Alan Ratcliffe wrote
Aubs1 wrote
"The Police's" early stuff was considered "White / British raggae".......
I think it owed more to the British 2 tone ska than reggae - bands like The Specials, The Beat and Madness. Both 2 tone and reggae came from the original Jamaican ska, so they have similarities.
Stewart Copeland hints that the major influence was actually Elvis Costello and his single "Watching The Detectives". Copeland, whose playing career prior to the Police had been prog rock, says that that groove came easy to him because it was so similar to the middle eastern rhythms that he'd soaked up as kid (he was an army brat, his family lived in the middle east for several years).
The police were only part reggae anyway. And milked that skanky groove less and less as time went by. For me Copeland was the key, a fab drummer. Also they were such a great BAND, and pulled off rhythmic changes in their songs that most of their contemporaries couldn't even have imagined.
I think it was more reggae than ska, though where on stops and the other starts is debatable. The first reggae hit that I recall (or the first one that got onto BBC) was "Elizabethan Reggae" which was an instrumental and a skanking re-arrangement of "Elizabethan Serenade" (which was a waltz now I come to think of it). But knowing what I know now and thinking back that sounds an awful lot like two-tone.
But then was two-tone an actual musical style or a social movement or a record label? It was, I think, a sort of white boy meets rude boy social thing. Quite uniquely English and a response to social trends at the time.
Marley is one of the greats. He took reggae and made it more poppy and accessible but kept the infectious grooves.
He was fab, no doubt about it. But for me the unsung hero of reggae is Chris Blackwell, founder of the Island label. He heard that music and started importing it via family connections in the Caribbean. Then he cut to the chase, formed his own label, first licensed and then signed ska and reggae acts and managed to take that sound across the high street and into the "white" market. The breakthrough was Millie and "My Boy Lollipop". He was very protective of Marley before he made it big, and part of that was allowing Marley the freedom to make the music that he wanted. Without Blackwell reggae might have just been a regional oddity in the Carribbean.
