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<span style="font-weight: bold">Sugar Minott Interview
When he talks, the scene listens</span>
For a big man, Sugar Minott moves pretty fast.
When ragga turned up, Sugar was at the start line waiting. When digital reggae arrived, he was standing there too. After his ‘Black Roots’ album carved a place for him in the reggae pantheon halfway between Studio One and Motown, he even found time to outrun dancehall - he pioneered the singjay genre - so it’s safe to say that when he talks, the scene listens.
Or when he sings. Sugar has a habit of singing down the phone during interviews; and for my ears only he included a track he’d had the good sense to leave out of his discography: “If you see a chi-chi man run, then send bottle and stone after him, run chi-chi man run...” he sings to me, collapsing into a school yard giggle.
Sugar grew up in the Kingston ghetto in the Sixties, in a country where poverty, ska - and casual homophobia - were a part of life, where even the most resounding of reggae hits were recorded on the thread of a shoestring. Sugar remembers breaking into the famous Channel One studio in the capital’s shanty town to record ‘Black Roots’, the album that would make his name and assure his place in the annals of reggae. “We used to break into the studio at night when the boss was gone - we would go over to the engineer’s house and wake him up and then bribe the watchman to open it up. We couldn’t afford it.”
That 1979 album, which was recorded with Leroy “Horsemouth” Wallace [star of arguably the biggest film about reggae, Rockers, on the drums, “Steely” Johnson on organ [the prolific dancehall producer who re-worked Dawn Penn’s ‘You Don’t Love Me’], registered its biggest hit with ‘Hard Time Pressure’, a roots classic which he tells me is inspired by “The feel of living in our ghetto Maxwell Park, where there’d always be police raids, and we couldn’t stay on the corner - we had to be running from the cops every day.”
Coming up in Maxfield Park, Sugar would find various places to practice with his crew, the fledgling African Brothers: a huge abandoned Chevrolet opposite a dancehall, in which he and his friend Tony Tuff would strum a guitar and burn a spliff before heading off to school, and at night they ended up “in a graveyard. Every night we were there among the tombs making noise, with people shouting at us, ‘Get out of the yard!’ There was nobody to run us there in that graveyard, and there were some ghosts up there that we made happy.”
Sugar’s personality, alongside his sturdy girth and gap-toothed grin made him a favourite amongst the unruly rabble of performers who would hang around Channel One studio, and he had no trouble getting them, or the engineers like King Jammy to “take thirty dollars instead of the usual sixty” for sessions. One interesting story, which explains the way his career continued to evolve, was when he was in King Tubby’s studio, and wanted to record his track ‘Never Gonna Give Jah Up’ for the 1979 ‘Ghetto-ology’ album: “[King Jammy] was giving me some time for free. He said: ‘Okay, you can only have one cut - if you miss, that’s it. I can’t afford to stop - you only get one chance.’ So the song started - (sings) “I never gonna give you up”, and I had to sing the song right through with no mistakes. There was a little part where I wanted to try some slow ting, but I didn’t do that because of the pressure, and that was one of my biggest hits! Nuff pressure helped me.”
After his roots origins, Sugar moved from a conscious style, lovers rock and dancehall, and added an ingredient which was to further distance himself from the classic conscious artists of that era. While crews like the Abyssinians were using their own beats, Sugar would re-use old rhythms from the rocksteady artists of his youth like Alton Ellis and Hopeton Lewis to create a new style.
Even back in the day, hawking for his first gig, Sugar had a beat picked out to accompany his song. This was at the infamous Coxsone Dodd auditions at Studio One, where a shy Minott had waited last in line before telling a shocked Dodd that unlike most of the try-outs, he had a beat to play over his song. This meant he could keep the recording, and practice back at home.
