Double 12″ Spin #84 – Yellowman / Ranking Dread –
A. Yellowman – Wreck-A-Pum-Pum
B. Yellowman – Nobody Move Nobody Get Hurt
Label: Greensleeves Records – GRED 148
Back in 1984, Greensleeves dropped this double A-side 12-inch that captured King Yellowman at the peak of his powers. On one side, the Slackness Don tackles Wreck-A-Pum-Pum, spitting explicit lyrics over the foundational Shank I Sheck riddim. But you might also know this one as Ram Dancehall Master or Ram Jam Master. The backing track comes courtesy of the Roots Radics. They laid down the riddim at Channel One in Kingston, with Barnabas handling the mix for producer Henry “Junjo” Lawes. Flip the wax over and you get Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt, Yellowman’s lick across Ken Parker’s I Cant Hide riddim that served as the title track for his landmark 1984 LP released on Volcano.
Winston Foster’s story starts long before anyone called him Yellowman. The birth date itself is up for debate, most reggae reference books say January 15, 1956, though some early bios and interviews put it at 1959. What’s not in question is where it began: Kingston, Jamaica, and a childhood spent at the Maxfield Park Children’s Home and later Alpha Boys School, after he was given up as an infant because of his albinism.
That condition brought him real discrimination growing up. Instead of running from it, he built his whole identity around it, turning it into a stage name and using sharp, self-deprecating humor and straight-up lyrical bravado to flip the script on people’s prejudice.
He first got noticed in the late ’70s, finishing runner-up to Nadine Sutherland at the 1978 Tastee Talent Contest, then coming back to win it outright the following year. That win is where the career really starts. He spent the next stretch cutting his teeth at outdoor sound system dances, most notably with Aces International, and it’s that period, the dawn of the ’80s, where you can trace the rub-a-dub dancehall style he became known for: rapid-fire chat, vocal ad-libs, slackness lyrics built on sexual humor and pure boasting. Around the Aces scene he regularly linked up onstage with Vernon “Fathead” Rainford, and that partnership carried into a run of studio releases over the following years.
1982 is when it broke wide open. His debut album came out that year, the same record released in Jamaica as Duppy Or Gunman and in the UK as Mister Yellowman on Greensleeves, produced by Henry “Junjo” Lawes with the Roots Radics behind him. Junjo shaped the early 1980s rub-a-dub sound like no other. Working out of Channel One with the Roots Radics and Scientist, his Volcano label crafted heavy, driving riddims for top artists. He pushed stars like Yellowman, Frankie Paul and Barrington Levy to the forefront. Junjo died in London, after being shot in a drive-by incident in 1999.
Following the release of his debut set Yellowman more or less ran Jamaican dancehall, cutting sides for producers like Sly & Robbie, Junjo, Channel One’s Joseph Hoo Kim, Willy Lindo, and Lloyd Campbell. The single that traveled furthest was Zungguzungguguzungguzeng, released in 1983, which turned into a genuine dancehall anthem, its vocal melody later lifted and sampled across hip-hop and pop for years afterward.
Then in 1984 he became one of the first dancehall deejays to land a real major label deal, signing to CBS/Columbia for King Yellowman. The album folded in crossover elements and led to a genuine landmark, a team-up with Run-D.M.C. on Roots, Rap, Reggae, off their King of Rock album. The pace of output in this stretch is still hard to wrap your head around, he put out more than thirty albums across the 1980s alone. Even once things slowed down in the ’90s he kept releasing music steadily, more than fifteen further sets that decade.
All that commercial success ran alongside brutal health battles. He was diagnosed with skin cancer in 1982 and pushed through it, only for the disease to resurface and spread to his jaw in 1986, requiring surgery that removed a substantial part of his lower jawbone. People assumed that was the end of his career. It wasn’t. He came back through the ’90s touring and recording again, and his writing shifted hard toward consciousness, spirituality, and roots themes instead of slackness. His 1984 CBS album had already put him among the nominees when the Grammys created their first reggae category, and in 1997 he picked up another nomination, this time for Freedom of Speech.
In 2018 the Jamaican government made it official, conferring on him the Order of Distinction in the Officer Class for his contribution to the development of the country’s music. Decades removed from those Aces dances, that’s still the throughline: a man who took what the world treated as a liability and built a career off it that reshaped how a whole genre sounds.
A. Ranking Dread – Gate Man
B. Ranking Dread – Gate Man Fashion
Label: Body Music – BMBIS 7
When Ranking Dread recorded Gate Man back in 1983, he took Alton Ellis’ Mad Mad riddim and turned it into pure dancehall heat. Ranking Dread shares production, arrangement, and mixing duties right alongside Tapper Zukie. He worked as reggae deejay and record producer whose work spans roots reggae, dub, and dancehall. Tapper established record labels including Stars, Tappa, and Mobiliser, and his productions for artistst like Junior Delgado and Horace Andy kept him at the top. Gate Man came out on Body Music, pressed on 12-inch vinyl. That Tottenham spot wasn’t just another independent UK label, shop, and distributor. Run by owner Fitzroy Sterling, the shop served as a cultural landmark for London’s West Indian community and international collectors for nearly forty years.
Winston Brown entered the world along the northern coast in Trelawny Parish around 1955. But long before taking the name Ranking Dread, he got his real schooling in the rough Kingston corners of Rema and Tivoli Gardens. Over the years he operated under a string of names, Winston Brown, Errol Codling, Michael Dicks among them, which tells you something about the life he’d eventually lead. He built his reputation as a deejay on Jamaica’s Ray Symbolic sound system through the ’70s before relocating to London and linking up with Lloyd Coxsone’s set.
His debut album, Girls Fiesta, came out in 1978 on Burning Sounds, produced by Linval Thompson. The follow-up, Kunta Kinte Roots, landed the next year on the same label. Then came Lots of Loving in 1980, produced with Sugar Minott, and Ranking Dread in Dub in 1982 on Silver Camel. Across that catalogue, backed by players from the Roots Radics, the Taxi Gang, and the Black Roots Players, he moved comfortably between roots reggae and the rub-a-dub sound that was taking over dancehalls at the time.
He scored a minor UK hit in 1981 with Fattie Boom Boom on Greensleeves. Beyond that there’s General on D.E.B., his deejay cut riding the same riddim as Dennis Brown’s anthem I Don’t Want To Be No General, and My Mammy, also on Greensleeves. What set him apart was the delivery, smooth and rhythmic, less rapid-fire chat than a conversational cadence rooted straight in sound system tradition. Lyrically he ranged wide, from social commentary and anti-violence messages, General being the one of the examples, to the lighter end of things: slackness, female admiration, dancehall humor. That gap between what he preached on record and what he was doing in real life is something reggae historians still bring up.
Because while the music was happening, he was also tied into Jamaica’s political street gangs, working with gang leader Claude Massop. By the mid-’80s the recording had all but stopped as his legal troubles piled up. British authorities and tabloids started calling him “the most dangerous man in Britain” and a “Yardie Godfather”, pointing to alleged involvement in armed robbery, drug trafficking, and illegal gambling networks running through London. He denied all of it publicly, including in a Canadian television interview with journalist Ben Chin. None of that stopped the legal pressure. He was arrested in London in 1988 and deported, then deported again from the United States before being arrested in Canada in 1990 on charges connected to assault and passport fraud. Eventually he was extradited back to Jamaica, where he died in prison in 1996. Official reports blame heart failure for his passing in prison. But street talk tell a whole different story. Word is he got poisoned in his cell, silenced to keep him from exposing the dirty ties between Jamaican politicians and organized crime.
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