STORY · REGGAE
Pre-release and the counter: how UK shops broke Jamaican records
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Britain's specialist shops were reggae's second engine.
The story of how London's reggae shops, pre-release 45s and importers turned the UK into a second home market for Jamaican music.
A second home market
Jamaican music had a second engine, and it ran on British high streets. As early as 1959, Rita King and her husband opened R&B Records in Stamford Hill and flew to Kingston to buy master tapes; within a few years they were releasing the music as well as selling it, a full decade before Trojan.
The post-Windrush community turned specialist shops into institutions. George 'Peckings' Price carried Studio One discs around Ladbroke Grove in a suitcase before opening his shop; Sonny Roberts cut Britain's first Black-owned label in a Kilburn basement; and Lee Gopthal scaled the Musicland chain into the launch of Trojan Records.
A blank white label bought under the counter could win a dance before the tune had a name.
What bound it together was pre-release culture: exclusive imports and white-label 'pres' that shops sold to sound systems and connoisseurs ahead of general release. The counter, not the radio, was where a British reggae hit was first made.