The obituaries have all appeared, and most both online and in the press have tended to concentrate on two performances - "Night Nurse" and the footage in "Rockers" of Gregory performing "Slave Master" on stage. Great as both tracks are, they are far from the story of what made Gregory such a huge star in the seventies and early eighties. Here then, largely ripped from old vinyl, is a random ramble through some of his finest works, in no set order whatsoever.

Kicking off then is "Thief A Man", recorded at Channel One round about 1975; this was famously versioned by Dr. Alimantado as "Gimme Mi Gun". Given the singer's well-reported drug addiction a decade later, part of the lyric here may now seem a little ironic -

Next, moving into "lovers rock" vein is the full length extended mix of "Soon Forward". Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare had decided to set up on their own, running the Taxi label, and needed somebody big to kick the project off. they'd been working on a rhythm that owed a little to Booker T's "Time Is Tight", when Gregory turned up with this song. It topped the UK import charts for close to three months on release, and was replaced at the top by Ranking Joe's "Stop You Coming and Come", itself a version of "Soon Forward"; Taxi was off and running, and Sly and Robbie seldom looked back.

This is Ranking Joe

Long a friend of Dennis Brown's, this track produced by Joe Gibbs and Erroll Thompson in 1977 is very much based on Dennis' Studio One hit "Easy Take It Easy" but with the lyrics tansformed from a love song as the title "Babylon Too Rough" makes clear-

Next up is a cover version posted here before, but long since eaten by the Mp3 devouring MOGmonster that has obliterated many older posts of less mainstream tracks. "Sunday Morning" was written by Bunny Wailer, for whose father Gregory dealt cannabis as a youth, and owes a lot in style to the records of the Impressions; it was first cut at Studio One in 1966 when Bob Marley was in Delaware. This version was recorded in the early eighties and released on African Museum 7". The dub is attached.

Clive Chin had recorded a little-remembered dub called "Jam-Rock-Reggae" in 1973 or so released on an LP called either "Java Java Dub" or, on its Jamaican release "Java Java Java Java", by the Impact All Stars. It came to the attention of Lee "Scratch" Perry, who remade it at Black Ark, where it became "Mr Cop" -

Although this track was later cut in a digital computerised style as "Badness", on his King Tubby produced 1985 LP "Warning", with its covershot of cocaine, a knife, scales and money, I still think the better version was that released on an African Museum 12" in 1980 - "Wailing Rudy"

Finally, though, we come to the record I still think was Gregory's all-time best. Once again, this is a re-post of a track I put up here years ago. Released early in 1978 on Dennis Brown's DEB Music in the UK and on producer Ossie Hibbert's Earthquake (I think) in Jamaica, the style of "Mr Know It All" was quite remarkable. At the time it was wholly unknown for the dub to kick in immediately on the vocal side of a Discomix. The drumming on this is frankly sensational, and Ossie Hibbert's stabbing organ fills add to the tension of what remains a quite remarkable record, years ahead of its time in its minimal styling.