Peace, love and songs you can’t argue with

At 55, I’m a bit too young to have gone to the Rock Against Racism demos in London in the late Seventies. But I grew up in their shadow, fed by The Specials and The Clash, in a time where you took sides musically as well as politically. I knew people who liked Blondie and Stiff Little Fingers, but from the age of 13 or 14 there was little doubt that my musical avenue led straight to Kingston, Jamaica. The other stuff just wasn’t serious. And within a few years I had progressed from the Bob Marley album and the odd Trojan compilation to a fully fledged obsession with underground heavyweight roots reggae, and it’s flip-side dub, which has never really gone away. I love and follow modern reggae and I also listen to all sorts of other music these days, but classic reggae remains a kind of default for me. There is something about the great roots music that came out of Jamaica, and a little later the UK,