Gregory Isaacs (1951-2010)

My favourite singer died on Monday. I'm not saying that as a tribute or to claim him as mine but if I happen to outlive Al Green, you must come back and check that I don't say the same about him.

I have a heavy pile of vinyl upstairs that establishes my allegiance, something like 35 LP's plus 12 inch singles, and some CD's closer to hand down here, the Live at Brixton Academy album playing right now. But my collection is nowhere near an effort at completism. In the mid-90's there was a review in Q, or it might have been Mojo, entitled 'that difficult 137th album'. Great admirer of his best work though I am, I'm not above thinking that some of those albums were the most perfunctory of contract fulfilment.

The two LP's repackaged as the double album, Lover's Rock, along with the Night Nurse set represented a high point in the reggae chic that Gregory was undisputed champion of. By no means the international icon that Bob Marley was, he had a specialist following in the UK while being a household name and perennial number one in Jamaica and the Caribbean. If Night Nurse crept into the lower ranks of the British hit parade in the original, it was some sort of compensation but not much that Mick Hucknall took the song to a higher position as a cover version.

There was already a considerable oeuvre of bittersweet singer-songwriter material behind him before the 1980's with albums like Red Rose for Gregory and Warning still to come as well as the powerful Judge Not collection with Dennis Brown (and do, please, look up the majesterial duet Let Off Sup'm) and collaborations with Sly and Robbie, the superstar rhythm section of choice. But Papa Gregory also benefitted from a fine backing band in the Roots Radics Band who were just as state of the art.

Equally adept as heartbreaker or heartbroken, the local ladies man, there was also a political strain to his songs in the likes of the rasta hymn Border, and the gorgeously well-judged cover version of Puff the Magic Dragon. His voice was sweet without being sentimental, languid and lyrical. Our first planned trip to see him in London ended in disappointment when called off, reportedly when Gregory was jailed on gun-running charges in the early 1980's but the mythology and rumour was not always easily distilled from the hard facts in those days. I don't know.

I eventually saw him in Bournemouth circa 1989, just after Red Rose for Gregory and enjoyed every minute, knew every word, even though waiting until midnight before he came on, and drove home to Portsmouth to be in bed by 3 a.m.

His passing marks almost the end of a great tradition of reggae, a genre whose reputation and more recent lurches into darker areas make the bygone age of Dennis Brown, Freddie MacGregor and their like seem really quite old-fashioned.

Hush Darling http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n8old0BNWQ