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Interview Clive Chin
©David Corio
By Drummond’s passing the ska had evolved into new forms but Randy’s was still a locus for the music. Vincent missed much of the rocksteady era due to plans that would come to fruition at the arrival of the reggae beat. In 1968 he opened a studio upstairs from the shop, where Bob Marley and the Wailers and the mercurial Lee Scratch Perry would record the group’s Soul Rebel and Soul Revolution LPs. It was at this point that Clive began to take over the producer’s chair. Like Vincent, who was taught trumpet by Dizzy Moore, Clive had dabbled in learning the piano as a child but gave it up in his teens. His father’s business interests meant he didn’t spend much leisure time with his children so Clive got the taste for the music from “Hanging around upstairs watching dad work.” When Randy’s original sound engineer Bill Garnett left for the United States, the role was filled by an old school friend, Errol Thompson who, in the late 70s, became the engineer for the producer Joe Gibbs as one of The Mighty Two. Soon Clive himself would join his pal behind the desk, as the island’s dominant rhythm, reggae, also came of age. “The first song I recorded wasn‘t anywhere near a hit - a tune named Young Love. It was meant to be a schoolmate of mine but maybe he couldn‘t hold the tune so I just made it an
instrumental. I can’t find a copy of it!” Another planned vocal turned instrumental would yield his first smash. 1971’s Java married a haunting melodica solo by another school friend, the legendary Augustus Pablo, with Errol and Clive’s studio wizardry to create one of the primary examples of the subgenre known as “dub”. Clive still insists it was the first of its kind. “I keep telling every historian that and they keep telling me about Blackboard Jungle and Aquarius Dub! Perhaps when I die they will stop” he says with gallows humour. He also adds that Pablo wasn’t the only musician to blow the melodica at Randy’s, citing recordings by Ansell Collins and even the Wailer Peter Tosh. Clive also briefly entered the sound system business in 1971 with a rig called Black Moses and an mc who would become dancehall master General Echo, but found the accompanying violence hard to stomach. In a dance with Augustus Pablo, he saw “a guy ride his motor cycle through the entrance of the hall and knock over a table where a couple were having their drinks” and quit. With Clive and Errol at the controls, the Randy’s sound meant crisp guitars and booming bass. Clive would use Pablo again for the dub version to Alton Ellis’ 1973 cover of the Cornelius Brothers Too Late (To Turn Back Now) – where, bizarrely, Clive claims the