None Shall Escape The Judgement

Don't let the title of this post put you off - I haven't gone all Scottish-Cardinal and started handing out damnation and promising hell-fire on account of archaic and ill-thought-out opinions based on nothing more than dogma, tradition and 3,000 year old moral codes. Twat. But I digress, this is about another of my charity shop finds and an excuse to post a couple of cracking tunes. 

I picked up a 45 of Egyptian Reggae by Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers this week for 50p. Not a track I was familiar with; to be honest I bought it because: a) it had the word 'reggae' in the title, b) it was in lovely condition for a 34 year old charity shop record, but mostly c) because it was cheap. 

So I took it home, stuck it on the turntable and gave it a play. It was strangely familiar so I did a little research and thanks to Wikipedia I found out that it was indeed a cover of the Johnny Clarke tune None Shall Escape The Judgement. 

I've got the Johnny Clarke version on a couple of Trojan Compilations and its a cracking track, but what I didn't know was that Clarke's version was also a cover. Thanks to the wonderful Duff Guide To Ska site I found out that the original was by Earl Zero and the Duff Guide page tells a rather sad tale about how he wrote the song but ended up not even being credited as the writer on Clarke's hit version of it. A little bit of searching on YouTube turned up this clip from the film Word, Sound & Power - not a film I've seen, yet. I'll be seeing if I can put that right ASAP.

By complete coincidence I also came across another instrumental version this week too. I've been listening to a lot of Ernest Ranglin recently, his Boss Reggae album is absolutely sublime and this week I got the Below The Bassline album which is also bloody magnificent. This is from Below The Bassline.

So, there you go: four cracking versions in one blog post. Much more enjoyable than the page I was tempted to write about a bigoted old man. A man who represents an organisation that denies millions of their followers the right to protect themselves against AIDS, that forbids women made pregnant by rape to abort an unwanted child, that has routinely and deliberately covered up the most sickening child abuse. A man who now thinks the biggest threat facing this country is gay marriage. Like I said: twat.

Postscript: I recently picked up the Owen Gray album Forward on the Scene and found this gem using the same riddim: 

There's a list of other tunes which use the None Shall Escape The Judgement riddim here: when I say 'list' I actually mean 'shopping list', as an incurable anorak I'm going to have to get myself all of them!

Post-postscript: Another vinyl purchase led to the surprise discovery of this slice of wonderfulness from Sly & Robbie and Bunny Lee:

And another one!