Reggae Legends

I just added to my small col­lec­tion of reggae leg­ends, with a Sly Dunbar inter­view. I had thought Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry had to be the most incom­pre­hen­si­ble man in reggae (at one point during our con­ver­sa­tion, Perry seem­ingly forgot he was being inter­viewed and sang Sun Is Shin­ing from start to finish) but Dunbar has a seri­ous Jamaican accent and, over the phone, I simply could not under­stand what he was saying, and he was having dif­fi­cul­ties fol­low­ing my stut­ter­ing North­ern RP. Tran­scrib­ing this one should be fun.

A few words slipped past the accent bar­rier, though. On being asked why he pre­ferred studio work to live per­for­mance, Dunbar said:

You want to know why? You have Black Uhuru records, you have Peter Tosh records, you have Sly & Robbie records, and you is up there in Scot­land lis­ten­ing to them, and asking me down in London about these record­ings, record­ings I made in Jamaica. That is some con­nec­tion. That con­nec­tion is why I go into the studio.

I like that. A full tran­script fol­lows shortly.

Posted at 5pm on 02/04/03 by Jack Mottram to the music category.
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