Contents - Beth Lesser

Roots Radics play the mix right into the rhythm. “‘Under Mi Sensi’, we actually
do [the mixing] in the studio, but ‘Here I Come’, is live and direct, the
band was doing that style,” Jah Screw explains. “I learn it off the mixing from
the sound – dup, dup, dupdupdup.”
“That was my idea. My bonafied idea,” Barrington recalls. “Cause, you see,
I started coming in the music business singing on sound system. So, when I
was singing on the sound system in the dancehall, that’s the mix that I have –
the selector do it for me. So, I decide that when I go to England, I was gonna
do this song. I was gonna – instead of having the sound system keys doing
it, we could use the band to play it live.” ‘Here I Come’ made it into the UK
National Charts in 1985.
The lyrics to ‘Here I Come’ originally came to life in The Howard Johnson
Hotel on the East side of Toronto, Canada. The standardized low rise hotel
just happened to have an intercom system to buzz up to the rooms and to
speak to a person in another room. Barrington thought the phone connection
was a great game and loved to call up Jah Life in the room next door. After
seeing how Barrington mashed up the concert the previous night when he
sang ‘On the Telephone’, Jah Life got the idea for a follow-up, ‘On the Intercom’
(aka ‘Here I Come’ – the song goes under both names). *
Barrington readily described ‘Here I Come’ as “a dancehall song”. The
lyrics start out telling a story about a relationship in which one partner wants
more freedom. Then Barrington breaks into a sing-jay chant
I’m broad, I’m broad,
I’m broader than Broadway
When you go to Volcano,
It’s like a stage show
You have men who sing, deejay and blow
Pull it, Danny Dreade-o! Swing!
A song within a song. The sudden topic shift creates the impression of spontaneity.
The topic turns from the story to address the ‘runnings’ in the dance.
“Pull it Danny Dread-io”. He tells the selector (Volcano’s Danny Dread) to
lift up the rhythm and start it again. Rather than being a cohesive whole, the
song becomes a mosaic of different parts. Like a performance live in a dance,
the performer shifts attention back and forth from his romance with Rosie to
the environment which he shares with his audience. Only now, the audience
wasn’t in the dancehall. It was people listening to the radio in the UK.
The sing-jay styling had become the only style hard core enough to play in
* As Jah Life describes the scene, “I start deejaying, like sing-jay, ‘On the intercom Rosie tell me to
come…’” Jah Life had a simplified melody, more rhythmic than the one Barrington used. From there,
Barrington took it and made it his own, throwing in some “shudeley wadily woaaas”, a scat riff that
was inspired by an in joke between him and Jah Life based on an old Spangler named Shuddely
Blinds who used to sit in the local community center and boxing gym in Jamaica reading all day.
178 | RUB A DUB STYLE – The Roots of Modern Dancehall