Blood & Fire Ladel S/D

Destroy-ish: Some of the dee-jay stuff is less than exciting (not the I-Roy and Big Youth collections though those are amazing. . . put those up in search!) The collections seem kind of useless, but only because most of the stuff on them works better on the albums they're pulled from. Supposedly the Willi Williams album is just meh. Actually I guess there are quite a few records after release 39 which I haven't heard.

Stuff I haven't heard but want and haven't gotten only because I haven't seen them cheap enough yet: The Chantels & Friends thing, the Prince Alla/Junior Spear/Tappa Zukie double CD thing, Fisherman Style.

cybele started a thread on the "fisherman" comp -

Is Blood and Fire's "Fisherman" comp not the best thing ever?

Jesus Dread has vocal versions and dubs and instrumentals and deejay versions of the same tunes.

Destroy-ish: Some of the dee-jay stuff is less than exciting

Noooo, the Niney the Observer collection is now one of my faves. I'm not so hot on the I-Roy one except for a couple tracks, but the packaging for it looks really good. Haven't heard the Big Youth one yet.

How is the Prince Far I that they put out? I never see that one get mentioned.

i only have mr. isaacs & heart of the congos, but both are obviously amazing.

I forgot about the Niney the Observer collection (If Deejay Was Your Trade is also good.) I was thinking more along of the Jah Stitch collection or the Welton Irie half of Lambs Bread International or the U-Brown thing when I said Destroy-ish. None of that stuff is bad though by any stretch of the imagination though.

Ernie reshaped the whole reggae distribution game in the US very agressively, the upside being we can get so much stuff, at such a good price, but Barrow is an historian.

http://www.reggaenews.co.uk/img/interviews/steve_barrow.jpg
http://www.reggaenews.co.uk/img/interviews/barrows_records1.jpg
http://www.reggaenews.co.uk/img/interviews/barrows_records2.jpg

http://www.reggaenews.co.uk/interviews/steve_barrow.asp
http://www.geocities.com/studiowon/dob/DobBarrow.htm

I really need to catch up, I haven't bought a BAF disc in a decade prob'ly. I did, however, po for a copy of Lloyd Bradley "Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King" from Amazon UK. $26 to my door in the US (outch).

what an unbelievable sale!

both of those i've really played the hell out of. the children of jah comp is probably one of my favorite CDs of ever, any genre, an era

I've got mostly all the dub stuff but none of the vocal albums, so I need to get on those. Are the Campbell or Clarke ones the best to start with?

I did, however, po for a copy of Lloyd Bradley "Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King" from Amazon UK. $26 to my door in the US (outch).

I meant to get a copy of that. Is it any good?

i agree w/ the nerdery part but disagree that the good stuff's all been heard.

blood and fire is awesome by the way, but i prefer the vocal stuff to the dubs.

It's from his 96 unfaves thing I think. I thought Simon was crazy then and I think he's crazier now. Esp. since the packaging, remastering and general attention to detail on the B&F and Pressure Sounds (and Wackies) reissues is about a million miles from the original Pebbles/Nuggets/Back From The Grave stuff.

"ts for murdering your wallet: blood and fire vs. basic channel wackies reissue avalanche"

Blood & Fire probably, although the fact that so much of the catalogue is marked down now probably mitigates it somewhat.

http://www.ebreggae.com/

Yes, although really you can't go wrong with any of the vocal albums. And as mentioned previously Jesus Dread is stunning and essential.

xpost

No-one has mentioned Mick Hucknall yet.

even if he's just the "daddy warbucks" behind the label, the fact that he's financed such a fucking beautiful string of (re)releases from a top-notch label over the years earns him crazy respect in my book.

but maybe that's just me.

Don't worry I think they run them periodically. Get on their mailing list and check the site occassionally.

Prince Alla OTOH is awesome.

I actually think Darker Than Blue is kind of overrated

Heresy! BTW, Is It Because I'm Black -- another song on the compilation, also by Ken Boothe -- is equally great.

Well I'm not going to argue it's bad, but compared to the original material B&F discs it's a little slight.

a little slightly awesome!

i wish the chantells comp. had been the entire chantells album in addition to the other various tracks but i guess it would have been two discs.

why didn't blood & fire ever do any barry brown reissues? he's all over their tubby comps.

that teacher fi de class cd is awesome

haha there's a straight up disco (as in sat. nite fever, not extended version) track on it called "hot reggae music"

and rapping :----)

"why didn't blood & fire ever do any barry brown reissues? he's all over their tubby comps."

He is? The Lee ones?

It is sad that the Chantells' album isn't available somewhere.

Has anyone bought any of the recent Pressure Sounds reissues? The Bim Sherman, Rockstones and Revolutionaries comps all look quite nice.

haha there's a straight up disco (as in sat. nite fever, not extended version) track on it called "hot reggae music"

Yeah, the toaster is the same fellow that turns up on half of Sylford Walker's Lamb's Bread Int'l disc (also released by B & F). It's an . . . interesting song. It look interesting. (n.1)

________________________________
(n.1) Actually, I think it borrows "liberally" from Rapper's Delight, if I'm remembering it correctly.

