Contents - Beth Lesser

certain large amount of crowd. There would be some feelings – like maybe if
you’re not dealing with a certain set of police, they carry feelings and mash up
your dance. They just come and see a big crowd and they fire shot and people
run up and down.”
Stur-Gav had gained a reputation for such incidents. “You have all kinda
rude boy,” Selector Jah Screw recounts about his time working with the
sound, “ That’s why Stur-Gav end up branded with the name ‘Stur-Grave’
- cause you would have shoot out.” Stur-Gav deejay Charlie Chaplin says,
“Wherever we go them always say, a pure badman and gunman. Through the
area where the sound come from, whe’ it represent, and the type of people
who love the sound. People who were known as ‘hardcore’ or dangerous men
follow the sound. But we a play the sound fe everybody. We cyaan tell who
fe follow it. Through the police see that, they kinda target all of our dance,
shoot it up and throw tear gas pon we. Nuff time them tear gas the dance, we
have fe run out of it.”
It wasn’t all bad, however. Getting shut down was a status symbol. “The
only sounds that don’t get shut down is the sounds that wasn’t popular,” Screw
explained. “If you sound is a popular sound, or a number one sound as we put
it, you will get shut down.” Stur-Gav, wasn’t a ‘badman’ sound. With veteran
Daddy U Roy as the owner, it became of the 1980s most well known and most
influential sounds though the introduction of deejays Josie Wales and Charlie
Chaplin. But that hint of danger gave it an edge that other sounds lacked.
Unlike the fun-loving and sometimes silly nights with Gemini, and the wild
party that was Volcano, Stur-Gav was serious and down to earth.
Stur-Gav Hifi was all roots, but ‘royal’ roots, as the sound traced its lineage
right back to King Tubby’s where U Roy held court in the late ‘60s. In the
‘80s, Daddy Roy didn’t spend much time around the Stur-Gav, although he
did make an occasional, sensational, appearance on the mic. Mostly he left it
to the crew to run and maintain. But his musical experience infused everything
the sound did and played.
Around 1971, U Roy broke away from King Tubby and King Attorney
and started his own set, King Stur-Gav * . The ‘originator’ found himself on his
own now, backed only by all his professional experience in the dance world.
“I tell meself, this is something whe’ me love, this is the only thing that me
know. This is the only trade that the Father give me whe’ me master. So, I
decide to start my own little sound. And believe you me, it was the best thing
me ever do. And me no really regret nothing about sound work.”
For the first little while it was a one man show, with U Roy selecting, deejaying
and operating. “It was a little sound at first, you know, but this little
* The name, which has been often written as Stereograph, really is the oddly spelled Stur-Gav. U
Roy explains, “Stur-Gav is two piece of two of me sons names. Its three letters out of one and four
letters out of the next one. It’s not a counterfeit name. This is a real name. This is not no joke name.
The sound register like that.”
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