Anthony "Knowledge" Doyley

Anthony Doyley (c.1955 - 26 February 2011) was a founding member, lead singer and songwriter of Knowledge, a Trench Town quintet who, without ever being widely rated at home, got the thing most Jamaican vocal groups only dreamed of: a major-label contract. Tapper Zukie, their producer and mentor, took them to A&M in America, who signed them and released Hail Dread in 1978.

The timing worked against them: at the height of Bob Marley's popularity a reggae act on a major tended to be promoted hard and then left to sink, and that is roughly what happened. The group formed in 1974 around Doyley with Delroy Fawlin, Earl MacFarlane and Michael Samuels on vocals and Michael Smith on guitar, and also recorded Stumbling Block for Roy Cousins.

Doyley's own first recording was made as a youth for Lee "Scratch" Perry and believed lost and unreleased; more than thirty years later he learned — during a 2003 interview — that Perry had had it pressed in England after all. He later settled in Britain and died in London aged 55. On the Trench Town he grew up in he was expansive: Bunny Wailer had called it "Hollywood", not for entertainment alone but for the density of talent — cricketers, boxers, cyclists, footballers, senators, mayors, and the youngest PhD Jamaica had produced, alongside the crooks and pickpockets.

It was, he said, home to the early Rastas: Leonard Howell, Sam Brown and Mortimer Planno lived there, and Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation came daily to see them. So did the Folkes Brothers, who cut "Oh Carolina". He described a place so competitive that a young Bob Marley walking down the road with a guitar would be called over by men who had just pulled a robbery and told to play — and criticised if he was not good enough. "In Trench Town if you gonna choose a career or a profession, you got to be very good at it.".