Are you talking about Teacher Fi De Class or Darker Than Blue? Or both?

Hotter Reggae Music is the last song on Darker Than Blue (hope that answers your question, Alex).

Yeah I know (I never understand why frankly), but that's not the same track on the General Echo CD is it?

Yeah, it is an odd choice-of-song to end that disc.

two different songs. not talking about darker than blue, that just a welton irie track

hot reggae music is on the general echo cd and has a disco beat and echo sort of old school rappin

This thread reminds me of the 'Ladle of Filth' exchange a few years ago which I can't find for the life of me

FYI most of the remaining B&F catalog on sale at Ernie B's.

found a copy of 'deliver me from my enemies' at my local store, glad i picked it up. i think i might like it better than the jesus dread comp.

i'd never seen this one before but its quality stuff http://www.boomkat.com/item.cfm?id=28990

Is it? I've often looked at it. It's one of like B&F things I don't actually own.

i need to give it another listen but its way better than i expected as the other ja-man one 'junior byles and friends' didn't strike me at all

Hah that one I like (at least three or four total killers and the rest is good enough), but yeah it is slighter than most of their other comps.

yeah i bought that ja-man dub one on the cheap from ernieb's recently (along with Deliver Me From My Enemies). definitely worth what i paid for it, it's an above average dub comp though not crucial.

the nextmen sampling niney's 'blood & fire'
http://www.zshare.net/audio/2533586c815bd6/

so is this label gone now? i haven't noticed a new release from them for about two years. pressure sounds and trojan's new reissue program seem to have taken up some, though not all of the slack.

it'd be a shame as this will be remembered as one of the great reissue labels and one of the highlights of the cd era (which i guess is drawing to a close soon enough).

Steve Barrow (of Blood & Fire) popped into a message forum late last year to say that Blood & Fire had essentially shut down, e.g., no one was left at the offices, he and the company's other founders had left, the remaining stock was in storage, and so forth. I've heard nothing since to suggest that the label is again active. Indeed, over at eMusic, there's a new label that's recently appeared -- Lee's Records Jamaica -- which features some of the old Blood & Fire albums verbatim (same artist, title, cover art, track listing and track versions). See, e.g., Johnny Clarke's Dreader Dread and King Tubby's Dub Gone Crazy and Cornell Campbell's I Shall Not Remove. And on eMusic's 17 Dots website, the President of the company that distributes Lee's Records said that the new label and distribution system was necessary in light of "major issues with royalties collection from labels and distributors that shall rename nameless." Now that doesn't necessarily mean Blood & Fire, of course, but with all the foregoing added to the analysis, I have little hope that Blood & Fire will be back.

I don't think they are doing any new releases. Actually a lot of reggae reissue labels seem to have slowed down as of late (no new Auralux, Hot Pot, Motion, etc.) Pressure Sounds still going strong though.

(same artist, title, cover art, track listing and track versions)

seems quite dubious. maybe jamaican reissues are back to "normal" then? at least we don't have to deal as much with those horribly-mastered vinyl reissues on studio 1 and clocktower that i ate up in the '90s.

sad about b&f -- those yabby you reissues are in my top ten most days.

now that Trojan/Sanctuary have been swallowed up by Universal I suspect it'll be a while before we see anything like the excellent reissue campaign that Trojan were sorting out.
Trojan website is dead/broken .. always a sign of changes afoot.

Ernie B is having another great sale! B&F, Auralux, Pressure Sounds, etc. I bought the following last week:

Ja Man Allstars - In The Dub Zone
Culture - Harder Than The Rest
Scientist - World At War
Various - Massive B Big Tunez: March Out & Jah Love Rhythms
Lee Perry - Divine Madness Definitely
Burning Spear - Spear Burning
Peter Tosh - Talking Revolution
Keith Hudson - Nuh Skin Up (With Soul Syndicate)
Various - Street Sweeper Round Two

i noticed they have the strong set from Larry Marshall + King Tubby for under a buck fitty. that's a great deal.

Even better is the Lee Perry collection Born In The Sky for $2!

Yabby You has died.

this is a post someone made at a reggae forum i read:

Youth I-an (as he preferred to call himself and which name was purloined by Big Youth) is irreplaceable. He was there, with Ras Michael, Albert Griffiths and Familyman at the dawn of rasta reggae late 60s/early 70s. No bandwagon rasta he.

After Brother Joe split from the Sons of Negus in 1971, Vivian joined him as one of the Rightful Bros. A big mistake that was probably responsible for Vivian's low opinion of other musicians. Behind Vivian's back Bro. Joe took Cedric Myton (before he adopted his falsetto style) into the studio (Harry J) and tried to cover Vivian's songs: Carnal Mind and Conquering Lion (which Vivian called "72 Different Nations"). It was a disaster. Cedric couldn't handle it and the session was fruitless. But Youth I-an discovered the treachery and broke with that group.