He picks his personal heydays as those spent in the recording studios in London’s Chalk Farm and Bethnal Green, where he was among the first flock of Eighties lovers rock artists, alongside Carroll Thompson and Winston Reedy. He remembers his time in Easy Street Studios in east London: “The first time we went in that studio in Bethnal Green they were playing punk rock. When we played it was the first time they’d heard reggae - and then all those punk rockers turned reggae. When I came to London I felt I could do what I wanted - I wasn’t in the ghetto any more. When I tried to make a sound like that [lovers rock] in Jamaica people would say [mimics a thick gruff Jamaican acccent], “No iya. That a soft ting iya. It’s an eedyat [idiot] ting.”
English audiences will remember Sugar for his honey-smooth version of The Jackson 5’s love song ‘We’ve Got A Good Thing Going’, when he blew up, of all places, Top Of The Pops with some gravity-defying pelvis pokes.
Minott is also credited with a song that prefaces ragga - ‘Rub-A-Dub’ back in 1984 [produced by the mighty Sly & Robbie on their press Taxi]. Also one of roots of the processed white digi-dancehall of today is Sugar’s: his ‘Herbman Hustling’ album was one of the first to use a drum machine, predating the much-touted 1985 ‘(Under Me) Sleng Teng’ by Wayne Smith by a year.
Minott gives me dancehall’s full definition - music that was so radical that it could only be played in a dancehall - which at the start of the off-beat revolution was pretty much all of it, and specifies Prince Buster as his god of dancehall. “When I was growing up it was Prince Buster, the god. We used to break into the dancehall next to my house, Champagnie Lawn, by pretending to be carrying parts of the sound system, or else we’d get in through a hole in the wall that we would cover up during the day - just so we could see people like him.”
Now, he thinks, “dancehall is a fake”. He remembers the melodies in Jamaican music: “There’s no singing in dancehall no more. Reggae’s going down. Other people are surviving, country is surviving, calypso is surviving. The old presentation of reggae has broken down. If Dennis Brown was still here everything would be alright. Nobody’s good enough anymore. Now they need Bunny Wailer and people like that to help. Nobody’s keeping us together. Despite the free downloading thing, Gregory Isaacs is done, Dennis [Brown] is gone, everyone is finished. It’s not nice,” he tails off miserably. All through the interview Sugar has been warm, with a quick-witted and mellow charm that belies a measure of interview technique - now, when asked about his current situation and his music’s, he seems downright broken-hearted.
Going back to that gay-bashing song, the fact that Sugar never released the track is testament to his values, particularly when so many of his peers were going ahead and putting out homophobic tracks: “We grew up like that - religion, rastafari, Christianity - we were always against things like that. It’s not because people are coming up with it now - we’ve always been like that. Jamaica’s like that. Myself - I don’t condone violence - people trying to kill people because of their lifestyle - or whatever. We have to live together anyway. I would say, leave them to Jah. I recorded the song just for the fun of it - then we decided, ‘No man, we can’t put this out’. When all this nonsense came out we didn’t bother. But it was just for fun, you know? Stop taking it so serious. Jamaicans say, ‘boom bye bye’ [a homophobic expression committed to song in a track by Buju Banton that details shooting gay people in the head] just for fun; they’re not actually gonna boom bye bye nobody. I’m saying leave it alone. I’ve never committed violence against anyone who wants to live the way they want to live.”
Sugar Minott will be remembered in two different camps for two different styles: his roots, sufferation tracks, like the excellent dub-laced ‘Slice Of The Cake’, and the Studio One classic ‘Mr. DC’, on one side, and his lovers rock and dancehall styles on the other. The strange logic of people’s tastes was epitomized by The Clash’s ‘(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais’, where Joe Strummer moans about his white reggae dreams of an earthy roots night night being shattered by the sight of aspirational, sharply-dressed West Indian immigrants: “Onstage they ain’t got no roots rock rebel”. Sugar Minott, who grew up with the harsh truths ghetto life, sang for a different reality: “I am a balladeer man - period. I’m Nat King Cole, Johnny Martin, I’m Sam Cooke. But because I grew up in the ghetto, where the sound was really rough, I didn’t get inspired to sing songs like that. ‘Good Thing Going’ - if I had a chance to choose what I sang, I would sing like that.”
