HERITAGE: Chris Lane's Fashion Records Featuring Smiley Culture, Maxi Priest And More (1984)

HERITAGE: Chris Lane's Fashion Records Featuring Smiley Culture, Maxi Priest And More (1984)


April 20, 2018

Back in 1984, UK music show Ear Say profiled a small but enormously influential reggae label operating out of the basement of a record shop. Founded by Chris Lane and John MacGillivray, Fashion Records played a hugely important role in the UK's 1980s reggae scene. Fashion Records initially spun off from the Dub Vendor record shop in Clapham and put out a tonne of music from British and Jamaican artists like Smiley Culture, Maxi Priest, Johnnie Clarke, Alton Ellis, Papa Face, Horace Andy, General Levy and many more.

That's the context of today's HERITAGE, but we've focused in on a section of the show that spotlights a young Smiley Culture (as well as Asher Senator, Papa Face, Maxi Priest and Barry Boom). In it, Smiley talks about combining patois and cockney slang for "Cockney Translation" and how he used that as the inspiration for "Police Officer", which you also see him record in the studio. The combination of London and Caribbean slang is taken for granted now, but what Smiley did in the early '80s was revolutionary.




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