the story of these two tapes, as far as i remember it, goes like this: a german student exploring the rasta-culture to get his degree or being payed by his university to do so, visits mikey dread at the radio JBC studios in kingston, jamaica, where mikey dread had a weekly show "saturday night at radio JBC". having his mono-tape-recorder with him for an interview, he plugged in and recorded the next three hours.
befriended with our beloved artist "snoid studios" he sent him a copy of the tapes ... the rest is (to us at the so called "hinterwald") history.
i remember 1980 everyone of us had a copy. when a car of a friend drove by that summer with windows open you could be sure hearing these tapes played loud. our "summer of 1980" tape, favourite in the "hinterwald" scene, where those days a punk-reggae-party took place: deadheads, punks & reggaefans created in 1981 the "hinterwald free & outside" festival which will have its 40th anniversary in the next summer.
following the link above you can get a slight impression of the historic events, the bands from that time, photos, the festival-posters and other artwork by "snoid studios". musically i suggest "Anssets Choice", that's my personal compilation of almost live stuff i recorded those days. yup, that's some weird german laguage, even for germans, some sung in our local dialect.
so i may call these tapes the "basic constitution", the musical place where we all met, opening the ears of even die hard deadheads (you know that: you enter a room and there are tapes with no names on it but only a date and a location ...) for some clash-stuff (mikey helped them making "sandinista") and we - the more punk or new wave freaks - learned about the secrets of listening to a week of deadshows ;)
the show itself is just wonderful. mikey extends some songs in various versions, original, dub, toasted ... spices them up with some animal sounds, noises, cries and creates this unique experience he never released as record. so you can't purchase it or anything else like this.
the opener takes a bit time, but then he's in a flow you'll hopefully enjoy as we did in the summer of 1980, a good year for roots rock reggae.
fun fact: my friendship to "snoid studios" is based on our common love to max romeo's "war in a babylon" and it lasts at this point in time & space more than 40 years, so the upsetter seems a solid foundation for friendship ;)
"hail JAH,
rasta-far-I,
emper-I selassi-I,
king of kings,
lord of lords
conquering lion of the tribe of judah".
stay dread!
