After The Tripods I was working with a good friend in a company we formed together called Inkling Productions. We were involved in many projects some of which we had many levels of interest in and others we basically considered bread and butter work, well we had to earn cash somehow to fund the projects we really wanted to do.

One of the more interesting projects was trying to record the dub reggae sound system known as Jah Shaka. My friends and I were very keen on rare Jamaican reggae artists, the kind of reggae that was hard to find and certainly not as popular as the mainstream artists such as Bob Marley. These records were not massed produced and therefore the copies that made it to the UK were even fewer and it's this type of real dub reggae that Jah Shaka used to play on his sound system. It was a rough and ready style of sound system but it sounded incredibly good. A turntable sitting on a vibration absorbing base playing into a pre-amp which also had various effects attached such as an echo chamber, sound effects including his trade mark siren and of course the microphone so Jah Shaka's unique style of chanting or 'toasting' can be mixed in to the music. The valve amplifier that supplied the main power glowed as the night went on. It had some large speaker boxes to drive, stacks of speakers were placed around the hall, sometimes five or seven stacks with 18 inch for the immense base sound 12 or 10 inch gave the vocals life and separate tweeter boxes gave a crisp and clear top to the sound. It was loud. Very loud. In fact an attempt to describe the sound will always fall short. The base would travel right through your body, it engulfed the hall and spread to the streets beyond. The siren used in intervals seemed to travel around the hall almost like a spinning wrecking ball resonating right through your head as it passed where you stood. The drums and vocals would be crisp and clear the sound was perfect for the music. Once the sound system was set up Jah Shaka lifted the microphone and we started to record a truly unique and memorable night. The video you see here is of that night the 18th of July 1986. At the Arklow Road Centre, Deptford South London. What you see are excerpts from the evening which hopefully show how the night gets more intense, the crowd are more involved and Jah Shaka much more animated and active.

We approached Jah Shaka at his shop in New Cross south London and just plainly asked him for permission to record a session. To our surprise he said yes, it was a surprise because we fully expected to be told no as we had never heard of any such recording in the past and everyone we spoke with always said we didn't stand a chance. After a short discussion with Jah Shaka I think he realized we were there for the right reasons, in other words, to preserve what he does on video, to record the evening in a non commercial venture and for sole use by him, we agreed to provide him with the VHS master tapes of the night and to this day no other copies have been made and no commercial release has been made of the footage which is over five hours in length.

The resolution and clip length have been kept low as these clips are meant to be indicative of what Jah Shaka is about rather than a performance or video stream of the session. Any release of this video or soundtrack can only be sanction by Jah Shaka himself; therefore all requests to me to release clips will have to be refused for this reason.