Dec
The comradery that we had together in those days, forming bands together and the time we had. Everybody had a responsibility to the band to know their songs and the responsibility to come to rehearsal. That has sort of gone awry now in these time. I would have been a product of that. I found the Alley Cats which was the first group I really had anything to do with. It was a group of us who lived in the neighborhood. The drummer was pretty talented. The bass player was a pianist study the piano. The keyboard player, Jimmy Masala, was a reasonable keyboard player. And everybody was interested in playing pop music band style. It was pretty cool, really cool! It was a short experience and a short lived group because shortly after that I went to hear Inner Circle. I heard Inner Circle at a place called the Circus. There were a couple of men called Memphis Underground at that time. Shortly after that, they changed their band name to became Inner Circle. Their home base at the time was a club called the Tunnel.
The Tunnel happened to be very close to where I lived so I was able to walk to the Tunnel easily which was important then. I was only 12 or 13 then and to leave my house at that time was not easy in the night to go to the club. Not because my parents were strict, these are the time were you were going to school and you’re looking to pass your exams. My two older brothers were absolute scholars so me with the poor grades didn’t work. My grades weren’t never really high but I got so far so quick in music that it sort of compensated for everything. With a little bit of luck on my part and a little bit of something different because the guitarist at the time, Richard Grey, got a scholarship to go and study medicine and he left suddenly and as it were, I got a chance to get into a band at a very young age. That’s really the roots of how I really learn band business through Inner Circle. I learned what it was to be a roadie, to be a band member, to be a person who had to work out singer’s chords. I was someone who appreciated great singers and performance. I learned all that stuff being in Inner Circle. We did it all. We did unpaid performances, backing bands; we back many artists. We did hotels. We did road trips, shows, road trip club shows. We did it all. We also had two incredible experiences being the group that anchored the Jamaican Festival shows, the Sun competition that happens every year. We did that twice. One of them being the year that “Cherry Oh Baby” was the festival song that won. That’s really the first big record I played on… Cherry Oh Baby. It’s something incredible for me to say. For my first real big song. It was one of the biggest songs ever to come out of the Caribbean; a very major moment for me.
I was in Inner Circle between 13 and 17. And I was still in high school at the time. As I said, it wasn’t easy. Most of the gigs we did was during the week. They had to do the gigs without me. There was two guitars, myself and Roger Lewis. So it wasn’t that hard for the band to go out and do stuff
without me at the time.
Everytime, from around, just after Easter, the band started getting a lot of work. And during the summer time, was when the real work took place in those days. We did a tremendous amount of work. We played at the Maritone, we played at the VIP Lounge, we played the Somewhere Club, the Carib theater, Regal theater and Montego Bay Strand. We played a lot of places, a lot of venues in Jamaica. Around 1972, December 4th, 1972, I was getting into high school then. I only had two years of high school left. I started to listen to a lot of different kinds of pop music. Instead of the usual R&B, I started to listen to Jimi Hendrix and Santana. The school I went to, there was a lot of kids who were American and they started to turn me on to all that kind of music. I begin listening to it and started to develop more a creative style of thinking. What I wanted to do was to find a way to have a group that would be creative and we could write our own songs and do our own things and be like create our own different kind of music with a reggae vibe, but something more creative then just playing top forty hits, which is what I was doing at Inner Circle at the time.
That was what spur me to really start thinking about forming a group and that’s exactly what I did. I went on to get with some friends of mine who were thinking like mind. Some of them were already in bands. Some of them were in Inner Circle like Ibo Cooper. Colin Leslie was my good friend who had been the bass player in Vision. And Carl Barovier had been in Alley Cats and he also was one of the people who I targeted. We came together and we started Third World. And that’s basically is how the whole journey for me to Third World. Now there’s 40 years after that of Third World.
