Jah Jah Children In Need.

I’ve just been scouring the pages of everything from The Rough Guide To Reggae to Dick Hebdidge’s Cut’n'Mix because after gushing on last week’s show about Wogan being the 1st DJ to grace the BBC airwaves with the JA sound, I couldn’t find the info anywhere and was ready to resign myself to the possibility I may have even dreamed the whole thing.

Fortunately I took a 2nd glance at the Trojan story and sure enough hiding amid a section on string arranger and producer Clive Crawley is this episode…

Crawley’s background had been in sales, and then record promotion for B&C and Trojan Records. ‘I got into the music business as a result of a £10 bet funnily enough,’ he recalls. ‘I was in a pub one night having a drink with Lee Gopthal and I asked him how business was. He had some [Musicland} retail shops as well as the record company, and he said the record shops were doing great but the record company was a bit slow. So I asked him "Why is that?" and he said "Well we're not getting exposure on the records."

"What do you mean" I asked.

"Well" he said "We send them to the BBC but they never play them."

"What do you mean 'send them'?"

"We post them."

"No that's not the way to do it, I don't know anything about it but would imagine they call that plugging."

"Yeah I suppose they do," said Lee "but I couldn't do that." So I said "Well I bloody well could!" So I had a bet with him. I bet £10 I could get his record played on the radio.

'The next one he had coming out which was a song called 'Kansas City', sung by Joya Landis. I went down and played the record but thought "This is going to be tricky", 'cos although it was a good record, it wasn't really a radio record, more a dancing record. But I went home and got a copy of the Radio Times - I've a £10 bet on this, this was half a week's wages, you know? So I go off down to the BBC, having looked up the names of these record shows, and the very first play I got was by a guy called Ian Fenner, who produced a show called Late Night Extra, which was hosted by Terry Wogan.

This was in 1968 and it went on every night of the week Monday to Friday from 10 o'clock to midnight. And he's the first guy I go and see, this guy Fenner, and I gave him a lot of nonsense, you know, told him a few stories, a few dirty jokes, whatever and eventually he said, "Are you going to play me something else?" I said yeah and he said, "What have you got?"

"Well It's a new kind of music from the West Indies called Reggae, and if you put it between Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, it might sound half tidy." 'He quite liked that, "I'll play it wednesday night, before the 10:30 news," he said. I thought "Christ this is easy!"

So anyway, Wednesday night comes along and I'm sitting indoors with the news at 10 on, transistor down one side of the armchair, and sure enough at about 10:25 Wogan comes on and says "Now we've got a new kind of music from the West Indies called Reggae, and here to sing 'Kansas city is Joya Landis."

'Well! You can imagine I leaped out of my chair and the following day I was down there [at Trojan] collecting my tenner. And the [Lee Gopthal] said, “Clive, why don’t you carry on doing this? I’ll give you a fiver for every play you get.” And that was the start of my career. That led to 30 years in the record business.’

Taken from Young Gifted and Black (the Trojan Records Story) by Michael De Koningh & Lawrence Cane-Honeysett.