Lovers rock: the diaspora builds its own reggae

South London lovers-rock singer who broke through in Mad Professor's all-woman Wild Bunch and then solo on Ariwa with "Country Living," winning British reggae best-female-singer honours through the late 1980s.

British lovers-rock and early-dancehall singer (1965-1994) whose Gussie Clarke-cut "Champion Lover" for Greensleeves became the template for Shabba Ranks's global hit "Mr Loverman.".

Silly Games, Janet Kay's 1979 hit, used a drum pattern Dennis Bovell had worked out specifically to shift reggae's rhythmic centre from Jamaica to Britain; it started on the small Arawak label before a wider release carried it onto the national chart. By Bovell's account it entered via Capital Radio at number 27 and climbed as high as number 2, a big enough pop breakthrough that he judged the drum pattern unusable a second time. The dramatic vocal break on the line "play... your... silly games" is said to have been session drummer Angus's unscripted choice, kept in the final mix.

British lovers-rock singer remembered chiefly for the enduring early-1980s ballad "Paradise," a much-loved fixture of the genre's canon.

British lovers-rock singer (Carol Simms), a founding voice of the vocal group Brown Sugar before a solo career associated with "Black Pride" and "Friday Night.".

British lovers-rock and reggae singer-musician nicknamed "Mr Honey Vibes," a Fashion Records mainstay and, with Tippa Irie, part of the duo behind "Ragamuffin Girl.".

One of the defining voices of lovers rock. Her album Hopelessly in Love, released in 1981 on her own terms rather than through a major, sold heavily to an audience the British record industry had not noticed existed, and it remains the record the style is measured by. She is a songwriter and arranger as well as a singer, which was rarer still for a young Black woman in British music at the time.

The South London vocal trio central to early lovers rock, formed in the mid-1970s with Caron Wheeler among its members. "I'm in Love with a Dreadlocks" (1977) is the signature record; Wheeler later carried the harmony training into Soul II Soul's worldwide hits.

South London dub/lovers-rock label and studio founded 1979 by Neil 'Mad Professor' Fraser; a prolific 300-plus-release catalogue spanning dub, lovers rock and reggae, including 'Jah Shaka Meets Mad Professor At Ariwa Sounds'.

Louisa Mark was fifteen and still at school when her 1975 single "Caught You in a Lie", widely credited as the first lovers rock record, became a hit. She was discovered at the sound man Lloyd Coxsone's weekly talent nights at the Four Aces club in Dalston, where singers competed over his instrumental dubplates; Coxsone released the resulting session on his Safari label, with Dennis Bovell effectively producing and Matumbi as the backing band. She followed it with "Six Sixth Street", "Keep It Like It Is" and "All My Loving".

Manchester-born singer who became one of British reggae and lovers rock's enduring voices — a Blackstones collaborator, a soloist since the late 1970s, and a fixture of the UK revival circuit whose live reputation has outlasted trends around her.

Mad Professor (Neil Joseph Stephen Fraser, born 27 March 1955 in Georgetown, Guyana) is a British-based dub producer, engineer and remixer regarded as a leading figure of the second wave of dub. He founded the Ariwa Sounds studio and label in South London around 1979-1980, building it into one of the UK's most enduring reggae imprints, and collaborated with dub pioneer Lee "Scratch" Perry as well as Sly and Robbie, Horace Andy and Pato Banton. He is also widely known outside reggae for his dub reworking of Massive Attack's Protection, released as No Protection.