'When we trod this land. We walked for one reason. The reason is to try to help another man to think for himself. The music of our art is roots music. Music which recalls history. Because without the knowledge of your history you cannot determine your destiny. The music about the present because if you're not conscious about the present. You're like a cabbage in this society. Music which tells about the future. And the judgement which is to come. The music of our art is roots. Presenting Misty In Roots. Roots music for everybody. I'd like to say good evening. Or good morning. This one called man kind. You a sinner...'
Misty In Roots has a solid, consistent backbone going through it from the moment they formed to now. The backbone is consciousness. And righteousness. There's a touch of seriousness there too but also pride. Lion's pride (no pun intended). Their's is such a cleansing noise. Pared down and clipped in its simplicity and purpose. Like all the best roots music it feels to me like immersing yourself in a hot bath.
Most of the records I review here have one thing in common. I choose to write about them for some unearthly reason that's quite a mystery to me, put them on and they, with a will of their own, unravel, unspool and hurtle back with uncanny momentum to the decade I heard them first. The eighties.
This Misty album is an exception in this respect. I bought the record second-hand on the internet and heard it all the way through for the first time a couple of months ago. But putting needle on this vinyl still works immediately and transports me straight back to '82 to '86. Moments of growing pains but also to some kind of birth of consciousness. The moment I became a separate, thinking human being.
So much of British Punk was given root on the bedrock of Reggae. It's a story that hasn't yet been wholly told. But it's also a story that goes both ways. So much great British Reggae of the late seventies and early eighties was given a massive shove forward into momentum by British Punk.
There's very little on the internet about Misty. Their Wikipedia entry is barely half a page long. They still seem like an underground concern all these years later. I found an official website and one fan website plus an article about their work with The Ruts in Rock Against Racism which I've printed above during my research which seems a pretty paltry harvest, for along with Steel Pulse and Aswad (the two bands they're eternally destined to remain bracketed with), surely the greatest Reggae group Britain ever produced. Kindly don't mention UB40.
Live at the Counter Eurovision is a great example of a band emerging whole as recording artists, fully formed and a vividly thrilling entity. It replicates absolutely the Misty live experience, something I've been privileged to have experienced myself on several occasions most recently earlier this year almost forty years after their inception. All the ingredients are still in place. Age doesn't wither them. There's something about their message and what they convey from a stage that makes them appear like they've just loped down a mountainside in their gowns bearing carved tablets of stone. The past, present and future mantra quoted at the start of this lays down precisely what they were and what they still are all about.
They're spiritual militants. Plenty of Biblical ire here. Blood, fire and brimstone. The Old Testament and the New but surely more of the Old. The hardy Reggae touchstones, Days of Judgement, prophets, Babylon, impending catastrophe and destruction pepper their songs throughout but Misty have an air of such stately, imperial calm that it all seems strangely appealing.
The album was recorded live at a Socialist festival held in the Cirque Royal in Brussels in March 1979. Misty had formed in Southall four years earlier and honed their skills in between on the London circuit particularly involving themselves with the Rock Against Racism movement which took the fight to the emerging National Front and skinhead and street violence that blighted the end of the seventies.
'Spititual reggae is made by spiritual people. How difficult is it to make such reggae in a society of materialism and full rationalism?
Ngoni: Well, you have to have certain strength to overcome still, you know? Because, all right, spiritual man makes spiritual reggae, but the roots of reggae is about suffering, reggae is a cry really. It's a sufferer's cry; so therefore all depends on the strength you have to overcome, cause some man can overcome, some man will run buttons and do things like that, some man will go out there and do craziest things beca' they cannot overcome. But if you have a certain knowledge that all this things around is a temptation which leads you to destruction really because you get so involved, to overcome these, you know, deep problems, really, you have a chance of living above these things.'
It was a violent and turbulent time with Britain seeming more on a knife edge than it had been since the 1930s. Just as then there seemed a need to choose sides. Misty stood tall as did Steel Pulse, Aswad, Lynton Kwesi Johnson alongside all the other great Jamaican artists and the white British bands who shared stages and causes with them. But it's a struggle. They know very well what they're up against.
I could go through individual songs and take them apart and itemise what makes them great but really this is all one piece and it doesn't make sense to break it down into constituent parts. So I'll leave it at this. Live at the Counter Eurovision is one of the great debut albums. One of the great Reggae albums. One of the great live albums. Misty in Roots made their grand statement here.
They've made some great records, some great Peel sessions (he was always their biggest champion) but most of all they've been a blazing potent live band ever since. They've had some sadness. One of them being the victim of racial attack during their Rock Against Racism era and then they also had to deal with and regroup from the untimely death of one of their founder members .
But they've picked themselves up and soldiered on. Who would have expected anything else. Their fire hasn't gone out. Anyone who's witnessed them on a good night will testify to that. When I saw them earlier this year they were raging about the murder of Stephen Lawrence twenty years on. 'Black man angry' was the cry I remember. They've got a point. The man below (Walford Tyson's)beard is now stately grey. He's still an imposing frontman.
With Misty It's all about the bass. But then it's all about the drums. And the organ. And the brass. And the vocals. And the message. I await the opportunity to see them again. Here's one of their finest moments though it came along a bit later.
One of the first times I saw them was in 1984 in what I remember as a pretty cramped shed in Twickenham. It was coming to the end of my college days. I was with my good friend Philip with whom I've shared a love of Misty before and since. I can still feel the bass and smell the herb thirty years on. So I'll dedicate this to Clarkey. His son is a big fan too! Misty, still righteous and mighty after all these years! They're a band for those in the know and I feel for those who aren't.
Myself and Clarkey. He has the hair!
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