Dave and Ansel Collins – Double Barrel (1970)
It isn’t Sly Dunbar’s most spectacular performance as a drummer – although his playing is right in the pocket: listen to the lightness of his touch on the cymbals and the tightness of his occasional fills – but as recording debuts go, appearing on an early 70s reggae classic in your teens, a single that furthermore went to No 1 in the UK and sold 300,000 copies despite British radio’s disinclination to play it, is quite the impressive way to open your account.
The Mighty Diamonds – Right Time (1976)
The Mighty Diamonds’ debut album Right Time effectively made Sly and Robbie’s name, helping to popularise the new “rockers” rhythm in reggae. It’s all great, but if you want to see how impactful Dunbar’s playing was on the sound, head straight to the title track. The beat he plays is complex, a world away from the “one-drop” rhythm that had predominated in reggae: so complex, in fact, that Dunbar claimed other drummers initially refused to believe he’d actually played it, assuming some kind of studio trickery was involved. “Then everybody started trying for that style,” he added, “and it soon become established.”
Junior Murvin – Police and Thieves (1976)
The sound of Sly without Robbie – the bass here was played by veteran reggae artist Boris Gardiner, alas best-known in the UK for his fairly drippy 1986 No 1 I Wanna Wake Up With You. With astonishingly tight fills, Dunbar drumming provides a solid foundation beneath Murvin’s eerie, careworn falsetto and a backing track that seems to shimmer with echo. Dunbar also said he played drums on Bob Marley’s Punky Reggae Party, a song inspired by the Clash’s cover of Police and Thieves.
Culture – Two Sevens Clash (1977)
Sly played drums on Culture’s Two Sevens Clash, unequivocally one of the greatest roots reggae albums ever made. It’s packed with incredible songs – I’m Alone in the Wilderness, Black Starliner Must Come, Calling Rasta Far I – but the greatest of the lot is the title track, which prophesises an apocalyptic event on 7 July 1977 “when past injustices would be avenged” according to the sleeve notes, and is sung in full belief that the world was about to be transformed. It wasn’t, but the sheer force of Culture’s faith – their sweet harmonies interrupted by singer Joseph Hill’s shouts and imprecations – can still knock you backwards.
Grace Jones – Pull Up to the Bumper (1981)
You can honestly take your pick of any of the tracks Sly and Robbie recorded with Grace Jones as part of Compass Point Studios’ house band – from their surprisingly funky reinvention of the Normal’s Warm Leatherette to the fabulously tough Nipple to the Bottle – but let’s plump for the most famous. The genius of the music on Pull Up to the Bumper is the way it exists in a space bordered by dub, disco, electro-pop and post-punk, but that is ultimately entirely its own: it just doesn’t sound like anything else. And Sly’s drumming is magnificent, from the bursts of martial snare that open the track to the implausible humid-sounding groove he conjures up, that marries a hint of reggae lope to an insistent dancefloor pulse.
Bob Dylan – Jokerman (1983)
As sessioneers, Sly and Robbie were incredibly adaptable, so their discography is nothing if not eclectic – it takes in everyone from Bunny Wailer to Britney Spears. But nonetheless, there’s something pretty unexpected about their period as Bob Dylan’s rhythm section (they were, apparently, recruited at Dylan’s own suggestion). On the opening track of 1983’s Infidels, they gently infuse the biblical imagery with Jamaican spirit: it’s done so beautifully, with such a light touch, that it feels organic and natural, the opposite of the clumsy lunges at reggae made by a lot of rock artists in the 70s and 80s.
Gwen Guthrie – Padlock (1985)
Sly and Robbie produced Gwen Guthrie’s early albums – and Dunbar programmed the drums on Guthrie’s big hit, Ain’t Nothin’ Goin’ on But the Rent, but the Padlock EP, featuring Larry Levan’s remixes of tracks from her album Portrait, is the real jewel among her Compass Point All Stars-assisted work. Its title track is just magnificent: it was a superb song to start off with, and Levan’s mix clearly bears the influence of dub, stripping the music back, drenching everything in echo and foregrounding Dunbar’s unshowy, but supremely funky drumming, a decision that seems to be reflected on the sleeve, where Sly’s name appears above that of the singer.
Sly and Robbie – Boops (Here to Go) (1987)
Sly and Robbie’s biggest UK hit as artists was both supremely cool and utterly irresistible: featuring a splendidly laconic rap by Shinehead, it wasn’t hip-hop, although, with its interpolations from both Rossini’s Barber of Seville and Ennio Morricone’s theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, it definitely felt at least slightly adjacent to the sample-heavy collages of Double Dee and Steinski. And the rumbling funk of the rhythm track is fantastic.
Chaka Demus and Pliers – Bam Bam/Murder She Wrote (1992)
Sly and Robbie were all over Tease Me, the album that briefly turned dancehall duo Chaka Demus and Pliers into mainstream stars: largely co-produced and co-written by Shakespeare and Dunbar, it spawned five UK Top 20 singles. It was a concerted push for crossover pop success but that didn’t preclude experimentation: both the cover of “Toots” Hibbert’s reggae standard Bam Bam and Murder She Wrote use a riddim that features Sly alone – there’s no bass at all, just a beat that bears the audible influence of Indian tabla playing – and which subsequently turned up on countless reggae tracks in 1992.
