BURIAL: A twenty one gun salute over the grave of the reggae twelve inch single.

For over twenty years Greensleeves records has been the premier label for the release of Jamaican music in the UK. In the seventies their twelve inch record sleeves featured a witty and detailed cartoon history of reggae music, starting with a mento group in brightly coloured shirts, through the advent of Rastafari with dreadlocked luminaries like Big Youth, Bob Marley and Augustus Pablo, and finishing up with Greensleeves' original shop under the Westway flyover in Shepherds Bush, London, while taking in skinheads, punks and unsmiling policemen along the way.
The Eighties saw a more dancehall orientated sleeve, featuring a DJ rocking the crowd in the near dark of a late night session, while the nineties brought total espousal of the ragga ethic, featuring a speeding car, video camera, baseball cap and a rude boy and dancehall queen flaunting a formidable array of gold chains and rings.
But no more. Last year Greensleeves simply stopped putting out reggae music on twelve inch records. So did Fashion Records. So did Gussie P. So have Stingray Records. In reggae terms, this is the abolition of the monarchy or post boxes being painted blue. Here in England the reggae twelve inch single is on the edge of extinction. "People just stopped buying them," says Chris O'Brien of Greensleeves. "With each round of new releases, sales of 12" records were going down. But when we started to release JA tunes on seven inch our sales tripled. It was an overnight success. We see no reason to go back to the twelve inch now." The reggae consumer had finally had enough.
At this point, it's worth looking back at the origin of the 12" single. What it was all about in the first place? It originated in the US as a vehicle for disco music back in the mid seventies. Disco producers liked this format because more music could be crammed on to it than onto a seven inch and with no resultant loss in sound quality. Simply, this meant more dancing time. Eight minutes or more of uninterrupted disco heaven with all the frequencies sounding out loud and clear, from those lush disco strings all the way down to that svelte dance floor bass.
JA producers, always astute and on the alert for foreign musical developments, were quick to spot the advantages for reggae, which after all is dance hall music or it is nothing.
There's some dispute as to what was the very first reggae record ever put out in the twelve inch format. TRULY by The Jays on Channel One is often put forward as the number one contender but if anyone has other ideas I'd be very glad to hear them. There is agreement however that reggae started coming out in this format in 1976. Like nearly all things in reggae this was a trend that started off in Jamaica itself although taken up with great enthusiasm by UK release labels due to their profitability. Some very early twelve inch records of distinction include BABYLON KINGDOM FALL by Vivian Jackson on Prophets, FUNNY FEELINGS by Dennis Brown on Gussie, and HISTORY by Carlton Jackson on Upsetter. Vivian Jackson, Gussie Clarke, Lee Perry; producers of this stature show just how eagerly the twelve inch format was embraced in Jamaica.
The only 12" records still put out by Greensleeves are crossover hits like Beenie Man's Who Am I, tunes which have already broken in the UK reggae community on Jamaican 7" pre and UK release 7". These are for sale in mainstream record shops like Our Price and Virgin which hoped to have seen the back of vinyl years ago anyway and only sell 12" on sufferance because the dance market keeps it alive. For these mainstream shops the 7" single has all the commercial attraction of a pre war sixpence.
Chris O'Brien feels no personal sentiment at all for the demise of the 12" single. He believes that while initially it represented a creative extension to the music, its possibilities were rarely used to their full potential and all too often degenerated into an unimaginative ripoff. From a purely pragmatic point of view, as someone with a business to run, Chris also welcomes the fact that 7" singles take up less warehouse space and cost only £1.20 to send mail order to Australia as against £3.50 for a 12" single.
Lol Bell-Brown of Dub Vendor records in South London feels that while it's too early to write off the twelve inch altogether, its command of the UK marketplace has probably gone for good. For Lol, as the initial creative promise of the twelve inch declined, the unwieldy and expensive nature of the format became ever harder to justify to the consumer. He points out however that the twelve inch is still the only singles format in the US where, in Chris O'Brien's words, "if you showed them a seven inch single they wouldn't know what it was."
