The much anticipated re-do by Ashley Beedle and Darren Morris is out now – of Ghetto Priest’s reggae version of Hercules by Aaron Neville – the North Street West ‘holyvoodou’ of Hercules. Whenever Ashley Beedle has edited, snipped, re-touched, refixed – for the likes of Weekend Inc, Moton, Modern Artifacts and more – it’s always delivered the goods.
Hercules is the first single from Ghetto Priest’s Big People Music, a forthcoming LP co-produced by Carlton “Bubblers” Ogilvie (Aswad, Barrington Levy) and mixed by dub engineer and On-U Sound don, Adrian Sherwood. Set for release in April, Big People Music sees Ghetto Priest re-work classics by Ken Boothe, Nat King Cole, Dennis Brown and more, across ten triumphantly fresh cuts, saluting the cultural legacy of Jamaica, the land of his parents’ birth, as well as countless musical icons, from Peter Tosh to King Tubby.
“It’s a history lesson in black music,” Ghetto Priest says. “Big People Music looks back on a time when my parents came over to England. I was going back into the past to bring these songs in to the future. There are lessons to be learned from previous generations. It’s constant flow.”
Referencing a term often used in Jamaican and Caribbean households to define music listened to by parents or elders, Ghetto Priest’s Big People Music was conceived originally as an EP to commemorate the life and passing of his father, back in 2009. However after whittling it down to five covers of his father’s favourite songs, Priest soon rediscovered other previously forgotten staples of his childhood and thus began to lay the foundations for his sixth studio full-length.
WORLD TREASURES MUSIC 