker

 

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