5. Desmond DekkerIsraelites

This is the summer of 1969. I’d been working for a few months, been going out. There’s a new thing happening, that started to happen in ’68 clothes-wise. Short hair, American clothes, a little bit of soul but mainly reggae music. That’s what you’ll hear when you go out. By the summer of ’69, something was happening. Everyone had short hair and Harrington jackets. It was a really exciting time and there was no name for it – it hadn’t yet been termed skinhead by the media – but I knew it was our time, it was fresh. I was part of the Harrow crew, we’d meet in the Wimpy bar on a Saturday night, we’d go out and we’d hear ‘Israelites’. When that track got to number one it was like – wow, it’s coming through, this is changing things.