"Stanley! Wha' a gwan Starlight!" When you walk in the streets of Jamaica with Stanley "Starlight" Beckford, you're surprised to notice the appreciation that surrounds this veteran singer, almost unknown outside his own country. It's that at 60, the composer of hits like "Soldering" and "Wanted Man", the vocalist of historic bands - the enormously celebrated Soul Syndicate, the Starlights, Stanley & the Turbines - is also a popular figure glorified, after some forty years in the business, by three prize-winning songs in the Festival Song Contest and his innumerable television appearances.

Stanley Beckford has a double career, half mento and half reggae. Born in Portland, on 17th February 1942, he lost his mother when he was an infant, then his father when he was seven. Taken in by his grandparents in Kingston, he grew up between Greenwich Town and Maxfield Avenue. It was a classic path for a child of the Western ghettos (where the majority of Jamaican singers have lived): schooling at the Greenwich Town primary school, then Calabar High and All Saints School (that Bob Marley attended several years later), and a singing apprenticeship in his church, the Church of God, of which he became choir leader. A certain Carlton Smith, a guitarist, taught the instrument to young people of the area. Stanley attended that informal school. He wasn't yet 20 when he entered a famous amateur radio show that had seen every top Jamaican singers - the "Opportunity Hour" of journalist Vere Johns, which stopped off one night close by, at the Theatre Majestic in Spanish Town Road. Named winner by acclamation, Stanley received an envelope containing two pounds - a small fortune at the time - that the journalist waved over the head of each competitor.

In 1968, the year the word "reggae" first appeared and saw the birth of the Wailers, another instrumental group saw the light of day that music fans were to hold in high estime, Soul Syndicate. Stanley Beckford was their initial vocalist. But his distinctive voice, high-pitched and a little nasal, was better suited to the countryside repertoire of mento than to the new town style, the wailing illustrated by Bob Marley and his acolytes. While the excellent Soul Syndicate became one of the most-in-demand session groups, Stanley Beckford remained on the sidelines, depending on his nightwatchman's job to survive. From 1970 to '74, he worked at the telephone company Jamintel, where he spent his working nights playing the guitar and singing. That was where he witnessed the arrest of a wanted hoodlum. The event inspired him to write a song, and in 1973, Alvin Ranglin produced "Wanted Man", Stanley Beckford's first hit for GG Records. The disc's improvised vocal trio was named "Starlights", but its existence was ephemeral, Stanley Beckford continuing solo under the same name. Other recordings for GG followed, but without the success of "Wanted Man". They included "All Day Working", "Slave", "Oh Jah Jah", "Mr Softhand", "Hold My Hand" and "Mama Dee". In 1975, finally, he brought out "Soldering" (a euphemism for copulation) that was banned on radio but not without first winning over the public and engendering dozens of imitations. (Didn't Bob Marley himself, when asked what he did in life, reply "Welding"? - another word of course for soldering.)

But the success of "Soldering", - coming out during the first full flush of "conscious reggae", while the country was sinking into political violence and Bob Marley was building a reputation in the West with his Rasta rebel image, - wasn't to bring Stanley Beckford the international exposure hoped for, and the singer was forced to fall back on the hotel circuit. In 1980, he created for that purpose a "reggae-calypso" band (as one incorrectly calls mento, by analogy with the music of Trinidad), Stanley & the Turbines. It was with this formation that he recorded "Leave Mi Kisiloo" for Barrington Jeffrey (Dynamic Records) and three or 4 other albums ("Gipsy Woman", "Big Bamboo", etc.) The 1980s saw the decline of reggae roots, and Stanley Beckford had no other recourse but to go on the tourist circuit, travelling as far as the Cayman Islands.

In 1980, he won for the first time the Festival Song Contest, with a song of peace in that bloody election year, "Dreaming Of a New Jamaica (a Land of Peace and Love)". He won again in 1986 with "Dem a Fi Squirm" by Calvin Cameron (Uhuru Records), and a third time in 2000 with "Fi Wi Island a Boom". In the 90s, with dancehall whipping up a storm, he recorded several 45 rpm discs in the same style ("A Wah a Gwan", "Amazon"), but stresses that he never wrote "slack" (vulgar) lyrics, only songs describing reality. He would have the occasion to perform solo or with Rod Dennis, another great mento artist, at the Hilton Hotel. With The Turbines no longer in existence, Stanley Beckford is generally accompanied by the Fab 5, a reggae-calypso group, or by the Blue Glaze Mento Band - the group chosen for this recording by the disc's producers.

The Blue Glaze Mento Band is one of the last authentic mento groups. They play mento like it was heard in the countryside before the arrival of electricity. Put together in the 1960s at May Pen, - an agricultural centre east of Kingston, - by a small group of building workers, it's unusual in having a clarinette as solo instrument, that of Vincent Price, 67, the band's original leader. The formation has changed over time, but has stabilised over the past fifteen years with, accompanying Price, Nelson Chambers, 57, on banjo, Kenneth Burrell, 61, on rhumba box, Phamas Hamilton, 47, on guitar, and Randal Whyte, 57, on maracas and tambourine, with the last pair also doing vocals. Rediscovered recently thanks to the Jamaican Cultural Development Commission - a paragovernmental cultural organisation -, and the Mento Development project, the Blue Glaze has benefitted from their efforts to keep the style alive, notably with the recording of a CD in 2001 ("Authentic Mento") at the Tivoli Gardens One Love Studio.

For the recording of "Stanley Beckford Sings Mento", the wife and daughter of the singer, Thelma Beckford and Monique Miller, provided the vocal back-up, along with the two Blue Glaze singers. Several other artists joined in: violonist Theodore Miller, himself leader of an excellent authentic mento formation, the Lititz Mento Band. And apart from the three percussionists (Sky Juice, Michael Enkrumah Henry, and drummer Leroy Horsemouth), the only reggae musician invited was the fine guitarist Mickey Chung, called upon to replace Nelson Chambers one day when the rum had flowed in abundance and Nelson couldn't find his banjo! The aim of this recording is to rehabitate mento, a mass-public Jamaican style, just as the Cuban 'sound' has been rehabilitated, that's to say against fashion and local production which neglected them for several decades. The reaction is part of a worldwide trend to rediscover authentic roots, exactly like the recording of the Rasta group Wingless Angels by Keith Richards and the Rolling Stones. Why, in fact, neglect the forebears of reggae, to whom the great stars of the style owe practically everything?

It would be unjust to assimilate Stanley Beckford to a culture simply toned down for tourists, first because he also recorded numerous roots reggae titles, next because his mento repertoire isn't limited to spicy songs. If "Soldering", the traditional "Big Bamboo" and "Leave mi Kisiloo" are part of that tradition, other songs in his repertoire are the reflection of public feeling, like the very ancient "Dip Dem Jah Jah", a redemptive hymn of the prophet Alexander Bedward, a Baptist rebel at the start of the 20th century, a direct precursor of the Rastas, who died poisoned in a mental hospital for having over decades undertaken the moral redemption of the sons of slaves through baptism in rivers. The same goes for "Broom Weed", an old song of Marrons (escaped slaves), full of occult allusions. As for the Bob Marley covers, it must be remembered that the "rasta ambassador" was constantly inspired by popular culture, as his "Guava Jelly" confirms, and that mento musicians were doing no more than reedeming their property. That proves there isn't any real distance between the origins of mento and reggae: both form part of the great Jamaican cultural melting-pot.


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