![]() I’ll go on holiday with my family, and as soon as I reach the place I’m going to, I want to be back with Sly, playing music.”Īnd playing didn’t mean only reggae and dancehall. In an interview with British newspaper The Independent in 1997, Shakespeare stated, “The longest we’ve been apart in the last 25 years is about three weeks. They worked with reggae artistes, including U-Roy, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer, Dennis Brown, Gregory Isaacs, Sugar Minott, Augustus Pablo, Yellowman, and Black Uhuru.Īs a production team, theirs was a marriage made in musical heaven. By 1974, the two started an independent music production company and record label called Taxi Records. Shakespeare’s first collab with Sly Dunbar was when they played in the Channel One Studio house band, The Revolutionaries. ![]() He was also was a member of producer Bunny Lee’s recording band The Aggrovators and played the guitar on several hit songs at Channel One. After Family Man left his group, the Hippy Boys, to join the Wailers, it was his student, Robbie Shakespeare, who took over playing bass in his former group. The youth from the inner city practised relentlessly and would rise to become one of the most formidable and internationally acclaimed bass players the world has ever known. Afterwards, the bassist would show Shakespeare the basslines recorded in person at Shakespeare’s family house. Whenever Family Man recorded, Shakespeare would try to both listen to the session and watch the bass player’s hands. Sign up for The Gleaner’s morning and evening newsletters. You haffi teach me,” he is quoted as recalling in an interview. However, after hearing the sounds of the bass from the musician who would later become his mentor, Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett, Shakespeare was tuned into the bass for life. ![]() His brother Lloyd had a band called the Emotions, which rehearsed in the house, and according to his bio on Wikipedia, Shakespeare’s first instrument was an acoustic guitar. Robert Warren Dale Shakespeare was born on September 27, 1953, and grew up in East Kingston within a musical family. Sly and Robbie played on a mind-blowing 200,000 recordings although some sources quote up to half a million. In folk tales, they were known as Sly Drumbar (Dunbar) and Robbie Basspeare, and they have even been credited as such on Black Uhuru’s album, Red. The names ‘Sly and Robbie’ have appeared together for so long that it was inevitable that they would become known as the Riddim Twins, and even though they certainly don’t look alike, tales abound of people not knowing who is Sly and who is Robbie, but one person they do know is ‘Sly and Robbie’. On that day, Robbie Shakespeare, one half of the dynamic duo, took his final breath, and as a testament to the bass player’s legendary status, this event captured headlined across the globe in all major news outlets. Wednesday, December 8, 2021, closed the chapter on an era in reggae music brought to life by the wickedest drum-and-bass duo in history – Sly and Robbie.
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