Vinyl Release

The BBC website refers to it as 'one of the most uplifting albums of all time', which is not too far off the mark if you ask me. But before the plaudits, a little history. Frederick Nathaniel 'Toots' Hibbert was born in May Pen, Jamaica in 1942. When his family moved to Kingston in the 1960s, he met Raleigh Gordon and Jerry Matthias, formed the vocal group The Maytals and began a distinguished career.

They recorded with such legendary producers as Coxsone Dodd, Byron Lee, Prince Buster and Leslie Kong, about whom they wrote the fab if less than flattering 'Monkey Man'. Another of their biggest hits was '54-46, That's My Number', a song Toots wrote about the 18-month prison sentence he served in 1966 after being busted for possession of dope.

Soul A'plenty
The group were also credited with helping establish Jamaica's emerging musical identity with their 1968 hit, 'Do The Reggay', and Toots appeared in the breakthrough JA gangsta movie The Harder They Come in '72, The Maytal's epic 'Pressure Drop' adding to its already superlative soundtrack. Island Records' founder Chris Blackwell was an enthusiastic fan, and in 1974 The Maytals recorded Funky Kingston for the Island subsidiary Dragon, with Blackwell producing.

In fact, the title track was Blackwell's idea. Noting the popularity of 'Funky Nassau', an American Top 20 hit for a funk band from the Bahamas called The Beginning Of The End, he suggested to Toots that The Maytals should make their own claim on musical kinship with the grooviest music issuing out of the States, and hence Funky Kingston was born.

An absolute stormer by anybody's standards, what we have here is an exquisite showcase by an instinctive master stylist. 'Sit Right Down' is Stax-meets-rocksteady, Toots not for the last time on this album giving Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett a run for their money. In all, there's Soul a'plenty, while Ike Turner's 'I Can't Believe' takes a Mariachi/nursery rhyme turn, 'Redemption Song' is gussied up Gospel, while 'Daddy's Home' falls to the floor and testifies against some glorious doo-wop, and 'Pomp And Pride' is yer actual Bar-B-Q knees-up.

This is all wonderful stuff, Toots and his group taking on the US genres one by one and totally owning them. The two killers, though, are the title track, where Toots challenges James Brown on his own turf and comes out with a mighty credible 10-all draw, and 'Louie Louie' which Toots embraces in all its incomprehensible majesty with such crazy vigour that you can find esteemed critics online who actually claim this is the best version ever.

And for all of Toots Hibbert's unbridled vocal prowess, Funky Kingston is a canny beast, a deliberate ploy to ingratiate reggae with a hitherto largely uncomprehending audience.

The hybrid easing in, if you like, from one culture to another is exactly the same gambit Blackwell employed a year later when introducing The Wailers to the international market, adding some soft rock guitar and keyboards to the essential Wailers 'riddim' to make it less alien to uncultured ears. And, of course, Bob Marley became the poster-boy of the reggae revolution. Still the Maytals got their due plaudits – magisterial critic Robert Cristgau called them 'The Beatles to The Wailers' Rolling Stones' – and other critics found their vital approach a pre-punk fillip, harking back to a fundamental spirit, an antidote to the contemporary scene with its proggy, largely joyless complexity. And they continue to be revered to this day, improving beyond measure every festival bill they care to grace.

But what of that under-the-weather Toots struggling for a voice, whom we met in that flat back in the drizzly mid '80s? The day after we'd legged it, praise be, there he was burning it up at the gig, an absolute, unbowed force of nature.

Re-Release Verdict
When we're discussing Funky Kingston, we're actually talking about two LPs. The one that occupies us here is a 180g re-release on Music On Vinyl of the first one, which was issued in 1972 on the Dragon label. A couple of years later, Chris Blackwell unleashed it on the US market in a different form with a few more immediate songs from 1970's In The Dark, including the sublime 'Pressure Drop' single. Our copy exhibited no playing issues and was attractively presented. HFN