..
When he talks, the scene listens</span>
For a big man, Sugar Minott moves pretty fast.
When ragga turned up, Sugar was at the start line waiting. When digital reggae arrived, he was standing there too. After his ‘Black Roots’ album carved a place for him in the reggae pantheon halfway between Studio One and Motown, he even found time to outrun dancehall - he pioneered the singjay genre - so it’s safe to say that when he talks, the scene listens.
Or when he sings. Sugar has a habit of singing down the phone during interviews; and for my ears only he included a track he’d had the good sense to leave out of his discography: “If you see a chi-chi man run, then send bottle and stone after him, run chi-chi man run...” he sings to me, collapsing into a school yard giggle.
Sugar grew up in the Kingston ghetto in the Sixties, in a country where poverty, ska - and casual homophobia - were a part of life, where even the most resounding of reggae hits were recorded on the thread of a shoestring. Sugar remembers breaking into the famous Channel One studio in the capital’s shanty town to record ‘Black Roots’, the album that would make his name and assure his place in the annals of reggae. “We used to break into the studio at night when the boss was gone - we would go over to the engineer’s house and wake him up and then bribe the watchman to open it up. We couldn’t afford it.”
That 1979 album, which was recorded with Leroy “Horsemouth” Wallace [star of arguably the biggest film about reggae, Rockers, on the drums, “Steely” Johnson on organ [the prolific dancehall producer who re-worked Dawn Penn’s ‘You Don’t Love Me’], registered its biggest hit with ‘Hard Time Pressure’, a roots classic which he tells me is inspired by “The feel of living in our ghetto Maxwell Park, where there’d always be police raids, and we couldn’t stay on the corner - we had to be running from the cops every day.”
Coming up in Maxfield Park, Sugar would find various places to practice with his crew, the fledgling African Brothers: a huge abandoned Chevrolet opposite a dancehall, in which he and his friend Tony Tuff would strum a guitar and burn a spliff before heading off to school, and at night they ended up “in a graveyard. Every night we were there among the tombs making noise, with people shouting at us, ‘Get out of the yard!’ There was nobody to run us there in that graveyard, and there were some ghosts up there that we made happy.”
Sugar’s personality, alongside his sturdy girth and gap-toothed grin made him a favourite amongst the unruly rabble of performers who would hang around Channel One studio, and he had no trouble getting them, or the engineers like King Jammy to “take thirty dollars instead of the usual sixty” for sessions. One interesting story, which explains the way his career continued to evolve, was when he was in King Tubby’s studio, and wanted to record his track ‘Never Gonna Give Jah Up’ for the 1979 ‘Ghetto-ology’ album: “[King Jammy] was giving me some time for free. He said: ‘Okay, you can only have one cut - if you miss, that’s it. I can’t afford to stop - you only get one chance.’ So the song started - (sings) “I never gonna give you up”, and I had to sing the song right through with no mistakes. There was a little part where I wanted to try some slow ting, but I didn’t do that because of the pressure, and that was one of my biggest hits! Nuff pressure helped me.”
After his roots origins, Sugar moved from a conscious style, lovers rock and dancehall, and added an ingredient which was to further distance himself from the classic conscious artists of that era. While crews like the Abyssinians were using their own beats, Sugar would re-use old rhythms from the rocksteady artists of his youth like Alton Ellis and Hopeton Lewis to create a new style.
Even back in the day, hawking for his first gig, Sugar had a beat picked out to accompany his song. This was at the infamous Coxsone Dodd auditions at Studio One, where a shy Minott had waited last in line before telling a shocked Dodd that unlike most of the try-outs, he had a beat to play over his song. This meant he could keep the recording, and practice back at home.
