Reggae got soul

BBC 4 has been doing some fantastic reggae related programmes over the last couple of weeks including Reggae Britannia.
My Boy Lollipop was probably my introduction to Jamaican music - we all thought Millie was wonderful, and she wasn't much older than us. Then came the skinhead/ska era, and Desmond Dekker's The Israelites in 1969. I still have an old ex-jukebox copy of a Prince Buster single. Like soul and Tamla Motown it was part of my musical background, but through my later teens I became a bit of a hippy and took to bands like Love, Traffic, Derek and the Dominoes, Captain Beefheart and others too numerous to mention. By 1973, at the age of 19, I was part of a rock n roll revival band in Manchester, and my musical horizons were expanding once more. My friend Tony Wilson ( later of So it Goes and Factory Records fame)told me to go and see a band called the Wailers if I got the chance - he had seen them in London in the late summer of '73. I was about to start an English degree at Leeds University, and as luck would have it, the Wailers were booked to play at Leeds Polytechnic early in the term.
I am so pleased that I saw them at that Catch a Fire moment. Their later success was fantastic for them, but there was something very special about them at that time.
I never got the chance to see them again. Some years later when I lived in Morocco there were always rumours of Bob Marley playing a concert there. Sadly it never happened, and by the time I came back to England he had passed away. He was a truly international artist - Bob Marley and Manchester United were topics of conversation wherever I went in Morocco!
Watching Reggae Britannia reminded me of some of the great musicians I saw in those few years - Culture (2 7's Clash, not Club), Burning Spear (at the Hacienda believe it or not), the Cimarons, Steel Pulse, Aswad,possibly Big Youth and/or U Roy - some of it gets a bit hazy as you might imagine.
I have just heard a bit of Bob Marley's last ever concert on the radio - a number one album in the States at the moment apparently.
Lively up yourself!