Vivian was already quite sickly at that time. He was not a robust child, was abandoned by his parents at an early age and grew up bouncing it a yard. To survive, he joined a group of rastas who collected scrap metal and smelted it in a yard fire to create reprocessed aluminum ingots that they sold to fabricators. The fumes ravaged Vivian's lungs and he was repeatedly hospitalized, brushing death more than once. So it was a challenge for him to protect his work from the pirates down a yard. Which helps explain why it took another couple of years before he could record Conquering Lion for himself Horsemouth, Chinna and Familyman backed him up in a Dynamics session that produced what was then called "the Buckers rhythm", that was soon a big hit on Tubby's sound system. the session also yielded The Man Who Does the Work. Karl Pitterson was at the control.

Then he met a couple of guys from Mandeville: Bobby Melody and Alrick Forbes, who billed themselves as the Ralph Bros. They rejected the Youth at first, refusing to believe it was he behind the Buckers riddim. But, his credentials established, they joined forces at Tubby's studio to voice over the Buckers riddim as Conquering Lion. It's release on their Now label was like the zero milestone for rasta reggae.

After a violent confrontation over the rights with the Ralph Bros. over what was born again as a mega-hit in the small world of the west side sound systems, Errol Smith intervened and mediated a truce: the Ralphs kept the money received to date, but Vivian got control of the stampers. Vivian then reissued "Lion" on his own label and never collaborated with anyone ever again. Business is business.

Clearly, the Tubbs loved the Youth. The version sides of all those early Prophets singles bear witness to that love. Tubbs (first?) dub album was Prophecy of Dub almost all Y.Y. material.

Yabby's voice was not very musical and he recognized this himself; he often used other singers as proxies for his own frustrated ambitions (much as did Lee Perry), first trying to employ Pat Kelly, but later turning to such as Wayne Wade and Michael Prophet. Certain records such as If you won't Love Me (DSR 9187) reveal yabby's romantic side. I think he longed to be a Slim Smith. But he became his own original.

I confess, when I was first listening to him in the late 70s, I found his voice off-putting. For me, it was one of those experiences like getting into a very hot bath. Difficult at first, but once you settle in. Hank Holmes once said that if you don't like Yabby Yu, you don't really like reggae. That's how I feel about it now as well.

One of my all time favorites, this is terrible news.

Wiki is reporting it, too. What a terrible day this turned out to be. Damn.

Well I think the actual label thread deserves a revive on this note:

http://www.vprecords.com/vp-records-relaunches-uk-reggae-label-blood-and-fire-20-years-after-its-first-release/

:D

hell yeah. very excited if this, as i've read, means new blood & fire titles (not just re-releasing old titles with new material, which is good too).

hoping the resurrected blood & fire will reissue more full albums. i love the compilations and career retrospectives, but . . .

Funnily enough I tend to hope exactly the opposite! My favourites are always the comps, and there's usually a chance of either finding a proper copy of an LP if you're lucky, or if not someone boshing out a resissue on the back of the interest generated by a B&F set.

Yeah the full albums are generally very good, but the comps are for the most part (Heart of the Congos and maybe Social Living excepted) the stronger of the two.

man you really appreciate the sonic work B&F did when you have to listen to the "original" albums/tracks on the streaming services

Blood & Fire were fantastic. I'm slowly acquiring the vinyl versinos of all the CDs I bought back in the late 90s. Just picked up a NM copy of The Congos for $40, which seems like a steal the way new vinyl gets priced.

Heart Of The Congos is fucking classic. The label did god's work in the 90's (even though that waste of space Muck Hicknall was involved). Another fave I discovered through them was Horace Andy's tremendous In The Light album.

Recently found their wonderful 'X-Ray' compilation of dub stuff in a charity shop.
Other than that, I only have the Congos 2cd reissue and the Keith Hudson compilation (Pick A Dub), from their catalogue.
Of course, if I see anything else from hereon, then I will buy it of course.
But I aint holding my breath.

brotherlovesdub : if you want to offload your cds as you find the vinyls ….

(can't blame a fella for trying .. )

I've been slowly picking up the catalogue over the years - vinyl/cd, whatever I can find. The Yabby You and Congos records are sacred, with the In the Light and Chantells collection close behind.

Chantells might actually be my favorite. Another label also put out a Phase One comp that's worth looking for

(called "We Are Getting Bad")

I can't find the Termination Dub stuff in any other format/albums/comp. My cd is 1700 miles away, & I hardly use my ipod anymore cause no battery life. So that's one I really miss hearing.

Other ones that I love but can't find digital equivalents of most of the tracks (or the ones I do find are of such poorer audio quality that it just makes me sad to listen to them: most of the tracks on Dennis Brown "The Promised Land", most of the dubs on Horace Andy's "In the Light" (esp the last track which has a great proto-hiphop intro).