Joss Stone acclaimed as... wait, what now?

It's that time of the year when magazines, websites, podcasts, television shows, groups, bloggers and Facebook Marketing Entities hand out 'best of the year' accolades.

Billboard has done a list, and amongst the winners this year is Joss Stone.

Joss, it appears, is the Reggae Artist of the Year.

You're surprised. How do you think the Jamaican Observer feels?

Puzzled, the paper has dug into the Billboard archive to see if it had somehow missed Stone being hailed as the greatest modern reggae act. It hadn't:

The album did not impress Billboard magazine writer Steven Horowitz who described Stone’s ‘reggae experiment’ as “unconvincing”.

He added: “For more than a decade, Joss Stone has been a serial genre-hopper. Switching from R&B to blues, funk to rock, the 28-year-old Brit has powered six albums with soulful vocals beyond her years. The songs are technically impressive, as expected from Stone, but unconvincing.”

Makes you wonder what the guy at number two must be like. Some chap called Bobby Marley.

Reggaeobit: Junior Murvin

Junior Murvin, the reggae singer whose Police And Thieves, about Jamaican turf wars, became a soundtrack when the policing at the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival led to a riot, has died.

Murvin's first attempt at music didn't quite work out - a rastaman called Mr Sunny advised him to attend an audition, but his mother, unimpressed by the enthusiasm of Derrick Morgan, Roland Alphonso and Desmond Dekker, called him back home. Luckily, opportunity knocked again, and Murvin started back-up singing - first for Sonia Pottinger, and then for Derrick Harriot.

A return to his birthplace saw him join the band Young Experience, but their lack of a van scuppered them. Three weeks after the split, though, Murvin wrote Police And Thieves - an impressed Lee Perry played the track to an even more impressed Chris Blackwell; a release on Island later, and Murvin had an international hit.

Talking to UnitedReggae last year, Murvin talked about Police And Thieves being covered by The Clash:

I wouldn't even say Police and Thieves is a song. I would say it has moved from a song to a proverb. A proverb is greater than a song, I would put it that way. Music doesn't carry a grievance to nobody. It's just in the lyrical content. Music only talks to you when you play it. Music can't say "hey no play me"". Music can't do that! So as long as the man them sing the conscious things we can uplift the nation with it. But if you deal with violence, violent and downgrading lyrics that call the woman "Gyal" and that sort of thing there "Gyal yuh underwear" and "siddung pon it" I have no business with it.

Murvin was 64. He died from complications from diabetes on Monday 2nd December.

His UnitedReggae interview ended on what sounds a bit like a epitaph:

Tell my fans I wish the best for them and love them and I will always sing until my eyes are closed.

Producerobit: Winston Riley

Winston Riley, a major figure in Jamaica's music scene across four decades, has died.

Riley's contribution to bringing reggae to a global audience is unquestionable; his label Techniques was responsible for Dave And Ansell Collins' I Am The Greatest, the second reggae number one in the UK.

He also produced this, amongst much else:



Despite massive success, Riley didn't start to make money until more recently, when his beats started to be sampled. His music runs through the spine of much R&B; a large chunk of it derived from this one track:



Winston Riley had been shot in the head in November; he had been in hospital since. He was 68.

Obituary: Smiley Culture dies in police raid

Sky News are reporting the death of Smiley Culture. The report says police are calling his death - during a drugs raid - as being down to "self-inflicted injuries".

UPDATE: It's a bit grim now to think that Smiley Culture owed his success to a song which saw him being let off a potential possession charge thanks to his toasting prowess:



Sure, it was a borderline novelty hit, but in 1984 there weren't many British MCs, and none were having chart hits. At the time, it seemed unlikely that a British policeman would have been intimate with Culture's track Cockney Translator - even though "in the reggae charts number one was it's number"; subsequent discovery of just the sort of background snooping the police were doing at the time makes it more plausible.

He never quite achieved the same level of success again, despite cutting a deal with Polydor. Follow-up hit Schooltime Chronicle was a Grange Hill to Police Officer's Bill; the album Tongue In Cheek has vanished from print.

Born David Emmanuel, Smiley took his first reggae steps as a member of the Saxon Studio Sound System djs. Saxon was like the RADA of fast-talk reggae - alongside Culture, the studios gave first steps to Tippa Irie, Papa Levi, Daddy Sandy and Daddy Colonel. Maxi Priest also graduated from the collective.

After his mid-80s peak, Smiley took a small role in cappuccino-car-crash flick Absolute Beginners. He then faded from public life before a sad return in the July of 2010 when he was arrested and charged with possession of cocaine.