He picks his personal heydays as those spent in the recording studios in London’s Chalk Farm and Bethnal Green, where he was among the first flock of Eighties lovers rock artists, alongside Carroll Thompson and Winston Reedy. He remembers his time in Easy Street Studios in east London: “The first time we went in that studio in Bethnal Green they were playing punk rock. When we played it was the first time they’d heard reggae - and then all those punk rockers turned reggae. When I came to London I felt I could do what I wanted - I wasn’t in the ghetto any more. When I tried to make a sound like that [lovers rock] in Jamaica people would say [mimics a thick gruff Jamaican acccent], “No iya. That a soft ting iya. It’s an eedyat [idiot] ting.”
English audiences will remember Sugar for his honey-smooth version of The Jackson 5’s love song ‘We’ve Got A Good Thing Going’, when he blew up, of all places, Top Of The Pops with some gravity-defying pelvis pokes.
Minott is also credited with a song that prefaces ragga - ‘Rub-A-Dub’ back in 1984 [produced by the mighty Sly & Robbie on their press Taxi]. Also one of roots of the processed white digi-dancehall of today is Sugar’s: his ‘Herbman Hustling’ album was one of the first to use a drum machine, predating the much-touted 1985 ‘(Under Me) Sleng Teng’ by Wayne Smith by a year.
Minott gives me dancehall’s full definition - music that was so radical that it could only be played in a dancehall - which at the start of the off-beat revolution was pretty much all of it, and specifies Prince Buster as his god of dancehall. “When I was growing up it was Prince Buster, the god. We used to break into the dancehall next to my house, Champagnie Lawn, by pretending to be carrying parts of the sound system, or else we’d get in through a hole in the wall that we would cover up during the day - just so we could see people like him.”
Now, he thinks, “dancehall is a fake”. He remembers the melodies in Jamaican music: “There’s no singing in dancehall no more. Reggae’s going down. Other people are surviving, country is surviving, calypso is surviving. The old presentation of reggae has broken down. If Dennis Brown was still here everything would be alright. Nobody’s good enough anymore. Now they need Bunny Wailer and people like that to help. Nobody’s keeping us together. Despite the free downloading thing, Gregory Isaacs is done, Dennis [Brown] is gone, everyone is finished. It’s not nice,” he tails off miserably. All through the interview Sugar has been warm, with a quick-witted and mellow charm that belies a measure of interview technique - now, when asked about his current situation and his music’s, he seems downright broken-hearted.
Going back to that gay-bashing song, the fact that Sugar never released the track is testament to his values, particularly when so many of his peers were going ahead and putting out homophobic tracks: “We grew up like that - religion, rastafari, Christianity - we were always against things like that. It’s not because people are coming up with it now - we’ve always been like that. Jamaica’s like that. Myself - I don’t condone violence - people trying to kill people because of their lifestyle - or whatever. We have to live together anyway. I would say, leave them to Jah. I recorded the song just for the fun of it - then we decided, ‘No man, we can’t put this out’. When all this nonsense came out we didn’t bother. But it was just for fun, you know? Stop taking it so serious. Jamaicans say, ‘boom bye bye’ [a homophobic expression committed to song in a track by Buju Banton that details shooting gay people in the head] just for fun; they’re not actually gonna boom bye bye nobody. I’m saying leave it alone. I’ve never committed violence against anyone who wants to live the way they want to live.”
Sugar Minott will be remembered in two different camps for two different styles: his roots, sufferation tracks, like the excellent dub-laced ‘Slice Of The Cake’, and the Studio One classic ‘Mr. DC’, on one side, and his lovers rock and dancehall styles on the other. The strange logic of people’s tastes was epitomized by The Clash’s ‘(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais’, where Joe Strummer moans about his white reggae dreams of an earthy roots night night being shattered by the sight of aspirational, sharply-dressed West Indian immigrants: “Onstage they ain’t got no roots rock rebel”. Sugar Minott, who grew up with the harsh truths ghetto life, sang for a different reality: “I am a balladeer man - period. I’m Nat King Cole, Johnny Martin, I’m Sam Cooke. But because I grew up in the ghetto, where the sound was really rough, I didn’t get inspired to sing songs like that. ‘Good Thing Going’ - if I had a chance to choose what I sang, I would sing like that.”
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