Jah Love and Wet Dreams Max Romeo @ the Old Vic, Nottingham 21.6.01 (review by Jon Horne 2001) © Touch Nottingham (internet magazine and What's On guide) In 'Stir It Up', a documentary about the history of reggae music, dating from the mid-1990s, one of the saddest scenes is of Max Romeo and the producer Bunny Lee, attempting a remake of Romeo's 1969 hit 'Wet Dream', singing over the original (and by now very muddy-sounding) backing tapes, onto which Lee was intending to graft a jungle beat, in the hope that "it could be very big in Englan', y'know." In the film, Bunny Lee looked desperate: once a wealthy exploiter of other people's talent, he was some way along the road back to poverty. Max Romeo looked like a man in pain, his voice softened by age, and his commitment to the smutty lyric called into question by twenty years as a Rastafarian. Things change, thankfully. Max Romeo is 'back' and by that, I mean that he has accepted his place as a jobbing professional on the oldies circuit. There are two ways of approaching such a life: either you treat it as a fall from grace, cobbling together a pick-up band of session hacks who don't care about the music, or else you take a craftsman's pride in your work. Max Romeo has chosen the latter option. In the unpromising circumstances of a Thursday night at the Old Vic, he and his band played a set that was both competent and, more often than not, inspired. Firstly, the band were great. A Jamaican outfit augmented by two English horn players, they simply played everything right. Opportunities for posing were happily spurned: even as they were being introduced to the crowd, the short solo spots were played as a dub-style musical collapse, rather than treated as an excuse for the musicians to upstage each other. In this environment, Max Romeo seemed to thrive. A modest little man dressed in African Sunday-best, with greying locks tied in a ponytail, he sang like someone possessed by a very gentle spirit. As with many Jamaican singers of his generation, the primary influence comes from Curtis Mayfield - in both style and content - that is, peace to the ghetto and peace to the world. There is something impossibly poignant about a person who still preaches love and peace in this day and age. "Tribal War Inna Babylon" is no longer a Dread prophesy; it is a statement of fact. But still every song was preceded by a quiet demand that the world change for the better. It is worth pointing out that he has nothing to gain materially by doing this: his audience is essentially the same as a football crowd, and if he wanted to play the Trenchtown hard-man, he would be cheered for it. There's no getting around the fact that Max Romeo's inspiration comes from faith. More than once during the show, I had the feeling of being in a gospel revival. What makes it palatable is the straightforwardness of it all. The sentiments are honest and to the point, and Romeo's high, vulnerable voice demands that you listen. It is fairly safe to assume that, by doing what he is doing, Max Romeo isn't going to be winning too many souls for Jah. The show was promoted by the Big Apple second-hand record shop, and some of the shop's atmosphere had made its way up from Heathcote Street to the Old Vic. At least half of the crowd on Thursday were elderly skins and mods, some of whom were claiming noisily to have been at Romeo's previous show in Nottingham, at the Boat House in 1969. Many of them didn't seem to have changed their clothes, or to have bathed very often, in those last 32 years. The great achievement of Max Romeo and his band was to get this crowd dancing, and listening, and applauding the quiet speeches about Jah love. Far too much is made (in the press and wherever) of the redemptive power of black music, but the music genuinely did something to this audience, making a roomful of misfits into a roomful of people who looked as if they felt at home. The consequence of all this high-minded inspiration was that nothing seemed forced, or corny. It didn't matter whether he was acting like a cross between a ghetto guru and a trendy vicar, or singing 'Wet Dream' like a drooling teenager, Max Romeo was fully committed to the job at hand: spreading the word of Jah, and making you dance. Links: From the Reggae Train site, A short biography. An interview with the radio DJ David Rodigan (1999). - - - read more rants and raves