Somewhat bizarrely, The Guardian then met up with him in September for an article on post-pop careers. Emmanuel revealed he was running diamond mines:

I first became aware of the possibilities for mining after visiting Grenada, where my mother comes from. Cockney Translation had endeared me to a lot of serious businessmen in the East End of London, and because of the records, I'd met a lot of influential people who helped me get investment. At school I thought diamonds came from vaults: now I've got gold and diamond mine concessions in Ghana, Uganda, Liberia, Kenya and the Congo, and I'm promoting a record for the Azerbaijan government. Recently, I bought an expensive car in cash, which resulted in a visit by the police. It was like Police Officer all over again.

That all sounds a little odd now - promoting records for the Azerbaijan government? If ever a newspaper piece had you yelling 'what? what do you mean?', it was this.

The details of his death today are sketchy - the "Independent" Police Complaints Commission are investigating. The Metropolitan Police have issued a statement:

A Scotland Yard spokeswoman said: "As part of an ongoing operation officers from the Metropolitan Police Service's Serious and Organised Crime Command today attended a residential address in east Surrey to make an arrest.

"While they were at the address, an incident occurred during which a 48-year-old man died. Officers from Surrey Police attended the incident and it has been formally referred to the Independent Police Complaints Commission."

Reggaeobit: Sugar Minott

The death has been announced of Sugar Minott, one of the earliest reggae acts to crossover.

Born - where else? - in Kingston, Jamaica, Lincoln Barrington Minott got involved with reggae at an early age, selecting for the Sound of Silence Keystone group before he was a teenager. He established his own sound system, Gathering Of Youth, shortly afterwards.

Sugar Minott got a further toehold in the scene as a member of the African Brothers. The band worked with names whose position in reggae history border on the religious - Coxsone Dodd, Rupie Edwards and Ronny Burke amongst them.

After he left the trio, he turned his start into a strong solo following. He spent time with Studio One, helping re-establish the label after it had seen many of its first wave depart to other outfits. Fabulously successful at home, Minott even managed a number four hit in the UK with Good Thing Going in 1981.

His Black Roots label, and Youthman production outfit brought on the next generation of Jamaican talent, while he continued to tour in his own right. He was about to release a new album in the next couple of weeks.

Sugar Minott was 54; the cause of his death has not been made public, but he had cancelled Canadian dates following chest pains earlier this year.

Reggaeobit: Wycliffe Johnson

Reggae producer Wycliffe Johnson has died, his daughter has announced.

Known professionally as Steely, Johnson had all the right connections, including a spell at Studio One and time playing keyboards for Bob Marley. His lasting partnership with Cleveland Browne - Clevie - started at the age of 12; the pair would be the first in reggae to seriously experiment with digital techniques.

As producers and inspirations, Steely and Clevie would shape the popular end of reggae for two decades (Johnson's production work is still being sampled and mashed, probably even as we speak.)

Survived by his mother and five children, Johnson died following a heart attack brought on by pneumonia. The 47 year-old had been in poor health for some time.

Reggaeobit: Mikey Dread

Mikey Dread, one of the leading reggae djs and engineers, has died at his Connecticut home.

Born in Port Antonio with the slightly less headline-terrific name of Michael Campbell, Dread first made a name for himself in the mid 1970s, presenting for the Jamaican Broadcasting Company and recording music. This at a time when those in charge of the state broadcaster were reluctant to allow their network to carry anything as common as reggae music - it's a tribute to Drea'd tenacity that he not only managed to get on air, but slowly forced a change in policy at the station. His earliest success as an artist came with Barber Saloon, but as well as performing, Dread was learning how to drive a studio. In 1981, he travelled to London to study at the National Broadcasting School, where he honed his natural talents. Shortly after graduation, he produced Bank Robber for The Clash before going on to co-write five tracks on the Sandinista album.

Central TV took him on to present Deep Roots Music, an early Channel 4 production on the history of Jamaican music; it was the start of a run of British TV projects that included creating Rocker's Roadshow and appearances on BBC2's Ebony. More surprisingly, he found himself producing a Japanese rock band - Anarchy.

A spell as opener on a European tour with UB40 may have perhaps persuaded him to try his luck on the other side of the Atlantic; he started to have success in the US from the mid 1980s, touring with Freddie McGregor and the Roots Radic Band.

Interestingly, Dread would constantly return to study during his career - he was the original lifelong learner. In 1996, he graduated the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale with honours in music/video production, for example. It's possible that he was doing this to atone for having produced for Izzy Stradlin on his post Guns N Roses single. By 2000, he was graduating again - this time from Lynn University with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in International Communications.

Studying didn't seem to eat too badly into his performance time, though, and well into this century he was a regular on-stage, playing everything from spring breaks with Ja Rule to Slovakian festivals.

Mikey Dread was 54. His death was reported as being due to a brain tumour.