Soul II Soul - Fair Play (12" Full Length Version)

Soul II Soul feat Rose Windross (Full Length Version) / 12 Inch Extended Remix (HQ Audio)

Trevor Beresford Romeo was the ninth of ten children. His family had emigrated from Antigua, and many of his eight older brothers were involved in sound systems. A young Trevor was trusted with carrying valves for their amplifiers as they set up for parties - something he felt was quite a privilege.

Broadly, a sound system is a collective of DJs (a selector who chooses the records and a controller who plays them and manages the preamp), MCs (or sometimes singers), and sound engineers who build their own equipment and play ska, dub and reggae music at parties. Sound systems cut their own exclusive records - known as dubplates - and, in some cases, as Soul II Soul would eventually do, press limited runs of vinyl and make them available for sale.

As a teenager, with his interest in music production sparked, Trevor got a job as a tea boy and tape operator at Nova Studios in London. While working in the cutting room, he would see Jamaicans bringing their reels of tape in to get their dubplates made and would sometimes even be asked to stick around as a translator of their accents for other staff.

Trevor played his first gigs with friends whilst still at school, in the late 1970s, with the bandname Jah Rico.

By 1982, he had rebranded the group - or "collective," as he prefers to refer to it - as Soul II Soul, and himself as Jazzie B.

In the early and mid-1980s, Soul II Soul was about much more than just the sound system and events. Jazzie had set up a record imprint and a very successful clothing line, selling from market stalls in Dalston and Islington and later from their own shop in Camden, with a distinctive look which the collective referred to as Funki Dred.

In the mid-to-late 1980s, Jazzie and the Soul II Soul sound system ran a long-running and legendary night at the Africa Centre in Covent Garden. One of the first dubplates the sound system cut for its nights was a version of the instrumental groove to this track, with Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech running over the top of it.

The sound system had lots of singers and MCs, but Rose Windross, who sings lead vocals here, was actually one of the dancers. One night, she picked up a microphone and began singing over the instrumental. "I thought, ‘Shit, she sounded great!’" says Jazzie. "We took her into a studio, recorded the vocals, and relit the whole track."

The session took place in Addis Ababa Studios in Harrow, with Nellee Hooper (from Bristol's Wild Bunch collective, some of whom's were about to form Massive Attack), Andrew Levy from the Brand New Heavies, Marco Nelson from Young Disciples, and Crispin Spry of Galliano all playing on the new recording.

Fair Play was released as Soul II Soul's first single in 1988 and reached number 63 in the UK chart. It was released on 10 Records, an imprint of Virgin Records, which had won the battle for Jazzie's signature against A&R reps from several labels who had been attending the Africa Centre events, and following the growing Funki Dred movement.

Another reason for such label interest was that Soul II Soul had a number of other tracks recorded and ready to release, such was their entrepreneurial and proactive nature.

These included Keep On Movin’ and Back to Life, which reached numbers 5 and 1, respectively, in the UK chart in 1989.

Along with their debut album Club Classics Vol. One, which collects their early tracks together, these records propelled Soul II Soul to international acclaim. The album itself went to number one in the UK, and also topped the US R&B chart.

Here, then, is Soul II Soul's first properly distributed 12" single, which serves as a document of those famous Africa Centre nights, with many members of the late 1980s collective featuring on the track, and as the bridge between their underground soundsystem days, and their long standing mainstream success.

The flipside of the 12" contains a radio edit and three minutes of bonus beats, while this side is the original full-length version of "Fair Play." Whilst this debut record may not have charted, it set the scene for a run of 13 top 40 hits over the next 8 years, and four top 20 albums.

Year: 1988 Label: 10 Records Cat no: TENX288