![]() ![]() “I have to presume they saw in me an open book,” he says. You might reasonably have expected the Jamaican music industry to look on a well-spoken white English interloper with profound suspicion, but everyone there appears to have loved Rodigan from the first time he fetched up on the island in 1979, looking for interviews for his Radio London show. “Ask Ronnie the time and he’ll tell you how a watch is made.” Still, he says, perhaps this fanatical obsession with detail was the reason he was so quickly accepted by the reggae world. “It’s like that thing that Jane Wyman said about her ex-husband Ronald Reagan,” he smiles. He seems incapable of mentioning a track without also telling you which record company released it, who the backing musicians were, or who produced it: “ Rudie Bam Bam by the Clarendonians: brilliant keyboards, must have been Jackie Mitoo playing piano, Studio One production, Coxsone Dodd … Roy Richards’ Contact: amazing harmonica playing, I first heard it on an album called Club Ska 67, but it originally came out on a label called Doctor Bird.” It’s that his anecdotes come with copious footnotes. It’s not just that he has a bountiful supply of anecdotes, as you might expect from a man who collapsed midway through an interview with Burning Spear after unwisely deciding to share the roots legend’s spliff, and endured a visit from Lee “Scratch” Perry during which the errant producer decided to redecorate Rodigan’s south-London flat with the aid of a marker pen. That disparity isn’t the only remarkable thing about Rodigan’s brand of conversation. And then the crowd started shouting, ‘Legal! Legal!’, which meant that it was an off-duty policeman, rather than a gangster, who had fired his gun.” You just don’t get many people who look and sound like Rodigan telling you about the time his DJ set in a Kingston dance hall called Ashanti Junction went down so well that bullets started ricocheting off the roof. The disparity between how he talks and what he talks about somehow seems more jolting when it’s coming from across a table in a restaurant rather than out of a radio. He also speaks in the perfectly modulated RP tones of a newsreader from the days before regional accents were allowed to sully Britain’s airwaves, a legacy of his time at the Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Drama. He looks, as he cheerfully admits, “like a bank manager”. On the other, there’s something about meeting Rodigan in person that brings home rather forcefully what a deeply improbable state of affairs this all is. At 65, he is both a legend in the Jamaican music industry and a national treasure in the UK: he is probably the only person ever to have been awarded an MBE and the title of World Clash Champion. He has now spent the best part of 40 years as Britain’s most celebrated reggae DJ. As detailed in his forthcoming autobiography, My Life in Reggae, he started out as an actor, but in 1978 parlayed an obsession that began as a teenage fan into a parallel career as a broadcaster. On the one hand, this is both fascinating and very much what one expects when one interviews Rodigan. Unless I can come back like a lion and claw you down.” He smiles. But if you lure me into playing that dubplate and then sting me with one saying your name and telling me I’m crap, I’m dead. So, I’ve got a dubplate that says, ‘I’m David Rodigan,’ and you’ve got a dubplate saying you’re Alexis, OK? On the night, if you play your Alexis dub and I play my David Rodigan dub, we’re quits, right? We’re equal. I’m sorry, a counter-action? “So, you’ve got a brilliant record by Johnny Osbourne – you get him to record a dubplate that names you. ![]() ![]() So, they know you’ve got a big dubplate by X, they go to X and get them to voice a counter-action.” There are different rounds, point-scoring systems, grounds for disqualification and strategies that make it, as Rodigan puts it, “the musical equivalent of a chess game”, in which “DJs deliberately set a trap. But, apparently, I couldn’t have been more wrong. I’d always assumed that it was just a matter of two DJs each battling to win over a crowd by playing better records than each other, with a heavy emphasis on dubplates (specially recorded tracks with vocals that mention the DJ by name). He is doing it with breathless enthusiasm, but it is still taking quite a long time because, as it turns out, the rules of a reggae soundclash are a thing of byzantine complexity. D avid Rodigan is explaining the rules of a reggae soundclash to me. ![]()
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