So why have reggae fans turned their back on the 12"? For one thing, in case you hadn't noticed, they haven't been made in Jamaica for quite some time. They disappeared some time in the late 80's. not with a bang but a whimper, slinking away like a thief in the night. The most recent 12" single pressed in Jamaica that I own is Yammie Bolo's Free Mandela from 1986, on the Skengdon label. I don't know what the last Jamaican 12" was. If you do, let me know. Perhaps, like the extinction of a species, it's impossible to pin it down to a last single living individual. Simply, the will to make them died away.
One reason might be the decline of interest in dub music since the digital revolution. No one wants to hear dub in Jamaica anymore so why bother to put out a 12" single whose chief advantage is that seamless slide from vocal into extended dub workout? Ah, you might say, but what about the DJs? DJs are as popular now, if not more so, in Jamaica now as they ever were. Isn't that why 12" records were called discomix singles, because of the delightful merging together of the original vocal cut with its DJ version? Well, perhaps that became part of the problem for the 12". In the past a vocal would come over from JA on 7" with a DJ cut on another 7", either simultaneously or after a respectful interval of a week or two. There was something simple and logical about putting the two together on a 12" as what was then termed a discomix single. Now however, JA record producers are in the habit of putting out up to half a dozen versions of a rhythm simultaneously, some would say to flood the market before other producers have the chance to rip their rhythm off. The 12" single, like many another venerable institution, has proved unable to cope with the anarchy of the market.
At its worst the reggae twelve inch was a complete rip off. It cost twice as much as a Jamaican seven inch pre and all too often was just a big lump of plastic with the vocal on one side and the dub on the other and a lot of empty grooves to fill up the surplus vinyl, with no attempt to give anything extra to the original Jamaican pre or to justify the extra money. Top of my hit list is my own 12" copy of Johnny Osborne's NIGHTFALL on the Cha Cha label from 1981. Most of the plastic is entirely void of grooves. It offers no more music than the Jamaican pre, costs twice as much, weighs twice as much, and takes up twice as much space. The fact that it's pressed on bright blue vinyl makes the ripoff seem all the more brazen.
At its best however, the 12" could be something genuine, creative and exciting, offering opportunities for innovation beyond the reach of the seven inch. Chief among these is the ability of the twelve inch to merge seamlessly in an extended mix from vocal into dub or vocal into DJ cut. Hence the seventies term "discomix" for reggae twelve inch singles. However, especially in the hands of UK release specialists, the full creative potential of the twelve inch was realised only rarely. More often than not it was simply a way of parting hapless punters from their money for a decidedly inferior product.
Now those who are not devotees of reggae might well feel perplexed by all this. Why the big fuss when vinyl is such a hopeless anachronism outside Jamaica anyway? For most people, it was supplanted by the CD in the last decade, the CD itself is soon to be supplanted by the DVD, and in any case we'll all be downloading our music from the Net before long. The whole notion of 'records' will then be in the dustbin of history. Yet the reggae world has not only largely ignored all this, it is now dumping the 12", which at least is being kept alive by dance music generally, for the even more anachronistic seven inch single.
Reggae is both highly insular and highly interested in the rest of the world, deeply conservative and highly innovative, in fact rather like Jamaica itself. Reggae is also very perverse, a trait often noted, not least by Jamaicans themselves, as being a prime Jamaican characteristic. Just when the dance music DJ has become a highly paid global superstar and the 12" dance single is a hot fashion item, reggae turns its back on it and returns to the most anachronistic musical commodity of all. With the exception of the 78. Perhaps... but let's not even think about that.
Let Chris O'Brien have the last word. "We've got no plans to bring back the 12". But it can never completely be ruled out. If the music changes again, as it always does, we might find ourselves going back to it."
Geoff Parker